Stuart Constantine is a founding partner of Core77, a design enterprise based in New York City. He studied History at the University of Connecticut and Industrial Design at Pratt Institute. He has over fifteen years of consulting experience in the design and technology sectors. Prior to his involvement with Core77 he worked as a designer at Lotus Development Corp. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as a director at Gartner, an IT consulting company in Connecticut. He currently resides in Connecticut with his wife, three young children, a collection of guitars, and a dog.
Steve Portigal is the founder of Portigal Consulting. In the past 15 years Steve has interviewed families eating breakfast, rock musicians, credit-default swap traders, and radiologists. His work has informed the development of music gear, wine packaging, medical information systems, corporate intranets, videoconferencing systems, and iPod accessories. Steve is an accomplished presenter who speaks about culture, innovation, and design at companies like eBay, Adobe, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard, and Dolby Laboratories. He has a graduate degree in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Guelph and is an avid photographer who has a Museum of Foreign Groceries in his home.
Michael DiTullo is Creative Director at the global innovation firm, frog design, where he works with clients like Intel, JBL, Honda, and Braun. Prior, Michael spent almost a decade at Nike, working on iconic products under their Nike, Jordan and Converse brands. He regularly speaks at design conferences, schools, and corporations on the value of design. Michael is a prolific creative and an unfailing advocate for our industry as a whole who frequently speaks at conferences and universities. DiTullo has been a core77 contributor since 2003, moderating our discussion forums (as Yo), producing design events, blogging, and producing a series of "5 minute" sketch videos.
Allan Chochinov is a partner of Core77, a New York-based design network serving a global community of designers and design enthusiasts, and Chair of the new MFA in Products of Design graduate program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Allan lectures around the world and at professional conferences including IDSA, AIGA and IxDA, has been a guest critic at various design schools in including Yale University, IIT, Carnegie Mellon, Ravensbourne, RMIT, University of Minnesota, Emily Carr, and RISD. He has moderated and led workshops and symposia at the Aspen Design Conference, the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio, Compost Modern, and Winterhouse, and is a frequent design competition juror. Prior to Core77, his work in product design focused on the medical, surgical, and diagnostic fields, as well as on consumer products and workplace systems. He has been named on numerous design and utility patents and has received awards from The Art Directors Club, I.D. Magazine, Communication Arts, and The One Club.
Don Lehman has contributed to Core since 2001, posting design news to the Clogger and authoring his column, "The Student Life". A co-founder of the Thought at Work student design conference, he has also worked for Benza, Blu Dot, RoadWired, and Hefty. Don is currently an industrial designer with Ignite USA in Chicago.
Aart van Bezooyen is a Dutch optimist and motivator for materials in design. He lives and works in Hamburg where he founded Material Stories to bridge the gap between the materials industry and the world of design.
He contributes to international design magazines and teaches materials at design universities across Europe. Material Stories is where Aart inspires and enables the best use of materials to make design more competitive, creative and sustainable.
Currently, Aart and his partner Paula Raché are traveling around the world with a focus on sustainability. You can follow their project at www.itsnoteasybeinggreen.net
Jeannie is a true jack-of-all trades, looks forward to a day gone swimmingly, and finds joy in all things awesome. Brilliant art, rocking the renegade music scene, conjuring up haute designs, other people's hot designs, tasty salad, trashy magazines and unicorns are some of the many things she is passionate about.
Glen is a caffeine fueled, photo taking, streaming music, sushi loving Australian obsessed with collecting airline safety cards and has only destroyed one laptop in 7 years of riding to work every day. With formal training in both Industrial Design and Interactive Media at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, he was the online art director at lomography.com for almost 5 years before joining the team at Core77.
Al Dean has been working as a technology writer for the past six years and currently holds the post of Technology Editor on the UK's leading Product Development Technology magazine, MCAD, and is Editor of Prototype, a new quarterly focussing on the Rapid Prototyping and Direct Manufacturing industries. He is also regular contributor to CADserver.co.uk, one of the world's leading providers of CAD and product development technology related web-content. He has contributed his work to numerous publications, including CGI, New Design, IPMatters.com, and Journal for the Institute of Engineering Designers.
Bruce M. Tharp is currently a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Chicago and works for Haworth's thinktank, the Ideation Group, helping to bridge the gap between research and design solutions. In addition to an MA in Anthropology, he holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Bucknell University and an MID from Pratt Institute.
Niti Bhan focuses on offering strategic insight for growth opportunities and revenue generation in the rapidly evolving interstitial space between design and business. Her 15 years of experience include employers such McCann Erickson Worldwide, Hewlett Packard India, The Second City and most recently, the Institute of Design. She is an engineer and an MBA whose most significant achievement in the field of design has been dropping out of two graduate design programs on two continents in two centuries - the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad and the Institute of Design, Chicago. Her areas of interest are business intelligence and trends, business strategy as well as creating a compelling user case for design as force for increasing value.
Trained at CCS in Detroit, Doyle has spent the last 10+ years working in and lecturing about experiential and communication design. He was the first place winner of Archinect's Communication Booth design competition in 2001, served as Graphics Chair for the 2003 IDSA National Conference and is on the board of for the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit. He is a news editor for Archinect.com and Computerlove.net, and director of Burnlab.net.
Mark Vanderbeeken is a senior partner at Experientia, an international experience design consultancy, based in Turin, Italy. He is also the author of the successful experience design blog Putting People First. Mark is a specialist in visioning, identity development and strategic communications and worked in Italy, Denmark, the USA and Belgium. He was communications manager of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, European communications coordinator for the World Wide Fund for Nature (or WWF), marketing director of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects (USA) and chief press officer of Antwerp 93, Cultural Capital of Europe (Belgium).
Xanthe is an artist and designer living in upstate New York. She teaches design and creative methods in the Saunders College of Business and in the Center for Student Innovation at RIT.
Ian Curry first got his hands dirty in design on a Chandler & Price letterpress. Shortly thereafter he moved into the more abstract realms of digital media, and has often looked back.
Ian has done interactive design work for the U.N., Eyebeam R&D, and a range of interesting companies while recently at frog Design's studio in New York. He intermittently teaches undergraduate courses in interaction design at Pratt and Parsons. Currently an interaction designer at Local Projects, he is working to reduce the number of broken-seeming interactive exhibits at area museums. If you walk by his apartment in Brooklyn, you are likely to hear him learning to play the cello.
