ideometric

DO WANT. Shelby Daytona coupe reproduction.

Osocio.org - a blog cataloging “social advertising and non-profit campaigns from around the globe.”

Good resource for anyone trying to integrate art and social movement activism.

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. Came across him while looking up the term “affordance.” Sounds interesting.

“This book is part polemic, part science, part serious and part fun. It examines the effect of poor design and equipment failure on human behavior. Intended for a general audience, it covers user-centered design, the psychopathology of everyday things and the psychology of everyday actions.”

“We are all victimized by the natural perversity of inanimate objects. Here is a book at last that strikes back both at the objects and at the designers, manufacturers, and assorted human beings who originate and maintain this perversity. It will do your heart good and may even point the way to correcting matters.”
— Isaac Asimov

Random shot in the Fashion District, downtown LA.

Aesthetics and security. Form and function. What’s the difference between a nice looking security gate and a utilitarian one? Who does it avoid offending (who is the audience)? Does it change the perception of the surrounding area? What’s the point? (Alternatively, why not? Why shouldn’t it look good?)

I don’t think enough thought (creativity, culture, wit/humor/irony, style, humanity, whatever) is put into design, especially for mundane things. What if we lived in a culture that could incorporate a sense of humor into the design of security gates as a matter of course? Like, perhaps, Japan and their all-encompassing emphasis on kawaii (see the Japanese defense ministry’s annual report, published as a manga).

Maybe this hints at a deeper critique of industrialized production, monopolization, and/or the cooptation of the aforementioned design aesthetic (and material culture more generally) by a production process that makes it all subservient to marketing, efficiency, and profit.

I think that computers and the ‘net put some of that creativity back into the hands of individuals, atleast for certain things.

[unfinished thought]

The interface design for Google’s new live stock market app is pretty slick. All kinds of information convergence happening. Notice the way it links to news stories on top of the graph of the stock price.

If I were the type of guy that would spend $35 on a pen, I’d be all over this. But alas I’m not, so I will admire its modern, self-contained, elegant simplicity from afar, while I plod away with my “borrowed” Bics and Uniballs.

THE magazine is yet another trend-spotting zine, but it’s pretty accessible, had a few things that I found genuinely interesting, and the hype is kept at a bearable level.

Found via 

Came across this at Yolk in Silverlake. Rechargeable. It’s impractically practical, a perfect embodiment of “nonsequitor” as design philosophy. I want to get one and keep it in my car as an emergency flashlight.

Nothing like an illuminated pig snout to get you through an emergency.

$12 ish @ Yolk. Or $9 plus shipping here. You can find it online for 99cents direct from China/Hong Kong, though only in reject color schemes like green and purple.

I’m planning to build a cafe racer over the summer. This is an animated mock up I made. I took the photo of the stock bike and painted over it in photoshop to show what I want to do to it (bigger version here).

I think the bike will cost around $1500, plus another ~$500 to pick up a cafe style seat and new exhaust, etc.

With gas prices set to tick past $5/gallon, a 40+mpg bike sounds good to me.

Cold War era ekranoplans. Gotta love the Soviets.Check out 8:30 in, where they decide that adding missiles would be a good idea. Naturally.

TWEMCO is some kind of Japanese clock company that still makes old fashioned analog flip clocks. The design is classic, I love it. I was going to buy one but then I saw the $140 price tag…

NYT Magazine is featuring an article on Jan Chipchase, who has my dream job and whose “Future Perfect” blog is always worth a visit. He’s an anthropologist of sorts, a “human-behavior researcher” or “user anthropologist” employed by Nokia to roam the globe in order to identify how people, especially in emerging markets (i.e. developing countries), are actually using technologies; their social and environmental improvisations (sharing a phone with several people or dealing with lack of electricity), unique needs and wants, etc., in order to design new/better products and services.

The NYT article uses his job to highlight the wider role and potential of the cellphone in globalization and economic growth in the developing world.

“A 2005 London Business School study extrapolated […] that for every additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people, a country’s G.D.P. rises 0.5 percent.”

“A cellphone in the hands of an Indian fisherman who uses it to grow his business — which presumably gives him more resources to feed, clothe, educate and safeguard his family — represents a textbook case of bottom-up economic development, a way of empowering individuals by encouraging entrepreneurship as opposed to more traditional top-down approaches in which aid money must filter through a bureaucratic chain before reaching its beneficiaries, who by virtue of the process are rendered passive recipients.”

This Ugandan improvisation for sending remittances through cellphones shows how people improvise with technology, and illustrates the need/market for virtual banking infrastructure in the developing world:

Someone working in Kampala, for instance, who wishes to send the equivalent of $5 back to his mother in a village will buy a $5 prepaid airtime card, but rather than entering the code into his own phone, he will call the village phone operator (“phone ladies” often run their businesses from small kiosks) and read the code to her. She then uses the airtime for her phone and completes the transaction by giving the man’s mother the money, minus a small commission.

Good read.

The US State Department has a government take on Snopes.com called ‘Identifying Misinformation’.

Funny that Naver, a huge Yahoo style portal site in Korea, has a new “Simple Experience” that mimics Googles pared-down aesthetic.

Google, on the other hand, is using Flash buttons on their localized Google.co.kr site - the only Google country site that differs in style from their main US design.

I’ve never been a Mac fan. Proprietary systems and high prices are not cool. But now that you can run Windows on the new Intel based Macbooks, and given OSX’s Unix base, I am pretty much sold. The 2.5ghz core duo Macbook Pro is looking more and more appealing, especially as I type away on my 4 year old Dell.