Dupli.Casa by J. Mayer H.

Core friends Archinect have launched a new feature called 'ShowCase' and to kick things off, they've started with Dupli.Casa located in Ludwigsburg, Germany by Jürgen Mayer H. Completed 2006-07, the villa is based on the footprint of the house that was originally built on the site in 1984.

>> continue + more pics

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Superstruct, the first MMO forecasting game

On 6 October, the Institute for the Future will launch Superstruct, the world's first massively multiplayer forecasting game.

This is more than just a game that allows for speculation of the future but actively solicits you to work on the problems we might face and how to keep them from destroying our planet.

Watch the five videos detailing the super threats and read the Global Extinction Awareness System report before you get started.

More background on O'Reilly Radar

via Smart Mobs

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Advertisement

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Modeling the future: design or fiction? Will Wright speaks with the SETI Institute's Jill Tarter

What do an astrobiologist and game developer have in common? Well, if the game developer is the legendary Will Wright and the astrobiologist is Jill Tarter, then the answer is quite a bit--from visionary predictions of the role of artificial intelligence in the near and distant future to the potential of finding intelligent technology beyond our planet. Wright, who became a regular visitor to Tarter's labs at the SETI Institute while developing his recently released game Spore, sat down earlier this month with Tarter for seed.com's Seed Salon. Wright and Tarter's discussion weaves in and out of science and fiction, illustrating how slim the border between the two can be and how the imagination can allow a better view of both. As Wright explains:

I think of games as being an amplifier for the imagination of the players, in the same way that a car amplifies our legs or a house amplifies our skin. Not only are we able to build much more elaborate models on a computer, which can keep track of all the numbers and the repercussions, but we're also able to share and communicate those models to others. It becomes a tool of self expression.

So if you were looking for an excuse to spend more time playing Spore, here you go.

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Coroflot Creative Seeds: What does Alexander Romer look for in a designer?

Alexander Romer, the collaborative architect who helped Collectif EXYZT bring the Southwark Lido project to London earlier this year, has worked with a wide range of creative collectives, and an even wider range of designers and architects:

Whoever I hire would need to make space for others; interpret and advance an initial idea, and also, of course, take pleasure in developing projects with others. But probably the most important trait would have to be patience: a collective decision is often followed by the disappearance of some of the members...

Read the full interview
More Creative Seeds

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Ferrari motorcycle concept

The V4 Ferarri motorcycle concept (by Israeli ID'er Amir Glinik) is cool, but to me it's the opposite of fried chicken: I think it's better with the skin off.

via industrial & art

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Design criticism for the 21st century

Is "Good Design" enough? The recent emergence of design criticism and writing programs at a number of design schools suggests that the answer might just be, "no." This past fall New York City's School of Visual Arts (SVA) added an MFA in Design Criticism to their range of studio-based MFAs, in October of this year the University of the Arts London will launch its new MA in Design Writing Criticism, and in March 2009 Victoria University of Wellington's School of Design (NZ) will debut a new undergraduate degree program in design criticism. These programs and others like them represent a much needed response from within the design community to the growing presence of design across popular media, from mainstream news stories on Target's latest design conquests to the proliferation of lifestyle magazines promoting a popular (if watered down) kind of design literacy. Alice Twemlow, co-chair of SVA's D-Crit program, said in a recent interview for subtraction.com:

To me it's clear there's momentum gathering around the need to clarify design criticism's purposes and processes. D-Crit will work alongside these other initiatives to improve the quality of public discussion about design. Our specific goal is to help provide a new generation of critics with the tools to generate writing and thinking that is imaginative, historically informed and socially accountable.

While architecture and the fine arts have a long tradition of theoretical and critical discourse, the comparatively young design disciplines are just beginning to establish a supporting body of critical writing. The slow development of criticism within design may in fact be related to the very concept of "Good Design," which traditionally has prioritized rationalism, functionalism, and aesthetics over a deeper recognition of the broader cultural and contextual implications of design. But the reign of "Good Design" may be coming to a close as the discursive floodgates open, fueled by design criticism graduates with new ways of thinking and writing about design.

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4 billion mobile phone users by the end of 2008

The world's love affair with the mobile phone shows no sign of abating, with the head of the UN's agency for information and communication technologies predicting that there will be 4 billion mobile phone users - or more than half of the planet's estimated 6.7 billion inhabitants - by the end of this year.

Hamadoun Touré, secretary general of the International Telecom Union, said growth has been driven by consumer take-up in developing markets such as China, India and Latin America.

>> Read article

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Nokia's vision of the near future

Speaking of communication, Nokia developed Agenda 2015 (pdf) as a vision of how the physical world will fuse with the digital world seven years from now. It's a look at how people will be connecting not only with one another, but also with every place and thing in the world, as well as the surprising ways in which they will use these connections to enhance their lives.

Over the coming years, Nokia's research will focus on eight areas identified in Agenda 2015. Together, they explore the experiences people will have seven years out, the technology and interfaces they will use, and the infrastructure required to make it happen. computing, and device integration.

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Why Business People Need to Think More Like Designers Think

The Rotman School of Management, part of the University of Toronto, brings their Design Thinking Experts series to New York next week, with an event on Oct. 2. The line up features John Maeda (President of RISD), Roger Martin (Dean of the Rotman School), and Tyler Brule (editor Monocle Magazine), debating this topic for an hour or two, followed by a reception. This is a great opportunity for designers to here some smart folks discuss what is certainly a hot topic, these days more than ever.

The Rotman School regularly produces events at their main campus, and occasionally in cities around the world, discussing the intersection of design and business. A complete listing can be found on their site.

Oct. 2, starting at 4PM
Thomson Reuters Building, 3 Times Square, New York
Regitration here

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Innovation by design

Innovation by Design is an Irish programme of workshops, research and mentoring, run by the Centre for Design Innovation, aimed at business growth through user-led design.

The programme enabled the companies and organisations involved -- a precision toolmaker, an agricultural co-operative, a software developer, an educational institute, an airport, and a heavy machinery manufacturer -- to launch new brands; generate hundreds of ideas; explore new markets; create prototypes for new products; redesign their product development processes; deliver new and enhanced services to their customers; brief and contract design agencies; and in one case, to rename their company.

>> Read the report with all six case studies (pdf)

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Stefan Sagmeister installation removed by Amsterdam Police

Apparently Police in Amsterdam didn't fully comprehend Sagmeister's contribution to the ExperimentaDesign festival removing his installation — a sentence made from 250,000 Euro cent coins — within 24 hours of it launching. Scott Burnham, creator and curator of the Urban Play project for Droog Design describes the events on his blog.

It seems that the Amsterdam police were called by a resident of one of the overlooking buildings early Sunday morning to report that someone was "stealing an artwork". As the story goes, people were pocketing a few of the coins, which was also expected, but things got a bit out of hand when a resident saw this happening. So the police responded, and, in a rather bizarre instance of police efficiency, they proceeded to "secure" the artwork, by sweeping up the entire installation.

Police are now willing to return the coins and Burnham is seeking suggestions for what to do with them. ExperimentaDesign will run through till November 2nd, surely enough time for a witty response.