Alissa Walker writes about design for publications like Good, Fast Company, I.D., and ReadyMade, and is the assistant editor of the California Architect's Newspaper. She can be found on your iPod as the associate producer of the KCRW show "DnA: Design and Architecture." Alissa lives in Hollywood, where she throws ice cream socials, tends to her drought-tolerant gardens, and relishes life in LA without a car. Her new blog, Gelatobaby, offers commentary on design, Los Angeles, food, travel, and Star Wars, and every so often, gelato.
Kevin runs Plan, a London-based consultancy. After a grounding in engineering, marketing, academia, product design and design management, Kevin set up the trailblazing strategy team at Seymourpowell. Then in 2004, he founded Plan, to help companies think and act more strategically about the design of their products.
Never short of an opinion or three, Kevin makes time to write and speak on design strategy and its relationship with business and society.
Deb Johnson, is the Academic Director of Sustainability at Pratt Institute and is leading the development of Pratt's new Center for Sustainable Design Studies and Research. She is founder and executive director of the Pratt Design Incubator for Sustainable/Social Enterprise.
She is heads Greenmatter, a green design consultancy and sustainable design think tank. Greenmatter brings designers together to collaborate with people working to change the world.
Brit Leissler studied design at the KISD in Cologne as well as the CCA in San Francisco and has worked in communication & interface design for various companies in Germany and Switzerland before coming to London in 2005. Here she graduated 2007 from the Royal College of Art with a master degree in product design. Since then she has been busily engaged in establishing her own London based »Shoot the Stylist!« design studio, and has undertaken design consultancy and commissioned work for the BBC, Vodafone, Lago S.p.A. and other companies, as well as working on self-initiated projects. Using an eclectic alchemy of different mediums and disciplines, she seeks to place Art & Commerce in bed together to create beautiful subversive children, her work being highly conceptual with a strong playful and emotional flavor.
When taking a break from the design world she writes, sings and composes quirky electronic pop from the tough to the romantic (her current project being »Happy Trigger«) and spreads her own brand of creative karma around the world. Brit travels a lot, loves all forms of eccentricity, joins up the dots, gets into interesting conversations with all kinds of weird and wonderful people, and as a hardcore digital camera gunslinger shoots everything that moves and grooves. She doesn't eat animals, is hot for cheese, loves the Kensington Squirrels, her boyfriend Chrisly and life enhancing ideas.
Lisa is dedicated to promoting the American contemporary design scene. She keeps herself busy as the co-founder of the Object Design League, an association of independent designers in Chicago, and design practice Smith&Linder, both co-founded with Caroline Linder. She also teaches foundation research studios at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Tad Toulis is the Creative Director of Teague's Seattle-based Design Studio. Prior to joining Teague, Tad worked at Lunar Design, Motorola's Advanced Concepts Group and Samsung's LA LAB. He was also a founding member of designRAW, a San Francisco-based design collective. Tad is a frequent speaker and lecturer at universities, conferences and design symposiums. His work has received numerous awards of distinction and has appeared in publications across the globe.
Helen Walters is a design writer and editor, currently working as an editor and researcher at Doblin, a member of the Monitor Group. Until July 2010, she was editor of innovation and design at Bloomberg BusinessWeek. She's the author of five design-related books and also contributing editor to British design magazine, Creative Review. She tweets.
Steven heller is a senior art director of the New York Times and the co-chair (with Lita Talarico) of the MFA Designer as Author Program at the School of Visual Arts. He recently co-founded (with Alice Twemlow) the MFA in Design Criticism at SVA. He is the editor of VOICE: The AIGA Journal of Design and The Nose (with Seymour Chwast). He is contributing editor to PRINT, ID, Eye, Baseline and a contributor to Metropolis, the New York Times Book Review, Varoom, and Grafik. He has edited, co-edited or authored over 100 books on design an popular culture, including "Paul Rand," "Merz to Emigre: Avant Garde Magazine Design of the Tweniteh Century," "Stylepedia: A Gude to Graphic Design Mannerisms, Quirks and Conceits," "Euro Deco: Graphic Design Between the Wars," "Anatomy of Design," "Design Literacy Second Edition," "The Education of a Photographer," "The Graphic Design Reader," "Graphic Wit: The Art of Humor in Design," and "Teaching Illustration." He is currently completing "Iron Fists: Branding the Totalitarian State" for Phaidon Press and is working on a biography of Alvin Lustig. His website is Hellerbooks.com.
Andy Polaine co-founded the award-winning new-media collective Antirom in London working with clients such as the BBC, Levis and The Science Museum as well exhibiting several interactive installations and performances around the world. He was a producer at Razorfish in the UK before moving to Australia where he started the interactive department of visual effects company, Animal Logic. He was Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media and Head of the School of Media Arts at The University of New South Wales, Sydney before moving to Germany. Officially Dr Polaine with a PhD in interactivity and play from UTS, Sydney, Andy is now a Lecturer and Research Fellow in Service Design at the Lucerne School of Art and Design in Switzerland. Alongside his academic work Andy continues to work as a interaction designer, service design research and writer. His own blog is Playpen and he is also the Editor and founder of The Designer's Review of Books
I'm a multidisciplinary graphic designer and writer living in New York City. My projects have involved designing identities, motion graphics, web sites, exhibition graphics, publications, as well as copywriting and art directing. I look for projects that challenge my thinking and form-making skills, but I'm especially interested in collaborating with non-profits and civic organizations that need help to address complex social problems in ways that might spur lasting social change.
Willem Van Lancker is a product designer (UX) at Google with a passion for ethnography, maps, data visualization, and producing delightful user experiences.
Willem came to Google from IDEO where he worked as a communication designer focusing on understanding business systems and organizations through visual communication. Previous to IDEO, Willem worked for Apple, where he designed user interfaces for products including iPhone and iPad, and adidas, where he created new brand identities for various major league sports teams respectively.
Willem is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) with a degree in Graphic Design. While at RISD, Willem teamed with a small group of Brown and RISD students to create A Better World by Design, a now-annual three-day conference encouraging social and environmental impact within educational policy. He also served as a researcher and core member for RISD’s Strategic Plan, charting a new course for RISD’s academic programs and student life initiatives focused on how students of different disciplines can innovate through collaboration.
When he is not working on new innovations for Google, Willem can be found writing, sailing, playing squash (both the sport and the gourd), following English (and American) football, and occasionally regretting the decision to eat that bacon-wrapped hotdog from a food-cart in the Mission District.
Kara has a graduate degree in Design and her research is presented as a case study in IDEO's Human-Centered Design Toolkit.
