From high tech to low tech, Scott McLoud (Understanding Comics) penned for google a fascinating comic-style tour of Chrome’s development. Damn those google guys are smart!
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Archive for the 'Design' Category
The Buckminster Fuller Challenge - SEE THE MOVIE! from Buckminster Fuller Institute on Vimeo.
Mediacology pal Joao Amorim made this awesome video. A true inspiration for the (eco)design arts.
Link.
A new article about an old friend, R. Buckminster Fuller, featured in the New Yorker, “Dymaxion Man”.
As a media lit guy I think the one thing I can contribute to Earth Day is a warning that as companies “go green,” to be watchful of the kinds of images they use to hide or mask other activities. In particular an ad from a newspaper Website by Areva (a French nuclear power company) caught my attention. I clicked through and was intrigued by its fun hybrid of video game animation, info graphics and funky music. Immediately I thought of one of my favorite music videos by the band Royksopp (which I also posted above). Turns out they are done by the same animators, H5. Frankly it makes me nervous when nuclear power companies market their products as pop culture.
When you click around Areva’s Website, one things stands out: rather than forgrounding the product (nuclear power), instead they call themselves a clean energy company. This lines are their mission statement:
Innovate to contribute to CO2-free power generation and electricity transport that are cleaner, safer and more economic.
Sounds great. But is the above graphic, which shows the company’s energy distribution cycle, really the new paradigm that will change our lives? It still comes across as a centralized energy network with the consumer as the end user. I believe anti-television crusader Jerry Mander is correct when we assess the true implications of choosing nuclear power. It means a devil’s pact with a highly centralized, bureaucratized, military-industrial-complex. A renewable energy system is decentralized and is not dependent on a massive security apparatus or infrastructure delivery system predicated on scarcity. Areva uses graphics that put renewable energy on an equal footing with nuclear power, but do the size of graphic representations mean the same as actual input into the system?
As an alternative visual representation, consider the following graphic (click to make it bigger):
This is a systems representation from Permatopia derived from the concept of permaculture, which depicts a more interdependent relationship with all the factors of life.
When looking at the green claims of energy companies, you may want to consider the “Six Sins of Greenwashing“:
* Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off: e.g. “Energy-efficient” electronics that contain hazardous materials. 998 products and 57% of all environmental claims committed this Sin.
* Sin of No Proof: e.g. Shampoos claiming to be “certified organic,” but with no verifiable certification. 454 products and 26% of environmental claims committed this Sin.
* Sin of Vagueness: e.g. Products claiming to be 100% natural when many naturally-occurring substances are hazardous, like arsenic and formaldehyde (see appeal to nature). Seen in 196 products or 11% of environmental claims.
* Sin of Irrelevance: e.g. Products claiming to be CFC-free, even though CFCs were banned 20 years ago. This Sin was seen in 78 products and 4% of environmental claims.
* Sin of Fibbing: e.g. Products falsely claiming to be certified by an internationally recognized environmental standard like EcoLogo, Energy Star or Green Seal. Found in 10 products or less than 1% of environmental claims.
* Sin of Lesser of Two Evils: e.g. Organic cigarettes or “environmentally friendly” pesticides. This occurred in 17 products or 1% of environmental claims.
BTW, I have free media literacy materials that you can use to deconstruct industry messages. They are available here.
Finally, if you want to keep current on greenwashing, then visit PRWatch for its weekly spin report. Here is their video from the latest on PB.
PS Why is only one day a year dedicated to Earth? Just wondering.
We Tell Stories - ‘Hard Times’ by Matt Mason & Nicholas Felton
As part of Penguin’s We Tell Stories series, this update of Dickens’ Hard Times is a pretty cool little tour of our current state of the stats by Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma. The above is from the page, “Ideas are traveling faster.” Admittedly I find the graphics a little hard to follow. Maybe I’m too old. Anyhow, take it a tour, it’s worth the trip.
Bruce Sterling from Innovationsforum on Vimeo.
