Task: Find 5 examples of products that appeal to you from a design perspective and post images and descriptions of them. Discuss the elements that make them appealing to you. Be specific.

* You will notice that there seems to be an error with the numbering of these items. Don’t worry, despite what it says, I assure you that there are 5.

1. Powers of Ten (Picture above) – In an attempt to pick an Eames product to showcase, I found difficulty in choosing from the amazing array of icon items that they have designed. One of my favorites, though, is this short film that they produced for IBM. Not only do I appreciate the aesthetic qualities of their films, but this film in particular has a very interesting underlining meaning. I interpret it as an attempt to define infinity, which we have a very difficult time understanding. Watch the video here.

1. Apple Mac Pro – “Meet Mac Pro. It’s the fastest Mac ever with advanced 8-core performance, workstation graphics, and millions of possible configurations.” – Apple.com

In my eyes, this is the greatest 20th century computer. It is thoughtfully designed on the exterior and interior. In an age where most computers were made to become obsolete within a few years, this design has existed for 7 years and continues to be produced. The paradigm of computer is fast changing, but as a desktop computer created at the time that it was, this computer seems to be near perfect.

1. 10,000 Year Clock – “The idea to build a monument scale, multi-millennial, all mechanical clock as an icon to long-term thinking came from computer scientist Danny Hillis and was published in the form of an email to friends. Later it was followed up with an essay published in the 01995 Wired magazine “Scenarios” issue. Danny reasoned that by actually building a remote monument, the discussions around long-term thinking would be far more focused and it would lend itself to good storytelling and myth — two key requirements of anything lasting a long time.” - Long Now Foundation

I really love the concept and the delivery of this idea. There are few things these days that promote longevity, and this does so in a very natural and poetic way. More information can be seen here: http://longnow.org/clock/

1. Theo Jansen’s Kinetic Sculptures – “Since 1990 I have been occupied creating new forms of life. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic material of this new nature. I make skeletons that are able to walk on the wind, so they don’t have to eat. Over time, these skeletons have become increasingly better at surviving the elements such as storms and water and eventually I want to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.” – Theo Jansen

Along somewhat of the same lines as the previous item, these sculptures are also very beautiful and very poetic. They are very intricate, calculated, and mechanical, but the movement is so well engineered, that it is very fluid and organic. They are a great example of how are creations, despite their perceived complexity, are the most basic of objects in comparison to nature.

1. Shure SM58 - “The Shure SM58 is a professional cardioid dynamic microphone, commonly used in live vocal applications. It has built an enviable reputation among musicians for its robust construction and technical performance, and is considered the industry standard for live performance microphones.Introduced in 1966, the SM58 remains one of the best selling microphones in the world today. The SM stands for Studio Microphone.” Wikipedia

Though this product is not often thought about as a beautifully designed item, it’s reputation is still quite impressive. As mentioned in Wikipedia, this microphone has been selling for close to 50 years. In that time there have been many technological advances, yet this microphone has continued to improve it’s presence as the industry standard.

I will be taking a course on speculative design in which one required element is blog posts. Since the content of the course is somewhat inline to what has been posted on intwo in the past, I will be updating intwo with the required posts for the class. As always, discussion is very welcome, we would love to hear what you have to think about the material posted.

Grids are a designers best friend. Trusting, working with, and breaking the grid are all things that you should be familiar with if you are doing communication design. In most graphics programs it is easy to set this up and there are many different ways to do it. When working with the web, though, there are not as many commonly known tools to achieve the pixel perfect results that you want.

There are increasingly more frameworks sprouting up that give you flexibility to work with a solid, cross browser grid with ease. For a lot of these you can find Photoshop, OmniGraffle, or Illustrator templates that will allow you to design with the grid that you will be working with. Once finished the design process, though, I am not aware of anything to guide you through the rest of the development.

Last week I went on a search and found a few resources to create a grid overlay in your browser. I found this, this, and this. What I found to be the most flexible, though, was Allan Jardine’s ‘Grid’ bookmarklet. It grabs a little widget that overlays on top of the site that you are viewing and allows you to structure a grid on top of it with whatever parameters you want. I thought that it might be a pretty useful tool, but still didn’t necessarily help me as I like to edit my CSS in cssEdit and it doesn’t have the option to use bookmarklets.