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Designism 3.0 at the Art Directors Club

It's that time of year again: The past two Designism events at the Art Directors Club in NYC have been provocative, maddening, fun, profane, and yes, enlightening, so don't miss version 3.0 of the annual event. Here are the details:

Join the third annual gathering of leading creatives committed to social activism and instigating change through media. The evening promises controversy, conversation and includes a moderated debate, lightening round presentations and the launch of a new support system to help put your ideas into action.

The evening takes place on Thursday, October 2, 2008, ADC Gallery,
106 West 29th Street, NYC.

5:30-6:45pm
Sappi Ideas that Matter Exhibition and Opening
Drinks & Snacks
FREE with RSVP (for opening only)

7:00-9:15pm
Designism 3.0
$30 Members, $40 Non-Members
Design activism deconstructed! Participate in an evening of discussion, debate, and presentations on Design Activism produced by Brian Collins, COLLINS, and Benjamin Palmer, The Barbarian Group.

Click here for the lineup. All details and RSVP are at the ADC site.

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White Paper Calling for "Nutrition Labels" for Houses

Green Prefab Architect Michelle Kaufmann has released a white paper calling for "Nutrition Labels" for houses. The white paper highlights the need for a universal sustainability labeling standard that would empower homebuyers to make smarter, more sustainable homebuying decisions.

"Nutrition labeling allows consumers to purchase food according to the quality of its nutritional content. We want homebuyers to be empowered with the same sort of information when it comes to making a decision about what house to live in," said Michelle Kaufmann, founder and chairwoman of Michelle Kaufmann Companies. "We have to start holding the houses we live in to the same standards as the food we eat. Our habits concerning both are vital to our own wellbeing as well as the wellbeing of the environment."

The white paper is available for download at www.mkd-arc.com

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More comfortable flights: the Airborne Hotel concept

It sounds too good to be true, so let's face it, it probably is: The Airborne Hotel concept--another nifty entry in the Create the Future contest--purports to increase airplane capacity while affording more individual comfort.

The Airborne Hotel, or abh, is an innovative seating system for wide-body aircraft that optimizes the available cabin space, ensuring a fully-reclining seat-bed for every passenger on board, while maintaining--and even increasing--passenger capacity of aircraft.

The design's functionality is based on the bi-level configuration of its seating modules, which enables the utilization of the otherwise empty overhead space in an aircraft cabin. Each module is designed to weigh about the same as a conventional airplane seat; this is possible because the modules' honeycomb structure allows for multiple points of anchoring and fastening to the aircraft's fuselage, thus enabling the use of lighter materials. Another element of the design is its unique implementation of three aisles throughout the passenger cabin; this feature is essential to the design's efficiency, and also increases corridor space by 50%.

I'll tell you right now, I could deal with constant flight delays and being trapped on the runway if I could sleep through the whole ordeal. If this concept hits prime time, I'd look forward to the extra shuteye.

via the airline blog

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Android phone officially unveiled today

Today T-Mobile pulls the wraps off the G1, the first smartphone to use Google's Android operating system.

The G1 is something of a reactive product that targets both the iPhone and the Blackberry; the G1's touchscreen is meant to rival or at least compare to the former, while the free, no-data-plan-required Gmail access targets the latter (Blackberry users pay at least $15 for e-mail access). The addition of a slide-out QWERTY keyboard should also appeal to Sidekick users.

Google's Android operating system is meant to usher in a new generation of smartphones, with Motorola, LG, Samsung and others all slated to release phones (of different designs, naturally) featuring the system.

>> continue + video demo

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The New School appoints Bruce Nussbaum Professor of Innovation and Design

The New School has announced that Bruce Nussbaum, one of the leading thinkers and writers about the intersections of innovation and design, has been appointed Visiting Professor of Innovation and Design. He will work broadly across The New School, with a faculty "home base" in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School for Design, which houses degree programs in design and management, integrated design and environmental studies.

Nussbaum will surely find a highly stimulating environment in an excellent university so defined by its rich history of dissent and democracy, European exile culture and social research. In short, we couldn't be more pleased.

Congratulations, Bruce.

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London Design Festival 2008: All posts in one place

And finally, check out the complete list of Core77's event coverage of London Design Week 2008 in one easy-to-browse place.

London Design Festival 2008: 100% Design: Is Design Sobering Up?

London Design Festival 2008: 100% Design

London Design Festival 2008: 100% Design: Good Design Manifesto

London Design Festival 2008: Plastic Fantastic

London Design Festival 2008: Tent London

London Design Festival 2008: Changing Dimensions

London Design Festival 2008: Create Berlin

London Design Festival 2008: Cardboard Cafe

NEW THIS WEEK

London Design Festival 2008: Designersblock: Selfridges Window Displays

London Design Festival 2008: Complex Cities

London Design Festival 2008: Tom Dixon Factory

London Design Festival 2008: Foundry Popup Store

London Design Festival 2008: Heather Gillespie's glass creations

London Design Festival 2008: Designersblock: Seoul Young Designers Pavillion

London Design Festival 2008: Designersblock


VIDEOS:

London Design Festival 2008: Video Drive-By: What's on Wattson?

London Design Festival 2008: Video Drive-By: Mathias Hahn at OKAY Studio at The Aram Gallery

London Design Festiva 2008: Video Drive-By: Hiroko Shiratori at OKAY Studio at The Aram Gallery

NEW THIS WEEK

London Design Festival 2008: 100% Design: Video Drive-By: Hector Serrano's Waterdrop

London Design Festival 2008: Video Drive-By: Designersblock

London Design Festival 2008: Video Drive-By: Designersblock: Gnocchi Bar by Arabeschi di Latte

London Design Festival 2008: Video Drive-By: Tent London: Theodosis Zeniou's Domestic Landscape

London Design Festival 2008: Video Drive-By: Foundry Popup Store: Christopher Pearson's Animated Stone Carving

London Design Festival: Video Drive-By: Tent London: Custhom's Thermachromatic Lamp Shade

London Design Festival 2008: Video Drive-By: Designersblock: Seung Kwan No's Digital Painting

London Design Festival 2008: Video Drive-By: Designersblock: Nosigner's BentoBox

London Design Festival 2008: Video Drive-By: Designersblock: Haidee Drew's Cog Containers

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Special thanks to Mark Vanderbeeken and Margaret Maile for their contributions to this week's newsletter!

Please share the Monday Morning Must Read with colleagues, clients and collaborators. Many email programs do not forward messages in their original format, so please use this link: http://www.designdirectory.com/blog/newsletter

Email us your feedback and comments. We are looking for stories, case studies and global news on where and how design can make the difference.

London Design Festival 2008: All posts in one place

Check out this list of Core77's event coverage of London Design Week in one easy-to-browse place.

London Design Festival 2008: 100% Design: Is Design Sobering Up?

London Design Festival 2008: 100% Design

London Design Festival 2008: 100% Design: Good Design Manifesto

London Design Festival 2008: Plastic Fantastic

London Design Festival 2008: Tent London

London Design Festival 2008: Changing Dimensions

London Design Festival 2008: Create Berlin

London Design Festival 2008: Cardboard Cafe

VIDEOS:

London Design Festival 2008: Video Drive-By: What's on Wattson?