I just spent 35 minutes watching Bruce Sterling sum up the ideas of his design manifesto, Shaping Things. Thank the Great Whatever, because Shaping Things has been sitting on my bookshelf for two years and I’ve been dying to know what it’s about. I don’t want to spoil a great talk, but suffice to say that Sterling debunks many sci-fi technological conventions (such as androids and cyberspace) as impractical, pointing out that they are better literary devices than real design solutions. Sterling calls for the creation of “spime,” a kind of sustainable hybrid object that is embedded within networks (within networks (within networks)).
(Via BoingBoing)
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First of all, let me say that I hate Flash sites. With that said, you should most definitely check out the MOMA online exhibit, Design and the Elastic Mind.
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I Heart NY designer Milton Glaser has some heads-up advice about how to treat your brain. If you click the link below you can see the other nine things he’s learned about life.
7 - HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN.
The brain is the most responsive organ of the body. Actually it is the organ that is most susceptible to change and regeneration of all the organs in the body. I have a friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic. The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have. I was fascinated by a story in a newspaper a few years ago about the search for perfect pitch. A group of scientists decided that they were going to find out why certain people have perfect pitch. You know certain people hear a note precisely and are able to replicate it at exactly the right pitch. Some people have relevant pitch; perfect pitch is rare even among musicians. The scientists discovered – I don’t know how - that among people with perfect pitch the brain was different. Certain lobes of the brain had undergone some change or deformation that was always present with those who had perfect pitch. This was interesting enough in itself. But then they discovered something even more fascinating. If you took a bunch of kids and taught them to play the violin at the age of 4 or 5 after a couple of years some of them developed perfect pitch, and in all of those cases their brain structure had changed. Well what could that mean for the rest of us? We tend to believe that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that everything we do affects the brain. I am convinced that if someone was to yell at me from across the street my brain could be affected and my life might changed. That is why your mother always said, ‘Don’t hang out with those bad kids.’ Mama was right. Thought changes our life and our behaviour. I also believe that drawing works in the same way. I am a great advocate of drawing, not in order to become an illustrator, but because I believe drawing changes the brain in the same way as the search to create the right note changes the brain of a violinist. Drawing also makes you attentive. It makes you pay attention to what you are looking at, which is not so easy.
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Want a company Web site for nothing? Ad agency Modernista has come to the realization that hosting Web sites is unnecessary when you can distribute your content across the Web. Why not? Host your images at flickr, network with Facebook, put your company information on Wikipedia and make Google your home page. Conceptual, geeky, or just plain viral? You be the judge.
As reported previously, Apple seems to have an eating disorder. Others have picked up on Apple’s movement towards “thinnovation.” Is it in dialog with greater social trends, in particular the shrinking waistlines of celebrities and fashion models? Maybe it’s a stretch to equate the MacBookAir with anorexia, but I would certainly link it to the increasing ephemerality of technology. As Bruce Mau says, the goal of (system) design is to become invisible, innocuous.
Apple has declared itself the master of “thinnovation.” (Head to your nearest Apple and you’ll see this word-creation plastered on the store-front window.) It troubles Shannon McCartney-Simper, manager of business development of the Eating Disorders Institute in St. Louis Park.
“My 12-year-old daughter and I were looking at the MacBook Air online, and the words right out of her mouth were, ‘Wow, look how thin that is!’ ” she said. “Of course that’s appealing to young people. It’s what they’re used to believing is the ideal.”
McCartney-Simper can’t help but consider the parallels between ultrathin computers and people who are striving to be ultrathin. “These laptops are really thin and portable — almost like you can hide them,” she said. “And then you take that to another level, and you think of how women so often want to hide their bodies.”
(via Ypluse)
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Yo, corporations are designing your future. What about you?
Perspective 2.0: Why is design important?:
Design thinking in business takes this problem solving aspect one step further. Now the tools and techniques from the field of design such as ethnographic research, rapid prototyping and conceptual brainstorming integrate with the pragmatic business frameworks of strategy, analysis and metrics to create and provide roadmaps for business innovation and competitive advantage. In this context, design has evolved away from traditional form giving to becoming an integral part of corporate strategy.
