Environment

16 Jul 2008 0814H

Design Can Change; Interaction Design Supporting Sustainability

Maybe you all have seen this site, Design Can Change, from SmashLab in Vancouver, but I just tripped over it the other day. It’s a good read, and I think we’re all looking at ways to make changes as we can in the work we do.
A new society will require all kinds of people, [...]

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04 Jun 2008 2214H

Do you make things? Real things?

So I get this email from this guy today. I usually don’t help out grad students generally. As a former academic I try not to get involved now. But the ghost of Victor Papanek won’t let me ignore this one. He said once, “There are professions that are more harmful than industrial design, but only [...]

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29 Mar 2008 1804H

Earth Hour is nothing, NOTHING

A pause here in the normal flow for this important message.
After all, it is in keeping with Papanek’s imperative that design, being a human activity, serve humanity by helping us survive as a species. You know. Kind of important.
Darren Yates, a contributing editor to Australian PC User magazine, says we should think about all the [...]

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14 Feb 2008 1211H

Exotic occidentalia

It’s interesting to note that places like Chinatowns, apart from their daily functions as communities of Chinese immigrants, recently arrived and oftentimes, not so recently arrived, historically have touted themselves as internal tourist destinations, exotic gateways to the inscrutable Far East.
But what if you were to take that concept and stand it on its [...]

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03 Feb 2008 0942H

Painting with ice

One of the great pleasures, or so I’d like to think, of living in a city that experiences four distinct seasons, is that you get to experience things that only happen in that season, and that tends to contribute to the richness of living. I think it would be a great thing if we were [...]

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19 Jan 2008 0842H

Astronomy book for the blind

Via NPR the other day, it doesn’t do justice to the book, “Touch the Invisible Sky,” to say it’s merely an astronomy book for the blind, but there are fantastic images used to communicate the world beyond our world, images that the blind can’t obviously see. How then to communicate the majesty of space when [...]

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28 Jul 2007 0726H

Monocle

I’ve just twigged to this newish magazine, Monocle, through a series of videos on city design at the International Herald Tribune, one of my favorite designed readings on the net.
Look at this gorgeous modernism that does not use sans serif type for its headers. It’s simply beautiful. I can even forgive the black background [...]

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21 Jun 2007 1810H

Apple recycles your old hardware

My dad has a hand-me-down Pentium III which had been my PC from senior year and grad school, which I had replaced literally every part of except for the case. I actually still have all that obsolete but perfectly good hardware somewhere, plus a few CRTs, which all contain mercury, even the fried AGP graphics [...]

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19 Apr 2007 0723H

Muji Design Competition

Design isn’t design unless there’s a problem to solve, for someone or some set of circumstances, that’s generally accepted. So it’s particularly noteworthy when a big design centric retailer like MUJI, which is coming to the New York Times building soon, opens up an international design competition around the theme of “RE”:

RE
Theme for 2007
Re-think. Re-design. [...]

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23 Sep 2006 0921H

Donating/Recycling Computers, Pt 2

For Chicagoland residents (why is it that we never call ourselves Chicagolanders?), I’m investigating the possibility of 15 years of computing artifacts, a few 286s, two monitors, some dot matrix printers, an old 3-pass scanner, the remnants of rebuilds and upgrades via this organization, GiveAComputer.Org. . . will keep you posted on how this [...]

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