Tagdesign

Bricks made of bacteria and sand at room-temperature

Biomanufactured bricks

An American architecture professor, Ginger Krieg Dosier, 32, Assistant Professor of Architecture at American University of Sharjah (AUS) in Abu Dhabi, has won this year’s prestigious Metropolis Next Generation Design Prize for “Biomanufactured Brick.” The 2010 Next Generation Prize Challenge was “One Design Fix for the Future” – a small fix to change the world. The Next Generation judges decided that Professor Dosier’s well-documented and -tested plan to replace clay-fired brick with a brick made with bacteria and sand, met the challenge perfectly.

“The ordinary brick – you would think that there is nothing more basic than baking a block of clay in an oven,” said Horace Havemeyer, Publisher of Metropolis. “Ginger Dosier’s idea is the perfect example of how making a change in an almost unexamined part of our daily lives can have an enormous impact on the environment.”

Dexigner: Biomanufactured Brick: Bricks Without Clay or Carbon

(via )

The Current State of Web Design: Trends 2010

trends in web design example 1

themes in web design example 2

Smashing Magazine: The Current State of Web Design: Trends 2010

The Myth of Beautiful Website Design

Good design — even great design — won’t solve all your business problems. Not even close.

Design is not a magic pill

Design is not your message

Design is not about you

Design won’t work miracles

Copyblogger: The Myth of Beautiful Website Design

(via Eric Schiller)

Archigram archive

Archigram: Drive-in housing

Above: Drive in Housing, a “Highly elaborated ongoing speculative exploration of the possible use of cars as mobile and serviced component parts of an adaptable dwelling system composed of cars, drive-in buildings and services.”

A massive archive of Archigram materials:

Archigram Archival Project

(via Bruce Sterling)

See also:

Archigram’s heirs open_sailing (my interview with their coordinator coming soon!)

Hallucinatory Urban Architecture of the Future

Third World solutions to First World problems

Design for the First World

I’m not sure if this is a joke or not, but it is a good idea:

Our fellows in the first world often come to visit and give us their well intentioned but often very problematic “solutions”. We thought, why don’t we pay back?

Dx1W is a competition for designers, artists, scientists, makers and thinkers in developing countries to provide solutions for First World problems. […]

The activ­i­ties car­ried out under the Inter­na­tional Year focus on:

*Reduc­ing obesity.
*Address­ing aging pop­u­la­tion and low birth rate.
*Reduc­ing con­sump­tion rate of mass pro­duced goods.
*Inte­grat­ing the immigrant population.

The Dx1W com­pe­ti­tion is addressed to the devel­op­ing coun­tries of the world: All cre­ative solu­tions depend on hav­ing a pow­er­ful idea. Whether it’s great resources, mil­i­tary, pol­i­tics or gov­ern­ment, power and size are not enough with­out hav­ing a pow­er­ful vision. The First World needs our ideas to solve their prob­lems. First World prob­lems demand Sim­ple Third World solutions. From today on The Third World will bring ideas to redesign the future of the First World.

Design for the First World

(via Chris Arkenberg)

Why the Failure of Systems Thinking Should Inform the Future of Design Thinking

Thinking

In addition to the number of frameworks and ideas, and the density of the interconnections among them, there was a strong normative quality to the material and its presentation. “If one hopes to make any progress at all,” we were told, “you need to both understand and accept these related ideas.”

This particular version of systems thinking is not unusual in this respect. Peter Senge’s 1990 edition of The Fifth Discipline describes one manager’s reaction to a five-day introductory workshop on his approach, which among other things, requires growing comfortable with eight archetypes: “It reminds me of when I first studied calculus (p. x).” Systems dynamics, the Soft Systems Method and other approaches face similar concerns.

Each of systems thinking’s various manifestations demands some degree of subscription to an orthodoxy (a particular view of just what systems thinking is). And each requires that the user master a large number of related ideas and techniques, most of which are not particularly useful on their own.

Fast Company: Lessons Learned — Why the Failure of Systems Thinking Should Inform the Future of Design Thinking

(Thanks James Curcio)

See also:

John Kay’s work on obliquity, which critiques decision science.

(Photo credit: Gutter / CC)

Evolutionary, algorithmic & generative design round-up

Michael Piasecki's Cellular Bowl

Shapeways has a round-up of evolutionary, algorithmic & generative design projects, including the “cellular bowl” above, designed with Processing.

The marriage of tech and design is all around us. In a world where everything is designed a meta “way to design” that algorithmically cuts through the clutter is very appealing. A perfect design algorithm could potentially engender choice in design the same way that Google’s PageRank set of algorithms do for the web. And this is what generative design already partially does. It simplifies design by codifying it and somewhere within lies the promise of “true”, “simple” & “beautiful” design.

With technologies such as 3D printing letting everyone design or co-design things there is also a real need for generative tools. They allow for unique designs but since each is machine made, the marriage is a conceptually comfortable and inexpensive one. Also, rather than forcing the customer into a “blank canvas conundrum” whereby the sheer possibility overwhelms them to the point inactivity, generated models could lead to choice or guided choice in design.

Shapeways: Dasign: data driven, evolutionary, algorithmic & generative design

(via Bruce Sterling)

Winners wear red: How colour twists your mind

New Scientist has a fascinating article on the way the color red effects our minds. Definitely worth reading in full.

IMAGINE you are an experienced martial arts referee. You are asked to score a number of taekwondo bouts, shown to you on video. In each bout, one combatant is wearing red, the other blue. Would clothing colour make any difference to your impartial, expert judgement? Of course it wouldn’t.

Yet research shows it almost certainly would. Last year, sports psychologists at the University of Münster, Germany, showed video clips of bouts to 42 experienced referees. They then played the same clips again, digitally manipulated so that the clothing colours were swapped round. The result? In close matches, the scoring swapped round too, with red competitors awarded an average of 13 per cent more points than when they were dressed in blue (Psychological Science, vol 19, p 769). “If one competitor is strong and the other weak, it won’t change the outcome of the fight,” says Norbert Hagemann, who led the study. “But the closer the levels, the easier it is for the colour to tip the scale.”

This is just the latest piece of research suggesting that exposure to certain colours can have a significant effect on how people think and act. Up to now most of the research has focused on red clothing in sport, but other colours and settings are being investigated too. It is becoming clear that colours can have an important, unappreciated effect on the way your mind works – one that you really ought to know about.

New Scientist: Winners wear red: How colour twists your mind

(via Overcoming Bias)

Vintage Japanese graphic design

new face

(Toru Kogure (photographer), Takashi Tanabe (designer), ‘New Face’ editorial for Fashion News, early 80s)

give us back man

(Tsunehisa Kimura, 1968, commercial and industrial photography)

More Pics: A Journey Around My Skull

10 Wind Turbines That Push the Limits of Design

quiet revolution wind turbine

The wind turbine has become an instantly recognizable symbol for “green energy” (and for green washing). But here are 10 examples of turbines that are turning the iconic design on its head.

Popular Mechanics:

(via OVO)

© 2024 Technoccult

Theme by Anders NorénUp ↑