London Design Festival 2008: Video Drive-By: Mathias Hahn at OKAY Studio at The Aram Gallery

London Design Festiva 2008: Video Drive-By: Hiroko Shiratori at OKAY Studio at The Aram Gallery

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Core77 Toyota Calty Studio Visit, Round 2: How they're winning

Walking through Calty, you're only hit occasionally by the importance of where you are: with all the palm trees, the chatty hosts, the leisurely lunches, and the clay-carving sessions, it's easy to forget that this is the North American design headquarters of the most successful car company in the world. The company that led the New York Times Magazine to ask in a cover story last year whether it "has evolved into the world's most sophisticated modern corporation."

>> see more

>> Core77 Toyota Calty Studio Visit, Round 1: How the pros use PS

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IDSA National Conference 2008 Photos

If you weren't one of the 750 attendees at the IDSA's national conference in Phoenix last week, you can grab a peek at what went down in the flickr pool they've just posted and if you did go, add your pics. Word is despite a few missing regulars, attendance was good and there was a visible presence of a new generation of designers.

View photos

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Background rendering by Coroflot member David Fearnley.

1 Hour Design Challenge: Sick-Ass Car Rendering!

Cars are a huge part of our lives. They not only drive us from point A to point B, they drive memories. From that first road trip with the crew to losing our virg...er...keys, we have a long standing love affair with our automobiles.

In honor of this cultural icon, we're stepping it up a notch: We want to see you put to paper the sickest ride you can dream of. Seriously, we want to SEE you do it. This 1HDC is more than just a 1 Hour Design Session. To be eligible you must video tape yourself spilling your ink and your soul into this one. We will then ask you to compress that one hour down into a 2 Minute Video and post it, along with an image of the final rendering, for the world to see.

Doors open:
Tuesday September 16, 2008
9 PM PST (4AM GMT)

Doors close:
Sunday, Sept 28, 2008
9 PM PST (4 AM GMT)

CRITERIA:
Judging will be based on quality of presentation and whether or not your work could have realistically been done in 1 Hour. The 1 hour does NOT include thinking in the shower, procrastinating, setting up the video camera, editing the video, uploading to Core77, or anything not related to creating the sick-assest rendering you can come up with. Use this Core77 4 minute sketch session as guidance for how to set-up your camera. If you're a digital hack, a screen capture will do nicely.

PRIZE:
Publicity in the October Core77 Newsletter, publicity on the Core77 Blog, bragging rights that Ralph Gilles, VP of Design at Chrysler chose your design!

JURY:
Guest judge on this 1HDC is Ralph Gilles, the VP of Design of Chrysler, and designer of the Chrysler 300. Community discussion is encouraged to help ensure the best design wins.

Important guidelines here

>>Submit your entry here!<<

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H1 'Fugu' Disaster Relief Helicopter

The H1 'Fugu' Rescue Helicopter by designer Matt Bassett is optimized for space efficiency, his concept would carry a similar payload to a Chinook but in an aircraft that's 40 feet shorter. Click through to see the model and a large view of his awesome rendering.

>> see more

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Desktop form factor: "Open source" computing

The Eiffel Tower is to enclosed buildings as the Antec Skeleton is to desktop PC's. The open-air design has room for four drives and definitely looks like you shouldn't spill coffee on it. We're not sold on the concept, but in a time when everyone is driving towards Apple's silver sliver minimalism, it's nice to see someone trying something different. And remember, everyone hated the Eiffel Tower in the beginning.

via engadget

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iYo Yo-Yo powered charger for iPhone

Talk about a GreenerGadget! Swedish designer Peter Thuvander has designed an induction-powered yo-yo charger for iPhones and other Apple handheld devices. Housing a lithium ion cell, and based on the OLPC crank and this dandy wind-up remote, Peter is betting that the physics are close to there. "The remote control needs only 30 cranks--which is nothing when you yo-yo," argues Peter. He's also thinking about what road warriors call "opportunitic charging": "I think I'd at least use it as an emergency device for all the dead iPhone moments I have."

Or at least to change the channel when you've seen one too many "HI, I'm a Mac..." commercials.

Learn more at www.peterthuvander.se.

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Design thinking by IDEO; Thoughts by Tim Brown

Tim Brown has launched a blog on design thinking sprinkled with a smattering of social impact, Bruce Nussbaum tells us as he extols on the three things he likes about it. Here's a snippet from Brown's about page to get you started,

This is a blog about design thinking. I am in the process of writing a book on the subject and this is the place I would like to share ideas and have a discussion. If you want to get an overview on how I see design thinking then check out the article I wrote for Harvard Business Review here.

As you will see as you read the posts, I have lots of questions. If you can help me with any answers or perspectives I would be very grateful. If you let me know who you are I will also do my best to acknowledge anything that makes it into the book.

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Touchscreen-friendly gloves

Trying to use an iPod Touch with gloves on is like trying to program the microwave while wearing oven mitts. Here with help are Dots Gloves:

Dots Gloves offers simple, affordable gloves adorned with metal dots that enable use of the iPhone, iPod and iTouch without direct finger contact. The smooth, curved surface of the dots provides completely safe, scratchless use.

They even let you spec out which fingers (thumb, index, middle) you want the dots on, and at ten bucks a pop they're dirt cheap.

via dvice

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PRO INNO Europe

PRO INNO Europe is a new initiative of EU's Directorate General Enterprise and Industry which aims to become the focal point for innovation policy analysis, learning and development in Europe, with the view to learning from the best and contributing to the development of new and better innovation policies in Europe.

One of their most interesting initiatives is the INNO-GRIPS project, which aims to develop a vision for European design, analyse current barriers to better use of design in companies and how to lift them, explore the rationale and added value of European involvement in the domain, and set out possible building blocks of a European policy for design.

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Disappearing projection screen wins award

Wouldn't it be nice if objects appeared when you needed them, and disappeared when you didn't? Take your large flatscreen TV, for instance--when it's on it's great, and when it's off you've got a big, black rectangle hanging on your wall.

Consumer electronics manufacturer Beamax has applied that thinking to their X-Series Dellegno projection screen, which disappears into its base at the touch of a button. It's less hassle than having a ceiling-mounted disappearing projection screen, and it recently won the Best Industrial Design Award at Denver's Cedia Expo consumer electronics show. The video below is like most other product videos we've seen lately--poorly produced--but it should give you the idea.

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Kevin Kelly: Everything, Too Cheaply Metered

Steve Portigal tips us to this great piece on The Technium where Kevin Kelly riffs on the plummeting-to-zero cost of just about everything in the "new economy of abundance," and the attendant increase in value of metering each of those everythings. Hmm, maybe that wasn't so clear. Let's go to KK for the sweetspot:

I can get free email, free storage, free photo manipulation tools, free genealogical sharing, free phone service, free twittering, free...well almost free anything...knowing that the hosts are monitoring (metering) my usage.

Monitoring everything--all flows of materials, all flows of energy, all flows of people, all flows of attention--naturally creates rivers, if not oceans, of data about the flows of data. This flood of meta data is driven in part because the costs of bandwidth and computer cycles is itself "too cheap to meter." But in fact, meta data is too cheap NOT to meter--if we mean only to count and monitor it. The value of measuring the meta data of any bit seems to increase as the cost of the bit decreases.

At first glance there is a worry that an avalanche of data from all possible sensors, running 24/7/365 will simply drown us. What value can their be in saving every email, every web page EVER, every keystroke? One thing we've learned from radical self-trackers and life-bloggers is that while the value of ubiquitous monitoring seems nil at first, data streams of trivial actions are often the streams that become most valuable later on. Your night-to-night sleep patterns are worthless right now, but they might form an incredibly valuable baseline in the future if some emerging illness were to disturb them. Likewise in business, mass logs of ordinary customer behavior are now almost a hassle but might become the foundation for both new innovations and aids in discerning failures in future products and services.

