In hunting for a partner or a fling, we all known the trade-offs between beauty and brains. But we've never before seen a chart that so accurately describes the trials and tribulations of meeting someone worth dating.
Not a whole lot to say about this one--just check it out. (We recognize that even creating a chart to map these sorts of things--and listing attractiveness on an axis--presupposes a very male way of looking at things.)
But there are some interesting scientific data points in the brains vs. beauty quandary. Men really do prefer women with curves. In turn, curvy women are both more fertile, and tend to be smarter (and produce smarter kids). So among women, sexual selection does seem to be giving men what they want.
Women, meanwhile, tend to be attracted to more masculine men when fertile, and more feminine men when not. More masculine looking men tend to get that way because of higher testosterone levels--which in turn makes their sperm more viable. More feminine looking men are, at the very least, perceived to be more caring. So women, in turn, appear to have varying preferences, suited to finding both the best genes--and the man who'll take the best care of their kids.
Last week, we brought you a slideshow highlighting a new exhibit of works by Oki Sato, the founder of Nendo. Today, Nendo has announced their latest project: A hyper-sexy series of display furniture, which is being deployed at Issey Miyake shops across Tokyo.
The new Issey Miyake line has new items in 20 colors each, and will refresh every two months. So Nendo designed a series of display pieces which can constantly be arranged in new, quirky, overlapping patterns--an idea of constant change lifted from the chaotic, always evolving state of Japanese convenience stores. The make the parallel more explicit, the furniture itself is made to look like a wire-frame shopping cart, and the packaging designs (seen on the shelves above) look like food containers.
Lego has launched thousands of young designers into a lifetime of tinkering; Muji is a paragon of clean, ingenious design. So naturally, the two have paired up for toy sets that blend elements from each powerhouse.
The kit comes with Lego bricks, some paper, and a special hole punch that's exactly the size of a Lego peg. You start by punching out patterns in the paper:
And then you can use that paper, and some bricks, to create almost anything you want:
This isn't the first time that Lego has turned to design to refresh its brand--they've had great success with their Lego Architecture series, which features models of Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water and the SOM's John Hancock Center. (Designers, meanwhile have played with childhood toys--the best example being Form Us With Love's furniture made of blown-up erector sets.)
For now, the set's only available in Japan. And the folks at the Muji store in Times Square in NYC had never heard of the toy. But maybe they'll come here soon? MoMA store, I'm looking at you.
Maybe the toughest thing about being a designer is suffering the idiocy of your clients. Clients From Hell gives designers a much-needed place to air their horror stories. Which all basically boil down to: Clients have no idea what good design costs. And clients tend to be ludicrously stupid about design, even while insisting they understand it.
For example:
The artwork is approved, but we need to replace the skeleton, we think
it might be homosexual, and that could ostracise the audience, it's a
very masculine industry.
Or:
We think there's too much space, can you put all the services we do
inside the logo. And if you can - make it 3D too, so it moves when you
tilt the paper.
Or:
We have an animation budget of about $1200. We are looking for
character designs, storyboards and animation. We are thinking along the
lines of that Pixar Film with fish in it. You know the one? Finding
Nema? It'll get you good exposure. We'll put it on Virgin Airlines.
Man, there are some doofuses out there. For designers: Enjoy the site. For would-be design clients: Maybe you'll learn something? Oh, right. Probably not.
The 2009 Gunn Report, an encyclopedia of the world's highly decorated ads, is out.
The report is something of a bible for companies looking to hire top talent. Rather than awarding any plaudits itself, it simply tabulates the 100 ads and campaigns that won the most industry awards throughout the year. This year they included interactive and online work for the first time.
Via Creative Review, here are three of the top winners. Above, in the print catagory: BBDO/Proximity's (Kuala Lumpur) Jeep Two Worlds campaign, which shows all the ground you can cover in a jeep. (With tropical and arctic natives on either side, and the silhouette of a Jeep where they meet--a Venn diagram, really.)
Saatchi & Saatchi (New York) won the most awards for commercial work, in this series of ads for Crest:
And online, the inevitable winner was Crispin Porter's Whopper Sacrifice campaign for Burger King:
Web 2.0 is changing the nature of advertising and marketing--no news
there. But any would-be social marketer is now deluged with choices.
Which is why Chris Watson at Visualization Magazine designed this chart, which shows 30 different Web 2.0 services offering free sites, feeds, or embeds.
The chart itself looks incredibly daunting, and takes a couple minutes to decode, but it's enormously useful in mapping the sheer variety out there in the Web 2.0 self-promo ecosystem.
The basic design shows places where you can create content, with icons about how you might publish that content (RSS, for example), and finally, lines showing where you might try and get that content republished:
Most useful, perhaps is the list of sites at the bottom, and the descriptions of each.
Now all you have to do is create a product worth getting excited over.
The Dutch architecture firm MVRDV--#5 on our list of Most Creative People in Architecture--has just broken ground on one of their wackiest projects to date: A massive market hall whose canopies double as apartment buildings.
