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.
Dell is falling for bamboo. Having already introduced a computer with a bamboo case, today they'll begin shipping netbooks with bamboo cushioning, rather than the customary styrofoam and plastic. This is the latest detail in the computer maker's ongoing plan to green its supply chain.
As the AP points out, bamboo has become a popular choice in the green movement, used in everything from floorboars to t-shirts. That's thanks to the grass's natural properties: Not only is it incredibly strong, it grows amazingly fast--up to 24 inches a day. And that makes bamboo one of the most sustainable building materials on earth.
The bamboo comes from China's Jiangxi province (pretty far from Sichuan, where the pandas dwell, in case you're wondering). The forest itself is certififed by the Forest Stewardship Council, which monitors growing and working conditions.
The packaging itself is pulped without chemicals by Unisource Global Solutions, which has also invented a system to recapture the water used in the process. Apparently it's cheaper than regular paper pulp. This move might be slightly ahead of its time: The bamboo can't be recycled yet. However, Dell is working to certify the bamboo for recycling with corrugated cardboard, and they expect the clearance to come in the first half of 2010. Afterwards, the bamboo cushions will start making their way into more of the packaging that Dell produces.
Transparency International has just released its 2009 Corruption Perceptions Index, the preeminent, annual study of governmental corruption levels around the world.
This time, they've added a nice little interactive map--not much too it, besides the fact that mousing over the country gives you the numeric value. But it does give you a great indication of what countries do well, relative to their neighbors and what countries are basically sinkholes of graft and fraud. For example, Uruguay and Botswana do far better than the countries around them--no wonder that Botswana in particular is a prime example of economic development that works.
The CPI is a survey of surveys, which combines indexes found in 13 feeder studies with the expertise of academics who follow these issues. (Experts are polled on questions like how well a country's courts work, and the effectiveness of its watch dog agencies.)
If you're new to the study, the most surprising thing will be how poorly the U.S. does, relative to its first world peers. We're basically just a shade above some pretty dicey governments. The reasons are complex, but you can point to the influence of lobbying on our lawmaking and the ongoing controversy over how we've prosecuted the war on terror, among other things.
Designers love creating products with a social cause behind them, but the Home Duvet and Trottoir Sheet Set have to be among the strangest out there.
The 144 thread-count fabric is adorned with a photographic print of a weathered cardboard box and paving stones--in other words, providing a simulcra of life on the streets without the discomfort. It all seems dryly sinister, but the designers give 30% of the gross profits to Centrepoint, a UK charity for
homeless young people. It's sold through Dutch by Design, which exclaims, "The Home Duvet lets you sleep under a cardboard box so a homeless person doesn't have to!"
The print itself is high-tech--the ink is printed into the cotton, rather than on top of it, and that means the image stays sharp and the fabric stays soft through multiple washings. The sheets and duvet are made in Turkey and Pakistan, and the designers insure that child labour isn't involved in the production.
We have to say, there's a few projects floating around out there, aimed at inducing guilt in the consumer--ranging from these forks which show calorie consumption across the world to these cups whose design serves as an infographic about malnutrition. But these sheets take the grim-faced chic to an almost Derelicte level.
Okay so imagine you're designing a remote control for a two-legged robot. The task, basically, is to translate those walking motions into the controller movements--and usually, these two don't have any intuitive relationship with each other. That's why it takes so long to learn how to control a videogame, for example--the language on the screen (or in the robot) is different from that in your hands. Now, you can solve that with gestural interfaces, but there's a simpler way.
Researchers at Keio University recognized that problem, and designed a solution that simply requires an iPod. "Kiwalky" simply uses the iPhone's touch screen, and you control the robot simply by walking with your fingers. A kicking motion makes the robot kick, and a tapping motion makes it jump. Amazing potential for toys and games, right?
The project is set to debut in December at SIGGRAPH Asia.
Honestly, we're surprised that this doesn't already exist: Tribudesign, a young Lebanese firm, has secured a distributor for White, which is basically a bong that looks like an iPod.
Maybe bong is too cavalier a word. It's supposed to be a hookah, and it's going to be distributed by Airdiem, a Parisian company that appears to specialize in high-end Persian smokers.
White is made of a palette that includes stainless steel, acrylic, and leather, and that's more healthful because those materials are easier to clean and would thus produce less marijuana resin carcinogenic tobacco soot. Its slim design also makes it easily stashable. And if that isn't enough, you can just throw it next to your computer in a pinch, and pray that the cops mistake it for a USB drive.
We've seen how people like Catherina Fake, the Flickr co-founder, and Stefan Sagmeister keep their creative juices flowing. They point out: Constantly working hard blinds you to breakthrough ideas; one solution is taking copious time off. Maybe that solves the problem for individuals. But can society organize itself in such a way as to maximize the number of good ideas it produces?
It might sound like an impossible question, but Stefan Leijnen and Liane Gabora at the University of British Columbia in Canada have created a clever mathematical model that offers an answer.
Their key insight is that creative ideas can only spread if they're actually adopted by others. Too much creativity, and there's not enough imitation--ideas die on the vine, because there are so many of them and few ever catch fire. For good ideas to spread, there's an optimal balance to be reached between creating and imitating.
Leijnen and Gabora modeled that dynamic, and they found that to optimize the profusion of good ideas, we should spend less than 50% of our time on creativity. If some individuals spend all of their time creating new ideas, then they shouldn't comprise any more than 30% of a population.
Now, the model is obviously a gross oversimplification of how the real world works--and the model depends crucially on its assumptions about the rate of uptake in ideas. But it does offer some interesting insight to the eternal question of how much time an organization should spend inventing ideas, and how much time it should spend vetting them. Organizations and societies that spend too much time on ideas see their overall fitness decline.
As Technology Review points out, it's possible that our societies have already been built up around these rough divisions in labor and time. And I'll bet companies have been as well: 30% of staff devoted to product creation and engineering is about what you see in the gross headcounts of big innovative firms.
Where most designers are happy to get their designs into production, Richard Sapper can lay claim to producing some of the longest lived. Maybe his most famous design is the Tizio Lap for Artemide, which has sold a whopping 2 million units and remains in production today. And that's nothing next to his Thinkpad laptops for IBM, which have sold 30 million units. (Recently, we showed one of his other classics, the TS 502 Radio.)
Sapper's now 75 years old, and he sat down with BusinessWeek to reminisce about a dozen of his best designs, collected in an excellent slideshow. Its kind of a blast from the past, in a good way: Few people have ever handled standard butch-looking black electronics in quite as refined a manner, from TV's to radios. Click the link and enjoy.
Dell is falling for bamboo. Having already introduced a 