Imagine a world were any set of historical data was available to you. Everyone has their own favorite data stream from history they would love to have. Such a trove would transform our lives. For that reason, monitoring everything will become commonplace. Cheaply metering data, in fact, is what propels the free economy. Metering is a type of attention. Products and services will be given away in exchange for the meta data about their use. Data about the free is now more valuable than the free thing itself.

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European Institute for Innovation and Technology

The European Union is providing initial funding of more than 300m euros for the new European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), located in Budapest, Hungary and aimed at generating more European technological advances.

The EIT hopes to pool the expertise of universities, research bodies and businesses in new partnerships.

Renewable energy and new-generation IT projects are among the priority areas.

BBC article

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Modular Refrigerator for Student Houses

And finally, Stefan Buchberger, a design student at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna created a modular fridge unit for the Electrolux Design Lab competition 2008. Designed for people sharing a flat, his concept allows you to keep your part of the fridge clean without having deal with others who may have lesser standards when it comes to hygiene. The real question is can you lock it to keep thieving housemates from raiding your fresh milk supply.

The fridge consists of a base station and up to four stackable modules. The modules allow each individual user to have his or her own refrigerator space and can be customized with various colorful skins as well as with add-ons like a bottle opener or a whiteboard.

Handles on the sides of the modules make them easy to transport. "If you move to new flat, you can just transport your module like a suitcase and hook it up to the base station in your new flat," Buchberger explains.

>> see more

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Special thanks to Mark Vanderbeeken and Niti Bhan for their contributions to this week's newsletter!

Please share the Monday Morning Must Read with colleagues, clients and collaborators. Many email programs do not forward messages in their original format, so please use this link: http://www.designdirectory.com/blog/newsletter

Email us your feedback and comments. We are looking for stories, case studies and global news on where and how design can make the difference.

Come to Pappa - Hulger's New Wooden VoIP Phone

Worried that your cubical kitted out with generic looking hardware and periphery equipment has become indistinguishable from the dude that works in accounts receivable, step it up a notch with Hulger's latest addition, the world's first wooden VoIP phone made from American walnut and brass.

PAPPA*PHONE is available at: hulgershop.com

>> see more photos

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Beyond the Schlock of the New: Eight strategies for design and foresight, by Kevin McCullagh

When Samuel Goldwyn wryly advised that you should "never make predictions, especially about the future," he may have been reflecting on Harry Warner's misplaced attachment to silent movies, who in 1927 asked "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?".

The perils of prediction are legend and the source of many chuckles, but making bets on the future is part of a designer's job description. Whether selecting a colour, or devising a product strategy, designers are--consciously or not--making a series of assumptions about the future. So how can we shorten our odds and become more prescient?

The first hurdle to clear is the cynicism towards looking at the future that Goldwyn's quote captures. The cause of analysing change in a systematic way has not been helped by the self-importance of so many forecasters. Indeed James Woudhuysen, Professor of Forecasting and Innovation asserts that "Because of today's exaggerated sense of uncertainty and foreboding about the future, forecasters have never been in greater demand--and have never been less credible!" Whether they be economists making predictions to three decimal places based on bogus computer models; black-clad Parisians foretelling the return of the 'New Black'; or intrepid coolhunters reporting back from their latest Tokyo shopping expedition, they often have the whiff of snake oil.

The future is much more important than the new, the hip and the cool. The fashion and communications industries may rely on a constant feed of zeitgeisty whims, but product designers and strategists need to develop a deeper understanding of change. Our timeframes are too long and problems too complex for such fluff. Management thinker Gary Hamel frames foresight as being "prescient about the size and shape of tomorrow's opportunities" by building an "assumption base about the future" based on "deep insights into the trends." His advice that "strategy must be created from the future backwards, not the present forwards" also underlines the short-termism of much of today's innovation activity which places too much emphasis on what consumers said last month.

>> read on

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Advertisement

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Core77 Photo Gallery: ManufRactured Exhibit at Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft

At the bigger-than-it-looks Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft, ManufRactured is a first-of-its-kind exhibition of art and design projects from re-purposed manufactured materials. Familiar names like Marcel Wanders and Cat Chow are in attendance, along with some lesser known but mightily impressive works like Devorah Sperber's abstracted mosaics from thread spools and marker caps, and Regis Mayot's skeletonized plastic bottles. For those in Portland or visiting soon, it runs through January at the museum's new-ish space on NW 8th and Davis; Carl Alviani and photographer Kirill Shelayev have put together a short, beautiful gallery for the rest of you.

>>view gallery

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Target's aiming device: Design talent scouts

Ever wonder how a company like Target gets their designers, from marquee names like Starck to and up-and-comers like Sami Hayek? Businessweek's got the answer with their write-up on Culture & Commerce, an NYC-based design "talent scout" company:

[Materials consultant] Michele Caniato...founded Culture & Commerce with entrepreneur George M. Beylerian in 2000. They applied the concept of Hollywood talent management to product design. "We're a matchmaker and guardian angel," says Caniato, adding that the firm has negotiated $65 million in designer contracts to date.

...Before introducing designers to companies like Target or other clients...Caniato analyzes their mass-market potential and spends up to nine months coaching them on how to work with large corporations. He also negotiates financial and legal details of a deal and acts as a liaison between the two parties, managing scheduling, budgeting, and contracts.

In return, the designers, who retain final say on the look of their products, pay 25% to 30% commissions under 4-to-10-year contracts with the agency. And they get to focus on coming up with unique products. "Before, I wasn't designing a lot," says Hayek. "After, I began designing again."

Read all about it here.

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Desk cut & folded from a single sheet of steel

Made from a single standard size sheet of steel, London-based design group Formtanks' goal was to produce "more from less". Once cut using CAD/CAM technology the 3fold desk is hand formed and boasts minimal material wastage of less than 4% per linear meter.

You might have to start saving tho, constructing your own life-size Mikroworld starts at £3,851.

>> see more photos

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At the UN: Visualizing our carbon emissions

Manuel Toscano will deliver his opening remarks in the United Nations Lobby tonight amongst an installation designed by ZAGO and commissioned by the United Nation Development Program (UNDP) entitled The Nine Planets Wanted!

The initiative launches the campaign One Planet One Chance, "allowing visitors to physically experience abstract data related to global warming and take measure of the inverse relationship between responsibility for climate change and vulnerability to its impact."

Using key facts and figures from the 2007/2008 UNDP Human Development Report, the installation consists of 12 monumental beanbags (made from car interior remnants, natch), representing a comparative view of carbon dioxide volumes emitted around the world. (The largest of these beanbags is 9 feet tall!)

Here's a bit from Manuel's remarks:

>> read on ( more photos )

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Tikitag

Tikitag is an Alcatel-Lucent venture based in Antwerp, Belgium which provides a service to link the real world with the online world for consumer and business usage via easy-to-apply RFID tags. Currently still in Alpha, the beta launch is planned for launch on October 1st, with the availability of tikitag starter packages and tag packages via e-commerce.

via Bruce Sterling

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BBC launches "The Box"; Heisenberg uncertainty principle now trackable by GPS!

