Comment by yaakov34 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yaakov34 | Hacker News Reader

When it comes to Lebedev's designs, one would do well to reserve judgement until seeing the final result.

For example, Lebedev designed bus stops for the city of Perm with tremendous fanfare, see here: http://www.artlebedev.ru/everything/perm/bus-stop/ . There were hundreds of press articles about it, which is surely unusual for a bus stop design.

It then turned out that the bus stops could not be built with rounded corners with the specified materials (http://pics.livejournal.com/denis_galitsky/pic/000220ap/), and that lighting couldn't be connected to most of them, and that the benches are too high and narrow (http://pics.livejournal.com/denis_galitsky/pic/0001h036/ - this is called "the Lebedev pose"), and that the flat roofs are inappropriate to the climate and now look like this: http://denis-galitsky.livejournal.com/33098.html .

It doesn't help that Artemy Lebedev is a giant, giant douche nozzle - if you read Russian, you can convince yourself of this by browsing his blog.

Not particularly motivated to support Lebedev, but my understanding regarding the bus stop benches is that they are uncomfortable on purpose, so people won't sleep on them. London's bus stops have these seats as well.

I remember reading somewhere in the discussions which I linked to that the bench ended up being at that height simply because the nearest structural pipe (to which it is welded) is there, and all models of the bus stop have benches at different heights because of where the skeleton happens to be (and most are much too high). I don't know if that was part of Lebedev's brief.

Anyway, Lebedev apparently didn't give much thought to how these stops would actually be built (or used, for that matter), leading someone to say that the sketch was by Studio Art. Lebedev, but the actual industrial design was by Vasya the welder - who had no choice but to pick up the burden where the Studio dropped it.

  It doesn't help that Artemy Lebedev is a giant, giant
  douche nozzle - if you read Russian, you can convince
  yourself of this by browsing his blog.

Yep. The things they do are not that great to allow for his tone. "Kovodstvo" was a good read for me when I was starting my proffesional career as webdev (around 1999), but I left it for the higher quality in English (and because Lebedev's studio still cannot code HTML).

"[...] if you read Russian, you can convince yourself of this by browsing his blog."

there is an English version of it here: http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/

which is a translation of http://www.artlebedev.ru/kovodstvo/sections/

(I don't know if this is the blog you were referring to)

Probably this: http://tema.livejournal.com/ Com/mandership is much less douchy.

No, that's not it at all - I am referring to his main blog at tema.livejournal.com. It's a profanity-laced display that really needs to be appreciated in the original to be believed. E.g. his response to the bus stop fiasco was along the lines of - I am translating liberally here, and you may want to cover the eyes of any small children reading along with you - that as a designer, his ass doesn't get fucked with this, and it's the builder who takes it up the ass for anything not built to his sketches.

That's a pretty original concept of industrial design - all product designers I know follow the product from sketch to engineering drawings to casting molds to the prototype to the production line, to make sure every little squiggle is just right. Now, if he wants to be a sketch artist, as opposed to a product designer, that's fine too, but that's not what he gets hired to do.

You may remember the disaster of the "Optimus Maximus" keyboard - this is the $1500 keyboard with LCD displays on all the keys. It ended up being years late and looked nothing like what was promised - he couldn't handle the engineering of placing the LCDs on the keys, so the keys became transparent with the LCDs under them. Now, that was a privately-developed product, but he's done this to paying customers any number of times as well, leaving them with a misdesigned product and late to the market. He then explains in his charming manner (see above) that this is all their fault.

He is a fantastic walking self-promotion machine, which is why the studio seems unsinkable despite being kind of lousy in terms of actual product design firepower.

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