I am Douglas Tarlow

What good are tools, if you don’t have them when you need them? This is a particularly challenging problem that we as designers must face. The iPhone it seems is becoming the technology of choice for solving this problem.

Recently DuPont released an app called MySurface, which starts to address this problem.

The application holds a nice database of swatches for Corian and Zodiaq surfaces, with a nice example gallery. The cool thing about this application, is that it eliminates the need to carry around heavy binder of little square patches of various surface materials. However, you do lose something changing from a real world watch to a digital patch, you can’t feel texture in the digital world (yet).

DuPont has a strong history of reaching out to designer to demonstrate their innovative new products, I’m excited to see where they go from here, particularly with next version of the iPhone app. I can’t wait to be able to take a picture of something with my phone, and then automatically surface it with a Corian or Zodiaq surface to see how it might look.

Full Disclosure: I accepted an iTouch to test out this app, but I did not keep it, I donated it.