Well, we're really talking about the Observer effect, but still, you gotta wonder about this one. On Monday, BBC News (love them) launched a new initiative called "The Box" unleashing a logotized BBC shipping container out into the wild, LoJacked with a GPS transmitter, and trackable on its very own website. You can even contribute your own pictures.

The goal of the year-long project is to "tell the story of international trade and globalisation by tracking a standard shipping container around the world. It is a project which plans to deliver content for television, radio and online audiences - telling the individual stories behind what makes the global economy tick."

This sounds like a really great project (inspired by Marc Levinson's book), but the lack of anonymity here cannot be good. Cue taggers please...

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Fitbit takes the pedometer and runs with it

We talked a little bit about the potential uses of accelerometer-enabled technology for learning about human behavior last year, but the Fitbit is one of the first examples we've seen of actually turning that potential into a viable product.

Essentially a very smart 3D pedometer, the Fitbit clips unobtrusively onto your jeans or bra strap during the day and figures out how far you've gone and how many calories you've burned. The $99 price tag, though, is justified by some serious added functionality. Taking cues from the Wii and the Nike+ iPod system, Fitbit has enough logic to distinguish between walking, running and riding in a car, and syncs the daily results with the user's computer, posting them to a socially networked website. Moreover, it analyzes sleep patterns when worn at night by detecting REM-induced tremors.

According to MIT Technology Review's coverage, the unit managed to impress several higher ups in the technorati when unveiled this week at Techcrunch50, including Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, and Evan Williams of Twitter, who commented on its smooth website integration and strong design.

Due to go on sale at the end of the year, and destined to spawn a crapload of imitators.

>> More photos and website screenshot.

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From bike to boardroom, tailored performance clothing for cycling

It's every cyclists dilemma, how do you ride to work dressed well enough to convince the client you're the right choice for managing their tight-ass budget without keeping a second wardrobe at the office. Enter Outlier, classically tailored pants made from Schoeller 3xDry and Nanosphere fabrics. They're water resistant, breathable, quick drying, grease, stain and abrasion resistant.

We could not have hoped for a better result, over the past year we've been testing these garments day in and day out, through rain and snow and even one frightening crash. The bike was destroyed, the knees battered and bleeding, yet the pants were just fine and that was exactly the quality of construction we knew we needed.

Good news for those worried about stretched knee's in their Cheap Monday's.

>> see more photos

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As literal as liquid light gets

Yet another great project from the students at the Royal College of Art's IDE program -- this time, Spanish designer Cristina Ferraz Rigo takes the light out of lamps and pours it all over the place. The thesis project, called (DE)light (remember the days when you could name something with just words and not have to worry about clever punctuation?), uses chemoluminescent reactions to create luminous liquids, then puts them through all sorts of clever applications: taps that dispense light, light in a bottle, streams of light, etc.

According to Rigo, the compounds can glow up to 20 hours, and research suggests they could be made rechargeable with further development. Aims of the project are typically broad and sweeping. Says Rigo:

My aim is to look at all the resources we have and then try to redesign new future scenarios, rather than "redesign" what's already just to make it perform better. In this case, I was curious about the fact that domestic lighting has not changed, essentially, that much since Edison's invention: you always need a power source and a physical device (call it lightbulb, fiberoptic, led). What I wanted to do is to give a total different approach to light, make people realise we can think of objects that surround us different and shape the technological advance a different way.

>> see more photos + a video

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The Financial Times interview with the chairman of the London Design Festival

Sir John Sorrell CBE, 63, is chairman of the London Design Festival, which he devised and founded in 2003. During a 40-year career, he co-founded Newell & Sorrell, one of Europe's biggest design businesses, with his wife, Frances. He chaired the UK Design council from 1994 to 2002, is chairman of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe) and co-chair of The Sorrell Foundation, set up to inspire creativity in young people. He has three adult children and lives in London with his wife, Frances.

Here's a snippet from the frothy interview,

How important is it to you to live in a well-designed house?

Very important. I can't operate unless I have a calm and organised environment. I think beauty enhances your life. Good design creates a better quality of living and can dramatically affect your mood.

To make up for it, FT has another write up on The best of British design graduates, a nice round up of the New Designer's show. No slideshow however, pity that.

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Waiting for the whirlwind

Alex Steffen of Worldchanging introduces this essay by Adam Greenfield as one that "speaks, with an almost fevered clarity, about the American relationship to the future, at a moment when America's role in crafting the future may well be the planet's most important uncertainty."

"Mainstream Americans, where they were once called to dream and to believe that their best days as a community still lay ahead, are now at war with the future." [...]

"In the relatively narrow field of my interests - ambient informatics, the networked city - can be seen something profound writ small: among fully-developed nations, the US stands out as having generally rejected "futuristic" interventions in everyday urban life, to the point that what I’m bound to present as innovative to US audiences is almost laughably banal elsewhere."

And don't miss out on the passage where he argues why Sarah Palin is "future shock personified".

Read the essay (alternative site)

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A new perspective by design

DaeKyung Ahn, who goes by DK Ahn, has a unique chair - View - on display at the 100% Design show, one that he has designed to teach us about how we make social judgements.

He makes a profound observation about how people see each other by their most obvious characteristic at a certain time or in a certain situation. Even when circumstances change for the other and his behavior changes accordingly, we don't tend to allow that second impression to enter or last in our minds as another "view" of the person. So, if a strong impression is made on us during a person's moment of anger, we will see that person as angry, despite a subsequent meeting in which the person is rational and calm.

In the material world, though, Ahn observes, people are more willing to accept different perspectives; they perceive, for example, that a table's legs are not perpendicular to the floor when seen from above, and they allow that vision to stay in their minds.

"It is very ironic that it is difficult to see the physical world through a particular view point without changing that view point in our mind," Ahn writes.

Ahn designs the View to teach social perspective, using his obvious mathematical skills to create a chair that is a perceptual puzzle. It is only through use of the chair that all of its views can eventually be seen, but even then the totality of the View will remain a mystery.

More 'Views' of the same chair here. Text and photo credit InventorSpot

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Ecolab's bottle-in-a-bottle package design

And finally, Ecolab's Proforce Cleaners bottle design, internally nicknamed "Legoland," cleverly fits a 16 oz. spray bottle within a 1.25 gallon refill tank. The boxy, volume-maximizing design is better for shipping pallets (98.5% space utilization) and easier to store in a broom closet.

Packaging geeks who want to read details about stress engineering modeling and optimized in-line filling lines, click here.

via a.m. steeman

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Special thanks to Niti Bhan and Mark Vanderbeeken for their contributions to this week's newsletter!

Please share the Monday Morning Must Read with colleagues, clients and collaborators. Many email programs do not forward messages in their original format, so please use this link: http://www.designdirectory.com/blog/newsletter

Email us your feedback and comments. We are looking for stories, case studies and global news on where and how design can make the difference.

1 Hour Design Challenge: Back-to-school Bag Winners!

We've poured through the entries, the crew at Timbuk2 have voted, and the winners of the latest 1 Hour Design Challenge have now been chosen!

First place (and prize!) goes to the Locker bag by Guntar, for his innovative acrobatics--melding a backpack with a locker-friendly form factor. Here are the judges: "This was not only a great concept, but a great presentation as well. We like how the functionality was well thought out, considering the needs of the everyday student. The fabric swatches were a great touch--it gave us a lot of ideas on how else the bag could look and feel. Critique: We'd like to know how long this really took him..." [Ouch!]