Myhab is a novel solution for summer festivals. The two person recycled shelter can be booked and set up for you and even be customized with a logo. When the festival is over they will take it away and recycle it. It’s hard to tell if the thing is actually comfortable, but I think it is a better solution than what I saw after Bonnaroo last year when people bought crappy tents at Wal-Mart and then just discarded them to rot in the fields after the festival.
I’m still trying to figure out which kingdom media and technology belong in, but I think the following design principles are worth thinking about in terms of our tools.
Five Design Principles from ZERI International:
ZERI’s Five Design Principles
In nature, everything has value, whatever is waste for a species of one kingdom, is a nutrient for a living organism in another kingdom. The five kingdoms of nature generate sufficient resources for everyone on Earth. It is possible to use nature’s systems to provide for all.
The five design principles of nature become apparent when we study the five kingdoms of nature, and when we analyze the results of our trials and errors made when implementing pioneering zeri projects:
1. Waste of a species is always a nutrient or an energy source for a species belonging to another kingdom. The waste of one industry should be used as a value-added input for another industry. If one species is fed its own waste, it will degenerate.
2. A toxin produced by one species is always a nutrient or an energy source for a species belonging to another kingdom. The toxin of one species can be used as input for species of another kingdom.
3. A virus threatening the life of a living species has no chance of survival in species belonging to at least 2 other kingdoms.
4. The more local, the more diverse, the more productive, the more resilient. The more diverse and local the systems are, the more efficient and resilient their operations will be.
5. When species from all 5 kingdoms live and work together, they will integrate and separate all matter at ambient temperature and pressure.
“But for Alice the visible world does not run up against the screen of the mirror; the reflection is not a limit but a point of passage.” Paul Virilio
I checked out the new Mac Leopard OS and see that the dock is redisgned in order to have that mirror effect that is so popular these days, and it has also incorporated a new feature, “spaces.” Like all design trends, this will surely be dated in the near future, but I think it’s worth noting the siginificance of this aesthetic for the now. Three points:
1) It is a step closer to making the desktop look like a three dimensional space that you enter. Screens, as many great scholars have noted, are aready portals into a new space. The common term is cyberspace, but Foucault coined one that I find more useful: heterotopia (I wrote the wikipedia entry that this links to, yet I dsicovered that some idiot moved my entry and then deleted it in the “utopia” section- damn that user generated content!). “Hetero” means “other” and “topia” is place, hence other place, the electronic space we enter our disembodied selves into, such as the space of a phone call. Where is it taking place? Here or there? As Sprint once stated in its marketing campaign: “be there now.” That says it all. The mirror effect of Web 2.0 graphics is an aesthetic reminder that we are entering a new space.
2)Remediation. As Jay David Bolter an Richard Grusin have documented so well in their book, “Remediation,” new technologies don’t obliterate old ones, but compost them (my term). Hence, the Rennaisance never went away. The mirror effect on the new Dock has an exagereated sense of perspective space. In other words, a receding site line into infinite space. Again, this creates the illusion of 3-D space, but also implies a limitless horizon point, which is a perfect description of the Web. It never ends, and if you can tell where it does, I have a pot of gold waiting for you there.
3) Finally, this is further evidence that we have been invaded by the mirror lords. Calling it The Book of Imaginary Beings, in the1960s Jorge Luis Borges assembled an album of mythical beasts from world history in which he recounts an ancient Chinese tale about a time when people could move in and out of mirrors. “In those days the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, as they are now, cut off from each other.” The specular and human realms lived harmoniously until one day the mirror people invaded, but the Yellow Emperor’s magic arts prevailed. The mirror people were banished to their world and forced, as in a “kind of dream,” to mimic our behaviors. Someday, the fable goes, the spell will wear off. Little by little their movements will no longer imitate ours. And in the distance through the mirrors, we will hear the clatter of weapons. When this day comes, the barrier of reflection will be broken, and the mirror people will return.
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