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
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
|
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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....
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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.