Second place goes to School Is Hell by jknodell. This bag spoke nicely to the vernacular, and you gotta love the call-out on the spray can holster: "Alternative use for beverages." Very green of you jknodell! Here are the judges' comments: "We loved this idea. We like how the designer took a concept that most kids could relate to and made a bag for them. The militaristic, modular theme really lends itself well to school bags, as everyone needs their bag to function differently for their personal requirements. Fabric is so important to this bag, helping to tell much of the story. We would want it to be a fabric and/or print that is true to our military. Also, give more thought to how the bag is worn."

Third place goes to vespaw's Hoodie Bag, which put a smile on all our faces and seemed pretty darn commercializable--and bloggable! Here are the judges: "Beautiful presentation, great sketches. We like the idea, and think kids would dig it too. We also like the idea of elastic rubber. Our overall impression is that more time was put into the sketch than the idea behind it."

The Timbuk2 judges were very impressed with the participants' ability to attack the problem in under an hour. Comments Senior Designer Bopanna Ulliyada, "Some designers had a design in their head from the very beginning, some started with the aesthetic, some thought about function first, some needed more time... The overall response and enthusiasm to the entire contest was great."

And their advice to those who didn't make the top 3?: "Though some of the designs were just as good as the final 3, the lack of sufficient explanation was the reason they weren't picked. This draws back to presentation skills and the need for call-outs on the sketches, or a brief write up on the sketch. Not everyone judging at Timbuk2 was a designer, and that's the norm in a real world situation."

Congratulations to everyone who participated in this 1 Hour Design Challenge, and enjoy your sweet custom Timbuk2 bag Guntar!

>>View all of the entries here!

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Contract Basics for Freelance Designers by Carl Alviani

Flying by the seat of your pants is a pile of fun until you crash and burn; for all you freelance designers out there who never bother with contracts, trusting luck or the good graces of your clients to keep you safe from harm, have we got an article for you.

Over at Creative Seeds, Carl Alviani teams up with patent attorney Joe Makuch to give you the bare bones basics of legal protection for creative freelance work. If you don't know an NDA from an SLA, best take a look at this snippet:

The most immediately useful aspect of a contract is the degree to which it dispels uncertainty. A chat and a handshake are comforting, but it's remarkable how many slight differences in understanding can emerge once you start writing them down.

To begin with, do you want to use any of this work in your portfolio? Better get it in writing. Because so much creative work relies on confidentiality to maintain its market advantage, clients can be wary when it comes to use of the concepts you generate. It's not unheard of for a freelancer to be prohibited from publishing any images associated with a project, even after it's complete and out in the world. It's also not unheard of for a client to not care one way or the other, or to change their mind on what's permissible halfway through a project.

Even recent grads and occasional moonlighters without the deep pockets to engage a high-priced attorney have some recourse, it turns out:

The simplest sort of "contract" is just a clear list of agreed points followed by a short disclaimer. Makuch points out that simply adding two or three sentences to the bottom of a quote or Statement of Work can do much to protect the designer from liability; while not the same as a binding contract, it still holds significant legal weight should action be threatened...the disclaimer simply states that you, the Vendor, are not to be held liable for any damages claimed against the client as a result of the product's performance (obviously more of a concern for designers of physical products than print or web designers, but you'd be surprised).

Read the rest, and get schooled here.

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Advertisement

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Peugeot's Design Comp draws killer entries; still time to cast your vote

You've got about one week left to vote for your favorite concept from Peugeot's Design Contest 2008, which closes on September 15th. We've gotta say the judges this year had pretty sharp eyes--out of the 29 finalists, there's nary a dog in the bunch. Check out the well-rendered bad-assery here.

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Jump ropers get air at Art Center's Serious Play conference

Conventional Wisdom: Eight Ways to Save Design Conferences

Show's over, kids! Design conferences have become exercises in regenerated, wasteful spectacle. A self-described conference junkie shows us how to bring back the magic.

"Have I died?" I swooned, gnawing my way into a third mound of chili cheese French fries. These were not your typical chili cheese fries, mind you. These fries came with a full condiment bar; overflowing, help-yourself buckets of offbeat fry adornment that included three--three!--varieties of mayonnaise. I nodded back at Bruce Nussbaum between large, ungainly forkfuls of cheese sauce swirled with so much ketchup that it had turned pink, too focused on deciding which flavored mayo I'd ladle over my next serving (chipotle or truffle?) to actually pay attention to a word he was saying. What I heard instead was my inner monologue shrieking over the mastication of fried potatoes: "Now this is what I call a design conference."

Art Center's third biennial conference, Serious Play, held this past May, was packed with such sensory overload. There were blinking Google martini glasses and sleek Steelcase seating; rockstar designers and rocket scientists. I made friends with Eames Demetrios. I talked physics with a Mentos-and-Coke fountain-making scientist. When I left I had two grand-slam presentations still ringing in my ears: The adorable John Maeda and a heartfelt Paula Scher.

But even after my fry binge, I found myself riding around Pasadena in a chauffeured Hyundai, clutching a bag overflowing with designed-for-all Target products, feeling oddly...empty.

>> read on

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Core77 Photo Gallery : FIETS Bicycle Show

"Bicycle" is the title of a 100-day event (Jun.22 - Oct.5) full of activities and lectures anchored by a central exhibition at the Designhuis in Eindhoven. The exhibition provides a great overview on the variety of two-wheelers designed for sports, transport, or just showing off! There are some 18 million bicycles in the Netherlands--check out some of the best ones here. Aart van Beezoyen's got your ride.

>> view gallery

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Materialogical's Sexy Syllabus

The next time you're sitting in your portfolio class and your professor's critiques don't seem to be making sense, consult his or her syllabus to figure out if you should take them with a grain of salt.

Incorporating slick presentation skills, Matthew Hoey, Instructor of the Materials 2 Course for the department of Product Design at Parsons School of Design, has just raised the bar of expectations for both student and teacher.

Using a combination of simple presentation software and an interactive learning system called Blackboard, Howey has structured the class to be an eco-friendly course on materials. With the goal of being paperless and interactive, students will receive and submit assignments via the electronic drop boxes, while compiling powerful learning content using a variety of Web-based tools.

To that effect, Hoey also designed the accompanying website Materialogical, which will eventually feature more than 100 examples of materials that the students will maintain and build upon during the semester, thus creating a package so tight, we want to fling it across the room like a rubber band.

The site's planned launch is on 9/16 for the start of the 'NATURALS' class.

Image: Matthew Hoey & Savannah Enright

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Industrial design and human factors, user-centered design improves interfaces

Rob Tannen, the director of research at Bresslergroup discusses simplicity in Appliance Design magazine.

... there are misconceptions about the relationship between product complexity and usability. There's an implicit assumption among many in the appliance design world that, all things being equal, a product with more features will be a product that is more difficult to use.

Read article

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Not your Standard FEMA trailer

As the eastern seaboard awaits the triple threat of Hannah, Ike, and Josephine, the New York City Office of Emergency Management (OEM) is preparing to mount an exhibition of the winners of it's Post-Disaster Provisional Housing Design Competition, "What If New York City..."