She is a graduate member of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada and has joined the Designer's Accord.
She has worked as a design researcher at Emily Carr University with a focus on design and health care. She teaches design courses while also working on various projects in design, writing and photography. Most recently, this included a project in Rwanda where she is collaborating with a nutrition professor on the development of a food fortification system for rural communities.
Matt Brown is a designer from the Chemical City (Midland, MI) and works at IDEO in Boston. He studied Industrial Design at Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, MI and got his Masters in Interaction Design from the Umeå Institute of Design in Umeå, Sweden. He likes railroad tracks, talking about new ideas, and funny/awkward moments. He can't play the piano but collects synths anyway and has released a couple of records with his band Fracula.
His work deals a lot with fiction, humor, and people. A good example of this would be his piece on Dogpiling and Candles. You can see Matt's work on his website, and read more on his blog.
Don Norman claims his goals in life are to make a significant difference, but to have fun while doing so. He is both a businessperson (VP at Apple, Executive at HP and a startup) and an academic (Harvard, UC San Diego, Northwestern, KAIST). As co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group he serves on company boards and helps companies make products more enjoyable, understandable, and profitable. He is an IDEO Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He gives frequent keynotes and is known for his many books including "The Design of Everyday Things," "Emotional Design," and in October, "Living with Complexity," which argues against simplicity.
Venessa Miemis is a futurist, digital ethnographer, and modern day philosopher. Her superpowers include: pattern recognition, intuition, and the ability to distill complexity. She is currently pursuing a Masters in Media Studies at the New School in NYC. The focus of her graduate work is on facilitating trust-building, generative dialogue, and open collaboration in networked environments. Her blog, Emergent by Design, probes the potential impacts of social technologies on human behavior, thought processes, and the evolution of consciousness.
Ingrid Fetell is a designer, researcher, and writer whose work explores the emotional relationships between people and things. She writes the blog Aesthetics of Joy, and is working on a book of the same name, which draws on insights from neuroscience and psychology to suggest ways that design can lead the way to happier, healthier, and more sustainable lives. This allows her indulge her twin passions for delightfully designed objects and jargon-filled scientific studies. She also writes the Design and the Mind blog on the Psychology Today website.
Frank Bonomo can help you advertise with Core77. Send him an email or give him a call to shoot the shit. When he's not processing insertion orders he's performing live comedy on NYC stages.
Bill Moggridge is the director of the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, the only museum in the United States devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. Bill designed the first laptop computer, the Grid Compass, launched in 1982. He describes his career as having three phases, first as a designer with projects for clients in ten countries, second as a co-founder of IDEO where he developed design methods for interdisciplinary design teams, and third as a spokesperson for the value of design in everyday life, writing, presenting and teaching, supported by the historical depth and contemporary reach of the museum.
Ben is a Director of User Experience at Method in San Francisco. He has worked as a designer in teams both large and small, in-house and at consultancies, and from startups to corporate behemoths. His work has grown since its beginnings on the web to include projects that span mobile, brand, application, strategy, product, and service design. Prior to Method, Ben spent time at Adaptive Path, IDEO, Twitter, Samsung’s London-based design studio, pioneering service design and innovation consultancy live|work, and digital full service agency Oyster Partners (now LBi.)
Ben is also an educator, most recently teaching service design and advising MFA students at SVA in New York City.
Shai Akram met Andrew Haythornthwaite while studying at the Royal College of Art, the two now run their own design practice and are also members of the Okay Studio collective. Her projects cover creative direction and design for interiors, events, and furniture/product ranges. Shai’s work is a combination of practice and theory, translating research and ideology into objects and visual language. Her work has been exhibited internationally and projects have taken her to China, New Zealand and Italy- although Shai loves to travel, she secretly wishes she would stay in one place long enough to have a cat.
Tiffany Chu is a designer and blogger based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With a background in architecture and comparative media studies from MIT, Tiffany has a broad span of design experience including work for Pixar Animation Studios, h2o architectes in Paris, The New Orleans Office of Recovery, design/build in Cambodia, and field research on street vendors in Vietnam. By day, she currently works as an associate at the design and innovation consultancy, Continuum. By night, she dilly-dallies in internet culture, cartography, hot yoga, and dreams up design-entrepreneurial schemes.
LinYee Yuan is the Managing Editor of Core77. Hailing from the Lone Star State, LinYee is a Brooklyn-based dreamer and troublemaker with opinions about the things that matter most in life: food, cooking, and eating. She loves late night dinners, Oski the cat, and her Weber smokey mountain cooker.
Marina Garcia-Vasquez is New York-based writer and editor of lifestyle and culture content. Her current focus is on art, architecture, and design. She obsesses over typography, McCobb chairs, Italo Calvino, urban landscape, and poetry. She is the NY correspondent for the Australian Inside Magazine. Here for Core77, she will devote herself to emerging Mexican and Latin American designers. Aside from this reportage, she is fully vested in promoting Mexican culture in New York City through Mexnthecity.com. Follow her @MarinaGarciaVas and @Mexnthecity. Her blogs and website: www.mg-v.com, pairsofchairs.wordpress, mexnthecity.com
Manager: Design and Operations of Hand-Eye Supply Store and co-Curator of the Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club. Musical instrument collector and builder.
Ray is a Brooklyn-based writer, sometime artist and creative generalist. Aside from design, his interests include art, music, biking, urbanism, food, patterns, maps, coffee, shoes and em-dashes—seriously, he includes at least one in every post he writes.
Kenzan is the product of sculptors and bookkeepers. An upbringing telling of his approach to design: the hands-on formation of good ideas into solutions through considered assessment and judgement. Kenzan's experience as a lighting designer, small business owner, and good neighbor has provided him a means to explore and understand the multi-faceted world of design. Both a thinker and a do'er, Kenzan finds opportunity at every step of the process to create beautiful and effective design solutions, no matter the challenge.
Joann Plockova writes about design, ideas, solutions and various other topics of interest from her base in Prague. Her work has been featured in newspapers, magazines and online publications both in the Czech Republic and abroad. She is from the U.S. and previously worked as a copywriter.
Ilyssa Shapiro is a industrial design student at the University of the Arts and design intern for the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability in Philadelphia. Her work explores how design can intervene in our complex relationship with nature through engineering empathy into objects and the experiences they provoke.