To circumvent that minor problem I did the following:

1. Added a “Grid” button in my header file:
   <a id="grid_overlay" href="#">GRID</a>
2. Styled it to be out of the way:
   a#grid_overlay {
   color: #252525;
   text-decoration: none;
   position: absolute;
   padding: 5px;
   top: 0px;
   left: 0px;
   }
   
   a#grid_overlay:hover{
   background-color: #33ffcc;
   color: #fff;
   }
3. Used jQuery to select the button, and ran Allan Jardine’s bookmarklet code.
   function fnStartGrid(sUrl) {
   var nScript = document.createElement('script');nScript.setAttribute('language','JavaScript');nScript.setAttribute('src',sUrl);document.body.appendChild(nScript);
   }
   
   $('#grid_overlay').click(function(){
   fnStartGrid('http://www.sprymedia.co.uk/design/grid/media/js/grid-loader.js');
   return false;
   });

The one obvious downfall to this is that it has to pull code from his server, and therefore you need an internet connection to use it, but it has been helpful to me, so I thought that I would share.

It was probably two years ago that I stumbled across Folkert Gorter. I found him because I liked the work that he did, but I bookmarked his site for another reason. One of the sites in his body of work was named SpaceCollective. I clicked on the link and found a glowing orb with the words “Coming Soon”. When I provoked the orb with my mouse it subtly changed to reveal a log in form. I thought that this was quite peculiar.

It is not that often that you find something on the internet that has been created (or partially created) by a very talented professional, with a very distinguishable, thought provoking name, and a log in form with no explanation. I even asked Google, but no help. There have been a few times in the past two years that I have re-visited the orb, checking to see if there was any progress. But all visit came up to be a disappointment. The SpaceCollective had disappointed me, that is, until today.

Following a link from Smashing Magazine, I once again was acquainted with the SpaceCollective, only this time no to be disappointed:

SpaceCollective. Where forward thinking terrestrials exchange ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction today.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Things used to be easy and unambiguous. You found advertisements in magazines and on billboards, art in galleries and museums, and people expressing themselves by means of graffiti and defacing of private/public property was thought of as a nuisance by most. This is an oversimplification, but bear with me.

Over the years, as the urban environment got denser, it also got more cluttered with ads, and street art took on a new poignancy and presence. Today, anyone in an urban environment is subjected to thousands of commercial advertisements, but also non-commercial messages per day.

Clearly, this constant stream of information desensitizes people to messages, and it’s getting increasingly harder to catch anyone’s attention. To do so, in fact, means that advertisers need to break out of the very pattern they are helping to create. The holy grail of advertising is to cause passers-by to do a double-take. This can be accomplished by creating alien interjections in the urban web, somethings that doesn’t fit in, that stands out semiotically.

Weburbanist has a great article series on what’s sometimes referred to as Guerilla Marketing. Read more at these links:

• Guerrilla Marketing 1: History of Guerrilla Marketing
• Guerrilla Marketing 2: Origins and Evolution of Guerrilla Marketing
• Guerrilla Marketing 3: Major Corporations Go for Guerrilla Marketing
• Guerrilla Marketing 4: Guerrilla Marketing versus Viral Marketing
• Guerrilla Marketing 5: Guerrilla Marketing for Good Causes
• Guerrilla Marketing 6: 10 Types of Guerrilla Marketing
• Guerrilla Marketing 7: Is Guerrilla Marketing Right for You?
• Guerrilla Marketing 8: The Future of Guerrilla Marketing
• Guerrilla Art Versus Guerrilla Advertising: What’s the Difference?
• Creative Guerilla Marketing Campaigns

An example of guerilla art: Recently, Graffiti Research Lab and the Anti-Advertisement Agency teamed up to subvert big-screen-TV ads at NYC subway stations. By putting a laser-cut foam stencil over the still-running TV screen, they transformed the commercial messages into a luminescent projection of their own propaganda. The idea of a backlit street medium was originally concieved by Ji Lee as abstractor.tv.