The question that the international competition sought to answer was "What if New York City were hit by a Category 3 Hurricane?" and is based on a "fictional but realistic" New York City neighborhood that has been devastated by a hypothetical Category 3 hurricane. The competition investigates how residents can be provided with safe and comfortable living spaces that can be quickly deployed and adapted to different site conditions or reused in subsequent emergencies, while still remaining environmentally sustainable and cost effective.

>> read and see more

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Want to cast polyester? Talk to Vincent de Rijk

Archinect's got a killer interview up with Vincent de Rijk. Who is he?

Vincent de Rijk is perhaps one of the most well know architectural model makers in Europe. He graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven, with an industrial design degree. His proximity to the architectural scene in Rotterdam, at around the time when now-famous firms were emerging has resulted in a multitude of rich collaborations that continue to this day.

Vincent has developed techniques of model making dealing with plastics, specifically the casting of polyester in which he is the foremost expert. His education and practical skills along with a keen understanding of the aims and ambitions of architects have made him a sought-after, and coveted partner on all important competitions and commissions throughout Europe & North America.

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To Make a Stock Pop, Innovate

Buried in last weekend's Sunday NYTimes is this quick and dirty piece that you might want to bookmark, print out, and stick in your clients' faces:

There is a big temptation for companies to cut their R.& D. spending, especially during bear markets. That's because such expenses immediately reduce the earnings a company can otherwise report, in return for rewards that are uncertain at best. And even if there are rewards, they surely won't materialize for several years. Such thinking is shortsighted, however, according to the professors, who focused their study on R.& D. expenditures at 69 publicly traded companies in 19 technological categories from 1977 through 2006.

Read the article here.

Thanks Lori!

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OdeChair: Contemporary organic chairs from Jolyon Yates

Okay, these can be pricey, but if you find Wendell Castle a bit overwrought, check out Jolyon Yates' furniture designs, hand made in Northumberland. We asked Jolyon for a bit more info about the pieces, and then asked him if we could paste his comments right here.

I have been working in the car and the boat industries for many years as well as in University, teaching. The ODE chairs are kind of a reaction to loveless mass production--the rather lofty ideal emanating from the suspicion that when we mass-copy an object, the love that goes into designing such a piece is largely lost.

>> more photos and text

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Designers as leaders: John Maeda talks to the WSJ about the future of learning

John Maeda is the first designer to be appointed President of RISD or any other college, according to an interview published today by the Wall Street Journal. Certainly the first design school or designer covered in the WSJ, he's described as,

Mr. Maeda, age 42, looks disarmingly like the cartoon figure on the cover of "Computers for Dummies"; he says he represents an intertwining of art and design, technology and the handmade.

From his interview,

"A designer is someone who constructs while he thinks, someone for whom planning and making go together," says Mr. Maeda, cocking his head, widening his eyes, moving his hands as if he were shaping a pot. Mr. Maeda considers himself post-digital; he has outgrown his fascination with hardware and is driven by ideas. "I want to reform technology. All the tools are the same; people make the same things with them.

Everyone asks me, 'Are you bringing technology to RISD?' I tell them, no, I'm bringing RISD to technology." He describes a visit to the campus by an executive from Yahoo. Mr. Maeda took him to see the visual resources center in the new library. Hundreds of thousands of drawings, photographs and news clippings, and images of art, architecture and decorative arts -- on slides -- are cataloged and stored in old-fashioned metal and wood file cabinets. The Yahoo executive was stunned. "This is a real live Google!" Better, says Mr. Maeda.

Read the whole interview

Illustration credit: Ismael Roldan, via WSJ

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From HANDCRAFT to MINDCRAFT: Danish Design at 100% Design

From Sept. 18-21, MINDCRAFT will be featured at 100% Futures during the London Design Festival. With the MINDCRAFT exhibition, the Danish Crafts organization presents an overview of Danish craft and design, which highlights the development from traditional craft and applied art to innovative and conceptual design.

As part of the 10th anniversary show 'forget me knot' for London design shop mint, MINDCRAFT will also be presenting works by leading Danish designers Cecilie Manz, Ditte Hammerstrom, Louise Hindsgavl and Astrid Krogh.

Textile stone by Pernille Fagerlund

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New bottle for Elmer's, and everyone else

And finally, Elmer's Wood Glue, long a staple of wood shops here in the US (including the ones where we spent way too many of our ID school days and nights), is undergoing its first major packaging change in just about forever. The offset spout design, shown here next to the long-standing centered shape, makes laying down a long bead considerably easier and more precise, but posed a significant printing challenge. Enter Eastman Innovation Labs, whose Embrace resin films were able to shrink over the weird asymmetric shape, giving the bottles higher shelf visibility and more space to distinguish between types.

The Innovation Lab website offers an impressive assortment of other tricky materials, in this gallery, clearly aimed at the ID and packaging design set (they're also partially responsible for the POM Wonderful bottles that the branding community swooned over a couple years back). If you're planning to re-invent a wheel or glue bottle anytime soon, go take a look.

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Special thanks to Niti Bhan and Tool Girl for their contributions to this week's newsletter!

Please share the Monday Morning Must Read with colleagues, clients and collaborators. Many email programs do not forward messages in their original format, so please use this link: http://www.designdirectory.com/blog/newsletter

Email us your feedback and comments. We are looking for stories, case studies and global news on where and how design can make the difference.

A new angle on camping, the Mehrzeller concept caravan

With the Mehrzeller (multi-cell) caravan concept from Graz, Austria takes faceted design to whole new level. An online application generates the design based on a customer's specifications, resulting in no two caravans exactly the same—just in case driving this polygon camper on the autobahn doesn't express your individuality enough.

>> see more

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Verb: Crisis, edited by Mario Ballesteros

Since the first use of tools to achieve goals, design has been born as a response to problems and needs. Sadly, since we now live in a thoroughly designed world, many of our problems are themselves secondary consequences of prior acts of design. Collecting striking photographs with interviews and original essays, Arctar's latest book/magazine hybrid, Verb: Crisis addresses architectural and design responses to the problems of our modern age.

Nowhere is the collision between man-solution and self-induced problem clearer than in the book's opening aerial time lapse photographs of Dubai. In only a few years, a fully completed city seems to have risen from the desert, grown only from oil, money and hope. Yet behind all of the investment, buildings like the Burj Dubai stand as a monuments to disequilibrium. As is done in each chapter, descriptive prose and photographs are followed by philosophical inquiry. Boris Brorman Jensen observes that Dubai's very existence attempts to answer the question of whether a city can be created from scratch, and its success or failure will be born out over time. While Dubai works as a microcosm illustrating the ability of human beings to manage their environments, later chapters explore cases of varying scale: from single building housing projects to massive plots like the Fresh Kills landfill.

>> read on

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Droog Design Relaunch Website

Droog Design have given their website a much welcome overhaul, it's hard to remember the last version but it was a little too designed with individual hyperlinks on every word in a sentence--very annoying. This one is a huge improvement and does a much better job presenting their impressive collection of work and designers.

Check out photo's from their exhibition A touch of Green in Milan earlier this year here.

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New cultural economy symposia at Ars Electronica

"A New Cultural Economy: The Limits of Intellectual Property" is the theme of this year's Ars Electronica, the internationally acclaimed festival, taking place on 5-9 September in Linz, Austria.