Victoria Kirk is a senior digital strategist at Ogilvy, helping businesses create experiences that delight consumers. She has a Bachelor's (with honors) from New York University and holds a Masters of Industrial Design from the Pratt Institute. As a researcher, ethnographer, strategist and a designer, she has worked with organisations large and small to convert digital and cultural insights into tangible action. Her clients include large multi-nationals (Unilever, British Gas, Nestle) as well as educational and social enterprises (the Museum of Arts and Design, the Pratt Institute, Tilonia.com, the Barefoot College). A native New Yorker, she has lived and worked in India and is now based in London, where she is an active member of the sustainable design community, serves as board member and advisor to several social enterprises, produces documentary film and photography projects, and waits with cautious curiosity for the coming of the 2012 Olympics.
Dave Seliger is a junior at Dartmouth College studying Engineering and Studio Art. He is pursuing a career in emergency management. On campus, Dave is co-captain of the Dartmouth College Fencing Team. On Core77, he covers everything from police technology to DJing to urban geography.
While leading RKS as CEO, Ravi Sawhney has helped generate more than 150 patents and over 95 design awards on behalf of his diverse list of international clients. Sawhney invented the reliable Psycho-Aesthetics design methodology, co-authored the 2010 release of Predictable Magic (Wharton School Publishing), is a Fellow in the Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA), holds a Ph.D (Hon.) from the Academy of Art University San Francisco, and is the innovator and former jury Chair for IDSA’s Catalyst Case Study program. He is also a popular speaker and editorial contributor on the topics of design, innovation and management.
Recognizing excellence in all areas of design enterprise, the Core77 Design Awards celebrates the richness of the design profession and its practitioners.
Panthea Lee is co-founder and principal of Reboot, a service design firm working in the fields of governance and international development. At Reboot, she leads a multidisciplinary team of designers, researchers, development experts, and policy strategists to improve social outcomes globally, working for organizations such as the World Bank and the American Civil Liberties Union. Panthea has led projects in over 20 countries including Afghanistan, China, Sudan, and Tunisia. Before founding Reboot, she was with UNICEF Innovation.
Panthea speaks frequently on new approaches in international development, and has lectured at Columbia University, McGill University, NYU, the School of Visual Arts, and Pop!Tech’s social innovation program.
An Xiao Mina is an American designer strategist and researcher who recently worked on the Gwangju Design Biennale’s Un-Named Design exhibition. She focuses on the role of social media and communications technologies in building communities and empowering individuals. Find her on Twitter here.
Jan Chipchase is Executive Creative Director of Global Insights at frog, as well as an advisory board member for Makeshift Magazine. You can subscribe to his Facebook feed, follow him on @janchip.
Carly Ayres is an undergraduate student studying Industrial Design at the Rhode Island School of Design. When not in studio, she works as the elected President of RISD's Student Alliance or as a Research Assistant on the STEM to STEAM education initiative on campus. She writes on humanizing technology, congressional briefings, bike racks, and everything in between.
During the recent CicLAvia, cyclists stretch as far as the eye can see on 7th St. from MacArthur Park into Downtown. All images by the author.
Los Angeles is a city of cars. This we know. Public space is few and far between, taking the form of long streets like Melrose Ave or the Venice Beach Boardwalk. Public-private spaces like the Grove and the Third Street Promenade create the illusion of a walking city, but most people first have to drive to get there.
But Angelenos are yearning for public space, and recent interventions are pointing at a way to create that space. The most prominent, certainly, is CicLAvia, a biannual event that celebrated its fourth installation this month.
CicLAvia is inspired by the ciclovías of Latin America, a tradition started by Bogotá, Colombia, a traffic-heavy city which shuts down streets every Sunday. In Los Angeles, this means shutting down over 10 miles of streets, stretching west from Beverly and Vermont, through to MacArthur Park, Downtown and Boyle Heights, with a north-south trail from Olvera Street to Central and Olympic. The distance pales in comparison to Bogotá's 85 miles of street closures, but as any Angeleno would attest, 10 miles alone would have been impossible to imagine just a few years ago.
It was my first CicLAvia this year, and it was stunning. The city that I grew up in suddenly felt smaller, more free, disentangled from the traffic that makes it so infamous. I could feel the city air, see the smiles on my fellow cyclists, gaze up at the buildings and notice details I never had time for when driving by. Key areas created an open public space on the streets for cyclists and non-cyclists alike—in MacArthur Park, for example, you could sit down, listen to live music, eat tacos, and just people watch.
CicLAvia's success has been a thrill to witness, but its ambitions and scale are also difficult to reproduce. Costing about $100,000, mostly for street closures and the accompanying safety presence, CicLAvia represents the extraordinary collective effort of a 13-person board, whose talents range from social media strategy to arts organizing to civil engineering. A recent piece in LA Weekly described the original founders, "As if casting for some kind of prisoner-of-war escape film, the group's initial members each had the exact higher-order specialties you would need to produce an impossible-sounding seven-mile, open-air, closed-streets, public event in Los Angeles."
CicLAvia raises much of its funds through donations. In a quieter section on the northern trail, a sign asks cyclists to text in a donation to keep the project going.
Kids playing with their Clump-O-Lumps creations. All images courtesy Knock Knock.
Mix and match, design and customize. We can do it cars, with phones, with outfits. Why not with stuffed toys? Clump-O-Lumps, a new line toys out of gift and stationery company Knock Knock, features mix-and-match plush dolls designed for kids and kids at heart.
Start with, say, Tig-o the Tiger, a smiling tiger with an overbite, and then put Tig-o together with bucktoothed Bee-o the Bee. Zip off the head of Bee-o, and place it on Tig-o's head. Suddenly, Tig-o has the head of a bee, literally.
"While the animals each have their own unique identities," states Knock Knock in their release, "their insides are the same—red with a white circle running through the center that one could call Bone-o the Bone. Each child will have the ability to use his or her imagination to create new creatures by mixing and matching Clump-o-Lumps and making up original stories about them."
Design Max Knecht with his creations at the New York International Gift Fair.
The adorable designs are the brainchild of Max Knecht, an industrial designer and graduate of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Knock Knock's head, Jen Bilik, fell in love with Knecht's prototypes immediately upon seeing them, and they mixed and matched heart, brain and business sense to bring the products into the real world.
"To zip and match," suggests the release, "the intended age range is five to ten years old, though children younger than five love to hug their Clump-o-Lumps and take them apart." But the dolls are so irresistible that I suspect kids older than ten will be zipping and mixing and matching in no time (hint hint, anyone shopping early for a Christmas gift for me).
The designs, available in an interactive web site, will be implemented in a stretch of property in east London and span some 26 acres, with 1,200 homes and apartments for families and dwellers of different sizes and incomes, as well as office and commercial spaces and a school.