With this adbusting-campaign, called Light Criticism, AAA and GRL are postulating that “the real graffiti problem” (read: the real public space nuisance, uglifier of the urban landscape, and medium of stupifying propaganda) is commercial advertising, not street art.

Higher-quality .mov video at AAA

A while back, I made a post about crowdsourcing, an internet buzzword that identifies the productive path of online networking. Recently, I stumbled upon CrowdSpring, a site set up to align creatives with clients. It is providing a great entry for any designer or client that wants to get involved with a creative endeavor.

CrowdSpring works a lot like a competition. The only thing different is that revisions are allowed as well as client – designer dialogue. As a client, you post your project, say how much you are willing to pay, and then as the submissions start coming in, you can ask the designers to modify it in any way.

Designers can come onto the site and see which projects interest them, and then submit as many concepts as they would like. The downfall for the designer is that if you don’t win the contract, you could end up putting in a lot of time for not much return.

We have not used the resource yet, but if anybody has any experience with it we would love to hear how it went.

A band called Francis and the Lights has made a video for their song The Top. I really appreciate the simplicity of the video and so I thought I would share.

They are led by Francis Farewell Starlite. They have sold out the Mercury Lounge twice. Their short record A Modern Promise is now available at amodernpromise.com, where Francis performs his song The Top on 35mm film.

With this post, I send many apologies for the time between this and the last post. I hope you won’t hold a grudge. A great friend of mine sent me this video a couple of days ago thinking that it would be good for a discussion, and I agree. What I find most interesting about this concept is:

1. Biomimicry – In this case humans. Not only can designing by imitating nature help to solve very complex problems, it can also create a very non-traditional emotional response to the artifact. Artifacts that blur the lines between nature and machine are often more interesting than machines that are obvious.
2. A Shift in Paradigm – “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” – Alvin Toffler This is not saying that all previous information is bad, building upon existing knowledge is what allows us to grow. But we need to also continue to re-evaluate the knowledge that we are building upon to make sure that it is relevant in the present and in the future. I think that this is a great example, to me it seems that car manufacturing is very rarely creative. This could be a great shift into a new form of creativity.
3. Viral Marketing – Added on June 9th, this video has already been viewed by well over 3 million people. It amazes me how good of a job viral internet can spread the word about something.

[Thanks Randy]

As a science, creating robotics that are self aware is a field that is on the verge of creating artificial intelligence. Hod Lipson has a great TED talk in which he introduces two robotic experiments that touch on self awareness and evolution. One is a four legged machine that becomes self aware and teaches itself to walk. It is a fascinating and somewhat scary thought that we can create machines that have an understanding of a goal and not only have the means to reach the goal, but have the means to teach themselves to reach the goal.

As an art, this inherent knowledge within the robot can create a poetry that cannot be recreated with inanimate objects. The Robotic Chair by Max Dean, Raffaello D’Andrea, and Matt Donovan is a great piece of work in which the chair falls apart and pieces itself back together. The strong metaphor relies heavily on the self awareness of the object.

As an object, the chair has been a constant and trustworthy partner in the history of civil society. We depend on the chair to support our bodies as we depend upon the earth beneath our feet. The Robotic Chair stands in for the individual and a society over the course of a lifetime – falling apart, falling down, gathering oneself together, picking oneself up, again and again. The Robotic Chair articulately and concisely reminds us on a grand scale that there is magic – that there is hope.

Despite the potentially scary outcome of science (in the wrong hands) taking artistic ideas to create a apocalyptic science fiction thriller, this robotic chair reminds us that we are good at adapting to unfortunate situations and whatever bad situations we create, we have the means to piece ourselves back together.

Check out the video on their website as it is much more dramatic.

This animated short by street artist Blu, was drawn on public walls in Buenos Aires. Needless to say, this animation technique has a lot of constraints, and the result is organic and jawdropping. The theme reminds me of the fractal bubbling infinity of life. Go full-screen on this one, and turn on your sound.

More videos from Blu can be found on Vimeo, and some diary notes from a trip through Latin America with Blu can be found on megunica.org