"With this provocative formulation, Ars Electronica is placing one of the core issues of modern knowledge-based society at the focal point of this year's festival program. What's at stake: the value of intellectual property, freedom of information and copyright protection, big profit-making opportunities and the vision of an open knowledge-based society that seeks to build its new economy on the basis of creativity and innovation. The crux of the matter is that we still lack practical, workable rules and regulations governing this new reality and -of no small importance- that the task of coming up with them ought not to be left up to lawyers and MBAs alone.

After all, regardless of the perspective from which one approaches this issue -that of the Internet pirates, the inventors of a new information commons, the pioneers of a sharing economy or the apologists of the creative industries- one thing remains true: if knowledge and content actually are to be the new capital of postindustrial society, then they have to circulate and be accessible by all."

The four conference symposia will be streamed live, and an edited version will be available the day afterwards.

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Launching a 'design thinking' company

'Design thinking' is becoming very popular indeed. Now MAYA Design, the acclaimed human-centred design consultancy, is in the process of preparing the launch of a new company specifically devoted to the emerging need for design thinking in organizations.

The initiative is led by Chris Pacione, who was previously in charge of interaction design and customer marketing at BodyMedia, Inc., a company which he cofounded.

>> read press release

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The Hidden Radio

You can put this on the shelf right beside your new state-side Muji CD player. Australian designer John Van Den Nieuwenhuizen (now based in San Francisco) offers up The Hidden Radio, a quiet little concept with some poetic ergonomics:

The product attempts to be silent both visually and functionally by having the cap in the downward position. By lifting up the cap the user proportionally increases the volume. The further the cap goes up the louder the sound gets. To tune the radio you simply rotate the cap and receive feedback of tuning quality via the LED on the front.

Learn more at hiddenradio.johnvdn.com.

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Steve Portigal: What we need is permission to be confused.

Make sure you don't miss Steve Portigal's 4th column at Interactions Magazine, discussing the challenges of delivering design research insights to clients, and the need to take time so that they're wise, appropriate, and meaningful. Tough to pick just one sample from the article, but here's a nice bit on the notorious focus group:

Last summer I sat in on a focus-group-like session. We were at the end of a long table of people whom we had met in various observations and interviews throughout the previous week. One of the clients who had commissioned the work was sitting at our end of the table and operating the video camera--no small task, with about 12 people engaged in conversation. At one point she turned to me and asked: "We don't need to get this stuff right now, do we? Nothing's happening, so I can stop recording?" Surprised, I encouraged her to keep the video rolling. Editing in-camera may have worked for Hitchcock, but it's absolutely not the way to go for any sort of user-research process. It's not that each moment in such a session is dripping with raw data that will strongly inform any recommendations, but rather that you don't necessarily know the value of what's happening in the moment that it's happening.

Request the PDF of Hold Your Horses here.
The excellent Portigal Consulting blog here.

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Fight fire with a mean-looking gun

It kind of looks like something from Quake: The Shooter fire extinguisher concept fires CO2 bullets rather than foam, meaning you get to terminate the blaze with extreme prejudice. Only thing this baby's missing is a bandolier for the bullets. Designed by Eunjung Kim, Yangwoo Kim & Junyi Heo.

via yanko design by way of dvice

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MIT Technology Review's TR35

Crain's has been doing their 40 under 40 since the early 90s, but our vote for most interesting stories of young entrepeneurs goes to MIT Technology Review's slightly younger and smaller TR35--a selection of 35 technologists, scientists and inventors doing some genuinely game-changing work. Obvious highlights include Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame and JB Straubel who made the Tesla Roadster a reality, but some of the lesser-knowns have perhaps even more remarkable things to offer: Michelle Chang, for example, a researcher at Berkeley, is coaxing microbes to synthesize fuel and pharmaceuticals, while Harvard's Robert Wood shows off some utterly convincing robotic flies; the smallest yet devised.

Detailed PDFs of each subject are available, and unusually detailed for this sort of feature, including profiles, images, technical briefs and video.

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30 inches of productivity

A 30" LCD; we all want one, but will it change your work habits? Kevin Kelly thinks so:

The first thing I noticed was that the number of times I printed out hard copies of documents went down. Before, I would print copies of diagrams, specifications, and other reference material so that I could easily refer to them while working. Now I have space on the screen to have these visible. I wouldn't say I've made it all the way to the "paperless office," but it's gotten a lot closer.

Within a few days of using a large screen I began to experience a much more significant effect, though: when more of the things I needed to look at were already in view, the amount of time spent on visual context switches went down. Having more documents in view not only reduces the time consumed by the switch, but also the "recovery time" needed to remember what I was doing. A related time savings is that when a document I may need to switch to is visible, it takes less time to realize that I need it.

The display fills a lot more of my visual field - so much, in fact, that it took me a week or so to get used to how far away the left and right edges of the screen were. In the end, I found that this made it a little easier to concentrate (since my attention was less often directed toward wherever I'd been keeping the notes that wouldn't fit on the screen).

I found that once I got used to the idea that most things could be expanded to a size that required no window scrolling, I began to "think big" about a lot of things: my spreadsheets got bigger, my diagrams got bigger - and more unexpectedly: the size of the kind of thing I thought I could handle got bigger; and because I was much less often having to chop things into smaller pieces so that they could fit, things got simpler.

Less paper consumption, easier to concentrate, bigger thinking? What's not to like? Prices are dropping, too....

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Shaping the global design agenda

This two-day international design policy conference, which will take place in Turin, Italy on 6 and 7 November, will provide a global platform for the high-level exchange of ideas, insights and best practice from the many different countries developing, launching and maintaining effective design policies. An international line-up of speakers and panel members drawn from governments, industry and design will address strategic and tactical issues on design policy in developing and developed economies. Keynote speakers include Peter Dröll, Head of the Business Unit in Innovation Policy for the European Commission; David Kester, the Chief Executive of the UK Design Council; and Yrjö Sotamaa, President and Professor, University of Art and Design Helsinki, Finland.

The design policy conference coincides with the 'International Design Casa' - a series of international exhibitions and events at various venues across the city of Turin (opening on 5 November), and an extravaganza of contemporary arts, highlighted by the international Artissima arts fair (opening on 7 November) and the Daniel Birnbaum curated exhibition 50 Moons of Saturn. Make sure to stay until 8 November for the Contemporary Arts Night.

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Concept musical phones

Gabe White of Small Surfaces blog points us to this slideshow of concept mobile phones emerging from an unusual partnership between Yamaha and KDDI.

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Video: Japan's Good Design Expo 2008

Video coverage is now available of Japan's recent Good Design Expo 2008, sponsored by the Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization.

Good Design Expo...enables a wide range of visitors to get to know design, through programs that give a real sense of designers' presence in a variety of fields. The programs feature all kinds of products from businesses and designers in Japan and overseas, architectural designs from throughout Japan, designs used in advertising and communications, and futuristic design suggestions.

And yes, coverage is in English, with subtitled designer interviews.

via p.r. inside

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Mixko's Latest Joint Venture

And finally, the latest addition to UK duo Mixko's playful line of products is a series of ceramic vases taking the form of an elbow & knee. They're currently exhibiting in Cornwall and next week in Moscow. The vases will be available at their online store shortly.

>> see more

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Special thanks to Niti Bhan and Mark Vanderbeeken for their contributions to this week's newsletter!

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