A view of Dane's Yard and the Northern Quarter, the planned creative zone.
Indeed, Strand East's recent press release [PDF] points to five types of quarters, from a creative one in the northeast to a commercial one in the north. At the south, "The Hub" will serve as the primary social space, with a public square, a community building and cafes and bars. The residential area will pay homage to London's urban character, with "mews" and back alleys for privacy, and townhouses for larger families. With an eye towards sustainability and community, some areas will be designated solely for walking, and clean energy strategies are promised.
VIllage Telco's Mesh Potato, which retails for $119 and provides both data and voice services via wifi to communities with limited internet and mobile phone access.
The statistics, by now, are familiar to those of us following technology in the developing world. A recent article in The Economist looks at Africa's booming economy, identifying mobile phones as one of the major drivers behind the continent's growth: "Mobile phones have penetrated deep into the bush. More than 600m Africans have one; perhaps 10% of those have access to mobile-internet services. The phones make boons like savings accounts and information on crop prices ever more available."
But as a continent of over a billion people, that means some 400 million—twice the population of Brazil—still do not have access to mobile communications. And even fewer have access to the Internet. Those who do have access to a phone spend more than half of their disposable income just to stay connected. At the same time, building a tower to cover many parts of Africa can be a challenge, both because of the costs of the tower and the lack of access to available radio bandwidth.
In comes Village Telco, an organization working on technology to leap past these challenges and offer a low cost communications option for Africans in rural areas. "It caught me by surprise," founder Steve Song told Core77, as he referred to the "incredible pace and change of mobile technology."
An early prototype of the Mesh Potato. Image courtesy the Shuttleworth Foundation on a Creative Commons License.
Recognizing the growing need for voice and data services for all citizens across the continent, Song, based in Cape Town, set out to find a solution to the challenges of accessible connectivity. He had been following wireless hacker movement who had discovered that Linksys routers were built on open-source software and that a wave guide antenna could be built using a soup can—"a cantenna," he told me—that would distribute a broadband signal several kilometers away.
Based on this technology, Village Telco developed the "Mesh Potato," a wi-fi router adapted to connect with other devices like it and distribute wi-fi over large areas at low cost. It's the same basic principle that allows an Apple Airport Express to extend a wi-fi signal around your home. When deployed in a place like Bo-kaap, South Africa, a community on a hill, four of these devices serve as a backbone network, while dozens more placed on individual rooftops extend the network.
The Keyano repurposes a keyboard into a musical instrument.
We buy them, we love them, we use them, and then we toss them. Our gadgets are ever present until they're not, and while it would be nice if we could just drop them into a black hole, our gadgets end up somewhere, and that's often in landfills around the world. Bigger gadgets like ecoATM help you take your smaller gadgets and earn money for recycling them.
But what about all that waste already out there? What can be done? That's the challenge taken up by designer and technologist Dhairya Dand, who came across a striking image while backpacking in Cambodia.
"I was around suburban Phnom Penh and came across enormous land fills stretching miles and miles," he told me in an email interview. "These were piled with eWaste dumped from the developed world. What was more appalling, was that kids who should be in school were working here in the landfills. Most families had migrated from villages leaving behind agriculture to these landfills for a rich pay of a dollar a day."
Dand launched ThinkerToys, an initiative to solve these dual problems--massive amounts of electronic waste in landfills in the developing world, and a lack of educational resources for children in those countries. Thinker Toys picks up basic electronic equipment, like keyboards, mice and speakers, none of which need to be modified or brought back to factories. For now, Dand has been using Arduino but he plans to develop low-cost chips, called openTOYS, that make the project more scalable and accessible.
Pebble is a fully customizable e-paper watch that interacts with your smartphone.
It's hard to remember, but there was once a time, at least according to Dick Tracy, when we thought we might be speaking into our watches to communicate with each other. That vision of the future seemed to be a distant memory when cell phones came along.
Pebble, an e-paper watch, might just get us talking into our watches again. Brought to us by the same folks who developed the Blackberry-ready inPulse watch, Pebble is a fully customizable interface that syncs up with an iPhone or Android phone via Bluetooth. The 144×168 pixel display may be small but the device can stream plenty of data, with features to rival its smartphone 'host organism.' The developers suggest apps for exercise, among other things, where the e-paper provides a lighter display that is easier to read in bright sunlight. The watch can even interact with your phone's caller ID or an mp3 player to control music over Bluetooth.
But the killer app is that anyone can make an app, and that's where the potential lies. Aside from what you can download from their watchapp store, you can create your own functions using if this then that or tap into the full SDK, using a familiar structure from Arduino and simple C. That means savvy developers can customize the four buttons, motor and accelerometer for any number of uses.
Buses are great. Buses offer a clean alternative to driving. And you never know when they're coming.
Many cities have acknowledged this problem and offer open APIs with real-time bus data. This is crucial, as any bus rider knows that buses rarely arrive on time, because, unlike subways, buses are dependent on traffic and delays caused by riders. But it's also a hindrance to taking the bus: who wants to wait at a lonely bus stop, which is subject to the elements and may not be safe? Not to mention boring.
Tapping into London's Countdown service, which displays live bus data, John Graham-Cumming created a simple bus monitor shaped, naturally, like an actual London bus. The bus uses a hacked Linksys wireless router that Graham-Cumming outfitted with a custom Linux setup. The LED then taps into data for the next two buses and adds two minutes for walk time to the actual station.
Complete instructions are available for hacking a Linksys wifi router to interface directly with live bus data and display it on an LED.
Graham-Cumming has made the project open-source, with complete instructions for setting it up, including how to take apart the bus model to fit the LED. If you live in a city with open transportation data, you could create a custom one, with or without the bus model.
I could see this device in a coffee shop or bar near a bus stop, thus encouraging riders to come in and patronize the store without worrying about missing their bus. It could even be customized for, say, a 5 minute walk, if the shop is a bit farther away. More adventurous hackers could create a multi-display unit for different bus lines too.
I've always thought of cooking and art-making as kindred spirits. Both rely on an intuitive grasp of materials and presentation. One nourishes the body and the other nourishes the mind, and we all have strong opinions about favorite dishes and art pieces. Cooking may be slightly more temporal, but then again, how long do we really stand in front of a painting?
They Draw and Cook is a lovely initiative by brother-sister duo Nate Padavick and Salli Swindell. On a family vacation together, Swindell was painting her brother cooking fig fettucine and realized how fun it was to draw food. This spark soon became a full-fledged web site and book, a collection of illustrations from designers and artists about their favorite recipes.