For the Rotterdam-based MVRDV, this is a marquee commission. Sited near the Laurens Church, around which the city was founded, the 130-foot tall market canopy will house 100 stalls, shops and restaurants, and an underground supermarket--while the walls and archway will create 228 apartments. If everything performs as promised, the building just might
transform MVRDV from an hothouse of experimental architecture, to
starchitect status.
The central engineering feat will be a system for creating a suspended glass facade. That, in turn, will allow the building to be transparent for huge stretches, and create row upon row of shops featuring display windows for showing off all their wares.
The entire development is being billed as a showpiece of sustainable food and living--a "synergy" that capitalizes on co-locating so many functions in such a dense space, and all while creating what'll probably be one of the most interesting public spaces in the world.
Also, did we mention that the entire thing looks like a somewhat delicious, extraordinarily heavy, rum-soaked fruitcake? Except unlike what usually happens with fruitcakes, at least 228 families are expected to want it.
When you think of backyards, the first things you probably think: Dogs woofing, July 4th grilling, swingsets. Then again, you're not a senior Apple exec by day, and an art collector on the weekends.
As Metropolis reports: "The Japanese maple in Jeff Dauber's San Francisco backyard is not at the center of a carbon-sucking vortex." His deck, built by Berkeley-based architect Thom Faulders is actually flat. Metropolis calls it a sort of homage to Francesco Borromini's Palazzo Spada in Rome, where the Renaissance architect employed a mathematician to make an eight-meter arcade look 37 meters long. Faulders used
3-D-modeling software to achieve the dipping effect. The deck looks like it's sloping away from you, Apple's Dauber says, adding, "I wanted someone to barf when they look at it."
Faulder's also designed Dauber's entire home--another experiment in complex, computer generated tiling. I'll bet no one at Microsoft has a house nearly as cool.
Next month, all eyes will turn towards Copenhagen for the U.N.'s 2009 Climate Change Conference--a meeting billed as a decisive point in the battle against carbon emissions. A slew of young designers wants to help, and they've produced 35 experimental chairs, pegged to the summit, around the theme of fostering "new forms of dialogue, negotiation, and collaboration."
They're on display now in Copenhagen, at the Cabinetmakers' Autumn Exhibition, an influential furniture show that pairs young designers with furniture manufacturers, and lets their imaginations loose. So what sort of ideas are at work? We've culled seven of the entries, and noticed three basic themes.
The first is a variation on the idea of just locking everyone in a room and not letting them out until they agree.
Above: Komplot Design and Erik Jørgensen Møbelfabrik chair, which pairs the sitters up for a tete-a-tete.
Below, Claus Bjerre and ParadiseParkDesignStudios produced these stools, which are lashed together:
Another similar one: Niels Gammelgaard and Onecollection's chairs and cafe table--if you move, I move, and visa versa. Get it? Good! Now let's all hold hands!
Christina Liljenberg Halstrøm and Morten Lyhne's pair of linked chairs, which also lets you feel your partner moving. At least the butt-warmth isn't transferred as well:
Another theme: If negotiators from the world's 15 most powerful economies are going to act like children, then maybe they'll behave if we actually infantilize them.
Peter Johansen & Ingeborg Stence Clausen worked with Malte Gormsen to create a set of loungers oriented around a sandbox--because these "adults" clearly need a refresher course on playing together:
Troels Grum-Schwensen worked with Aksel Kjergaard to produce a table set that requires both participants to cooperate, if the table is to be functional:
Henrik Ingemann Nielsen and dePlace Møbelsnedkeri produced a chair for face-to-face negotations, with colorful little blocks that would could be shuffled back and forth, depending on negotiation terms:
The final theme we picked up on: We're kind of screwed, so we should all be living just a little more mindfully.
Søren Ulrik Petersen and Claus Mølgaard, with Amagerforbrænding, produced this brilliant recycled stool, with legs made of rolled up Ikea catalogues and plastic bottles. Cheap, green furniture at it's very best, with the lightest footprint:
And finally, Torben Bay took that awareness idea to its logical conclusion: Get scared!
Here, he produced a chair that manages to look like a post-apocalyptic raft, floating on a sea that has risen up around us:
Even if you're up on the news, the present state of the debate over gay marriage can be confusing at best. The LA Times has created an infographic to help. It is not a particularly well-designed graphic, but it's chockablock with information, and has links to the relevant news stories.
The baseline of the map is a color-coded system, showing the exact nature of gay-marriage laws in each state--a deep crimson, for example, indicates a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, as well as various legal rights for gay couples; deep green means gay marriage is legal.
Where the graph gets interesting is in the timeline---you can view a snapshot of the country at any point in the last ten years. (The snapshot above preceded Maine's ban on gay marriage, which voters decided in November.)
Comparing the map between 2000 and now is striking. 2000:
The color coding shows a country where laws were roughly at parity in 2000, with a legal ban on gay marriage--but few laws regarding gay rights. By 2009 that parity has splintered into states where gays are denied many rights, and a few states where marriage is legal.
In other words, the color coding tells you a story that doesn't quite fit with the one that many liberals cite: That gay marriage has gained greater acceptance, as social mores and generational attitudes shift. That might be true at the level of demographics and opinion polls--and it might mean legal gay marriage in the future. But for now it's a hot button, and states have responded in highly polarized ways. The default position has been less rights, not more.