"The emotional connection to food is really intense. When people illustrate, they put their all in it," said Swindell in an interview with Core77. "When I look at a photo in a cookbook, and my dish doesn't come out just like it, I feel so defeated. With our site, you don't know what it's supposed to look like so you can enjoy the process and have more fun!"
At USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab, groups presented on their ideas for improving the city.
Los Angeles is a city without a center. A recent exhibition across the street from LACMA gave away donuts as a testament to this fact—concentric circles that are quite good, which literally have nothing in the middle. And yet, as the second largest city in the United States, with a record number of people moving in and out, it's certainly dynamic and lively, and anyone who lives hear knows it's a hub for creativity.
Recently, I've encountered a number of groups trying to create some kind of civic center to Los Angeles. One of the more compelling is the City Works Campaign, an effort, as they say on their site, to "improve cities and spur innovation by mobilizing creative people to find varied solutions for urban problems." Part of their platform is LA Here and Now, a solutions-based workshop in collaboration with USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab.
I had the pleasure of attending their workshop this past weekend, which aimed to gather the creative, civic set of Los Angeles in exploring five themes: improving city experiences, fostering local economies, volunteering and (re)connecting, re-skilling and education, healthy and happy cities, and creating greater access to city services.
Group discussions included a discussions session with post-its centered around what-if possibilities of an improved city.
This weekend's workshop, A Smart Cities Incubator, broke up into groups by geographical region, recognizing that Los Angeles is more of a patchwork of communities with distinct needs, rather than a single, urban entity whose challenges can be tackled with broad policy changes. In our groups, we discussed the five themes and proposed to focus on one, and in the course of a couple hours then narrowed down that theme into a more actionable issue.
Fonts are great. We look at and use them all the time, from the words on this blog post to the credit receipts we sign to the cookie boxes we buy. They are everywhere and essential, and the success of a film like Helvetica and quirky designs like these Star Wars posters have shown that they have a popular appeal beyond the usual design set.
This is why I was excited to come across PBS Arts's latest micro-documentary "Typography," which is part of their popular Off Book series on art. It's a quick, 7-minute intro to type that's already garnered over 100,000 views, perhaps confirming type's appeal.
"Typefaces are not toys. They're tools. They're designed to solve problems," says Jonathan Hoefler, half of the typeface design duo with Tobias Frere-Jones. It sounds like a stern admonishment, but it's true love behind his words. Hoefler and Frere-Jones created a number of custom typefaces that have seeped into daily life, from Starbucks to American Express.
One of the designs featured in the documentary shows how type can be used to illustrate complex topics like the academic achievement gap in the US. Image via hyperakt.com.
The film features a host of great fonts in situ with thoughts from type designers like Paula Scher, Julia Vakser, Deroy Peraza and Eddie Opara. Scher, who served on Core77's Design Awards jury last year, talks up her iconic design for Bring the Noise Bring the Funk: "It was type that talked to you," she explained. "It was type that rapped. It was type that tapped."
I particularly enjoyed Peraza and Vakser's insight into infographics. They discuss how their studio, Hyperakt, worked with GOOD magazine to create graphics illustrating complex topics like high school students' perceptions of college, all in crisp, clear language. And, as with other micro-documentaries in this series, the film ends with a series of definitions and technical terms, also in beautiful type. [Ed Note: You can learn more about Hyperakt in our In the Studio series here!]
Eddie Opara said it best when it comes to type, and it echoes similar sentiments I've heard from other type designers: "It's just something that should be enjoyed." This short documentary certainly brings that love for type to life.
Homeless Hotspots features profiles of some of the people carrying wi-fi signals, along with a suggested fee to be paid for the service. Screenshot from http://homelesshotspots.org
We love to be connected. Thanks to wireless 3G networks, it's easier than ever to check email and Twitter, talk on the phone, pay your bills, watch videos and post pictures from virtually anywhere and at any time. But it's not fast enough—wireless internet is still the fastest way to get online with a mobile smartphone or tablet.
Recently at SxSW, a project called Homeless Hotspots sparked a heated debate online. A great post at NPR linked to the flurry of media about the project, such as quotable quotes like Wired declaring it "like something out of a satirical science-fiction dystopia."
The project had more prosaic goals, which was to update the analog practice of street newspapers as a source of revenue for those without homes:
Our hope is to create a modern version of this successful model, offering homeless individuals an opportunity to sell a digital service instead of a material commodity. SxSW Interactive attendees can pay what they like to access 4G networks carried by our homeless collaborators. This service is intended to deliver on the demand for better transit connectivity during the conference.
I started thinking about Liam Young's Electronic Countermeasures project, which has been making the rounds on social media. Young's project reflected on the need for constant connection through a more robotic means. The video feels like a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But this time, our alien friends aren't delivering news from outer space: they're bringing us the Internet.
In his video description, Young expands on the sci-fi nature of his work, which reimagines quadcopters as a pirate network of wi-fi routers that quickly disperse and reconfigure throughout cities:
We have built a flock of GPS enabled quadcopter drones from components that were originally intended for aerial reconnaissance and police surveillance to create this flying pirate file sharing network. The drones are autonomous and drift above the public spaces of the city as a balletic interactive aerial choreography. Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm we have rebuilt and programmed the drones to broadcast their own local wi-fi network as a form of aerial Napster. They swarm into formation, broadcasting their pirate network, and then disperse, escaping detection, only to reform elsewhere.
It's a stunning image, these magic Golden Snitches that we desperately try to catch with our phones.
Little Big Details helps designers catalog the many UI details they encounter.
As designers, we all realize that the most intuitive user interface often requires the most work. But as users, we always appreciate a thoughtful UI touch that makes that smartphone or laptop that much easier to use. And some UI decisions, like the fact that you can tap the clock on the iPhone to scroll up to the top immediately, act like "Easter eggs" until one day you discover them by accident or someone tells you.
Which is why I was happy to stumble across Little Big Details, a blog that lists out those little UI details that, well, turn out to be much bigger when you stop to think about it. And that serves as good design fodder for your work.
It's easy to join and submit a detail, and judging by the number of via notes, Little Big Details has become quite an active community. It's a great Tumblr or Twitter account to follow, and maybe it will help you train your eye as well as you navigate all the varoius interfaces online. It certainly has for me.
Cats like moving objects, but only for a while. I once bought a radio-controlled mouse that zipped around the living room, and my cat couldn't help but follow it around and try pouncing on it. And then, eventually, she got tired, and she took a nap right next to it.
Brothers Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas certainly learned their lesson from much bigger cats—lions—which destroyed a remote control camera they dubbed the BeetleCam. And so they created the lion-proof BeetleCam, armed and prepared for the legendary king of beasts. Here's thetir recen report from Kenya's Masai Mara National Reserve:
The pride had four cubs and it wasn't long before they were all circling BeetleCam suspiciously. They grew bolder and more inquisitive by the second and soon they were approaching to within inches of buggy as they probed for weaknesses.
They intuitively recognised the front of BeetleCam and would try to circle around to attack it from behind. They also grew bolder whenever BeetleCam retreated, swiping at it with their oversized paws. We were just getting the hang of this new game when disaster struck; BeetleCam's front left wheel hadn't been tightened properly and it worked its way off! The cubs instantly seemed to recognise that the buggy was in distress and they closed in.
A male lion graciously helps test out the new BeetleCam...
The Vimeo iPad app features a beautiful full screen interface that allows you to view and browse for videos at the same time and even access your site stats. Screenshots by the author.
It's always been the designer's alternative to YouTube. With a cleaner interface and built-in communities, Vimeo may not have the powerhouse reach of YouTube but it hosts its own film festivals and offers a number of "Pro" features tailored for filmmakers, animators and design nerds. It's always pushed boundaries and trends in online video, with early adoption of HD and Creative Commons Licenses.
Which is why I was excited to learn about Vimeo's new iPad app, a much-needed release that builds off the strengths of its original iPhone app. Hot on the heels of the New Vimeo site redesign, the iPad version opens up in full screen glory, an extension of the already great site. The videos play in full screen and make for relaxing viewing on a couch. And if you hook it up with Apple TV (which I didn't get to test out), you can even watch them on the big screen in your living room.
As designer Joseph Schmitt in the company's blog post announcing the new app, "Mobile traffic to Vimeo has exploded (technically speaking, it's tripled) since we first launched our iPhone app in early 2011, so we've renewed our focus to provide the best possible experience for Vimeo users on the move." The new app is sure to drive even more traffic (and reduce eye strain!).
Each video features the standard "Like" and "Later" buttons, and you can login with your standard Vimeo account so it all syncs up. In this regard, the "Watch Later" feature makes a lot more sense--turning Vimeo into an Instapaper-like site for great video (though you still need to be connected to the web to view them). Below the video, you can get more information from the author, share it out with your friends (including an embed feature for Wordpress), and even determine the CC license for viewing. You can even scroll for other videos while watching the current one.
The editing feature is clean and easy to use, with color-coded layers and a bevy of options, including transitions, audio (with easy access to Vimeo's music store), and text.
The most intriguing element, and a vast improvement from the tiny iPhone interface, is the ability to shoot, edit and upload video. Taking advantage of the iPad's built-in video camera, you can quickly shoot clips and either automatically upload them or create a new project.
While China's art scene continues to make record sales, and big names like Ai Weiwei, Cai Guoqiang and Yue Mingfen are starting to roll easily off Westerners' tongues, Chinese design remains comparatively in the shadows. At best, it's regarded as a culturally-distinct (but not quite mature) creative discipline; at worst, it's a punchline about cheap knockoffs. Still, Chinese design is gaining traction: a couple weeks ago, the 2012 Pritzker Prize award went to Hanghzou-based architect and green design advocate Wang Shu, a major milestone towards introducing Chinese creativity to the outside world, beyond the usual art practices.
One of the primary obstacles is that Chinese design can often be difficult to locate. Take a stroll through the French Quarter in Shanghai, or the peek through some of the design studios in Beijing's hutongs, and you'll locate a few here and there. Aside from organized events like Beijing Design Week, it can be difficult to get a broader sense of trends in the Chinese design sphere. Indeed, a furniture designer friend of mine has a studio in a village on the outskirts of Beijing.
Which is why, when living in Beijing, I was thrilled to hear about Design China, a new web site and blog that actively tracks trends and issues in contemporary Chinese design. Spearheaded by Zara Arshad, a British designer currently based in Beijing, Design China aims to provide a rare, organized look at China's contemporary design scene.
Fashion designs by Dooling Jiang. All images courtesy Design China.
It's through this broad work experience that Ms. Arhad has witnessed Chinese design. While I've discussed these issues many times with her over drinks in Beijing, I finally had a chance to sit down with her (on Skype) recently to talk through them more formally.
Core77: Where did the idea for Design China come from?
Zara Arshad: I had been discussing something like this for a really long time. The first time was whilst I was working on the Organizing Committee for Xin: Icograda World Design Congress 2009. This was in the latter half of my first year in Beijing, and I was frustrated at not being able to access design information in one place. It was mostly through colleagues (who were heavily involved at Central Academy of Fine Arts) that would inform me about events and exhibitions. It was all mostly via word of mouth.
Core77: I definitely felt that when I first moved to Beijing in early 2011. The art scene was quite well organized, but it was still difficult to find unified information about design. What spurred you to actually make the site?
The impetus came last year when I was taking care of the Beijing Design Week international media group. We were discussing Chinese designers and the BJDW program at the time, and some of the journalists highlighted their interest in seeing work specifically from Chinese designers. However, much of our 2011 program was a mix of both international and Chinese design. The former was, perhaps, slightly more prominent.
During an informal chat with some of the international media group, one journalist commented, "I don't know if there are any good Chinese graphic designers." I just happened to mention a few of my friends that fit the slot, to which he replied: "You have all this information in your head. You need to put it somewhere so that we can go and find out all these things." Sitting in a room with people who were experts in their field, and who were telling me there was finally a demand for something like this, caused me to conceive Design China.
I'm surprised there are so few blogs dedicated to contemporary Chinese design. I have actually found a couple of design blogs since, such as CreativeHunt and EightSix. They are both good websites, but I feel that I just have different experiences and information to offer. For example, I'm not just reporting about individuals groups and projects but also about events and observations. I'm trying to really expand on the design debate and look at how design can facilitate positive change within the community and how that's happening in China.
The interior at Liang Dian Design Center, Beijing's first space dedicated solely to contemporary design.
iStockPack offers a clear preview format so users can see the finished product and the vector file.
I love stock databases. They're the best marriage of sharing culture with graphic design, and they're a great resource for designers, especially ones working freelance or in small teams.
The site, still new, could use a few more resources, like clearer restrictions on licensing and usage. The usage section does mention restrictions, but it would be useful to include familiar language from, say, Creative Commons Licenses. It would also be great to have more social media features, to make it easier to share the ideas and inspiration on sites like Pinterest and Tumblr and to build a community amongst contributors.
But either way, iStockPack is a great pool of resources, and as they mention on their site, they're looking for more user contributions. Some contributions, like the ones below, offer extensive directions and resources.
This set of intersecting cubes uploaded by user ikarusmedia comes with extensive directions on assembling the finished product.
In Korea, the Internet is everywhere. I had the privilege of living and working in Korea for a month this past summer and constantly found myself with opportunities to get online. The country is legendary for being the fastest, most wired in the world, but I didn't expect to find myself catching wifi signals in the midst of Buddhist monasteries and at the top of mountains.
But in Korea, business cards are all the rage as well. In business contexts, I received them almost immediately after shaking hands, whereas in more casual settings, I usually received them after dinner. It could have been just as easy to trade Facebook contact information, but the importance of the business card exchange is difficult to underestimate. All throughout Asia, I'd be met with looks of mild irritation if I forgot to bring my business cards with me.
In the US, I trade business cards much less frequently—in my circle, we just whip out our smartphones and follow each other on Twitter—but I still carry them around. And I start to wonder about how they can interface and remain relevant with a digital generation.
A creative approach to embedding a QR codes in a resume.
A simple question on the Core77 Discussion Board posed by dexigner20110 has sparked a flurry of discussion recently: "I'm in the process of designing our new business cards and would like to know if any of you put QR code on them?"
These days, there are more ways to keep time than ever before: our cell phones automatically update themselves through wireless networks; our computers keep sync with atomic clocks; even our cars, ovens and television sets keep track of and tell us the time.
Nevertheless, the watch endures as a classic icon of style, and it's thrilling to see how companies are trying to innovate on this very analog device in an increasingly digital world.
A recent post on Boingboing tipped me off to a fabulous new watch making the rounds online. With a steampunk-esque belt design, Devon's Tread watches rely on a system of belts, motors and pulleys to show the time. Like the NOOKA clocks I reviewed earlier, it diverges from the usual circle format, instead separating the minutes, hours and seconds into separate visualizations.
Part of the secret sauce in the watch's formula is how its powered. Most watches today rely on kinetic energy or a standard battery (and some aficionados still rely on wind-up). Devon's Tread runs on a their lithium polymer rechargeable cell that charges via wireless induction. According to the extensive manual (online as a PDF), you simply need place it in its futuristic display box and it begins charging.
They're a staple in New York City, Portland and much of California, turning up in urban centers across North America by the day (at least come summer time): colorful, designer food trucks hawking delicious street food from around the world, from Korean tacos to crispy falafel. Multiple trucks park outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Wilshire Boulevard, and near the startup hub of San Francisco's Mission Street.
Now, the designer food truck phenomenon has spread its wings to the busy streets of Manila, Philippines. Started by Michealle Lee and Natassha Chan, Guactruck opened business recently as the country's first designer food truck. It wasn't easy, they tell me.
"In the first month, most of our customers were foreigners," said Ms. Lee, who hatched the idea after a stint living in Los Angeles to study business. "The Pinoys [Filipinos] were intimidated, even with free samples."
In the spirit of LA's many fusion restaurants, Guactruck provides Mexican-style Filipino dishes. Taking a page from Chipotle's playbook, they offer a build-your-meal plan along a buffet-style assembly line, with everything from soft tacos to burrito bowls stuffed with you choice of delicious Filipino dishes like pork adobo, chicken tocino and garlic rice. The tasty, unexpected blend partly reflects Guactruck's roots in Southern California, which has a rich Filipino and Mexican community.
Guactruck's food is all sourced from local businesses, thus substantially reducing the company's carbon footprint in an island nation.
"It's hard to find Mexican ingredients," Ms. Chan noted. "We made sure the food is more Filipino, prepared in a Mexican style."
This practical business decision—to use authentic, accessible ingredients—dovetails with their abiding interest in sustainability. All of the food is locally sourced, which drastically reduces their footprint in an island nation where much of the food is shipped in from overseas.
Beyond cuisine, Ms. Lee and Ms. Chan aim to innovate with sustainable business initiatives. The truck, a retrofitted Mitsubishi L300, is almost entirely self-contained and comes with LED and energy-saving lighting. They paid meticulous attention to the interior design to ensure all available space was maximized; only a generator sits outside to help power the truck during hours of operation.
The interior is as thoughtfully-designed as the exterior
The round form of the clock is certainly one of the earliest forms of information visualization. Going back to the sundial and perhaps earlier, the form hasn't changed much over the millennia: show time as a circle, reflecting the revolving nature of the sun's rotation around the earth.
But there are certainly other ways to think about time, each with their own purpose. There's of course the classic sand timer, which visualizes time as a finite, one-way event; it's perfect for board games and timed scenarios. And there's the binary clock: its dots create an arrangement signaling to others that you're probably a programmer or math lover. My favorite are the Roman fasti, lists of events organized by time.
Enter NOOKA's new iPhone app, which features a host of alternative visualizations for time. The full-fledged app includes a number of face designs from their popular product line, with playful names like "zot," "zenh" and "zirc." Each takes a different approach to showing time, from boxes and dots to a circle that represents hours and a line that represents minutes. Useful for world travelers is a world clock that displays multiple time zones intuitively in a single way.
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During the recent CicLAvia, cyclists stretch as far as the eye can see on 7th St. from MacArthur Park into Downtown. All images by the author.
CicLAvia raises much of its funds through donations. In a quieter section on the northern trail, a sign asks cyclists to text in a donation to keep the project going.
Kids playing with their Clump-O-Lumps creations. All images courtesy Knock Knock.
Design Max Knecht with his creations at the New York International Gift Fair.
An overhead CGI rendering of Strand East situated in London. To the north is Olympic Park. All images courtesy LandProp.
A view of Dane's Yard and the Northern Quarter, the planned creative zone.
An early prototype of the Mesh Potato. Image courtesy the 
The Keyano repurposes a keyboard into a musical instrument.
Pebble is a fully customizable e-paper watch that interacts with your smartphone.
Complete instructions are available for hacking a Linksys wifi router to interface directly with live bus data and display it on an LED.
At USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab, groups presented on their ideas for improving the city.
Group discussions included a discussions session with post-its centered around what-if possibilities of an improved city. 
One of the designs featured in the documentary shows how type can be used to illustrate complex topics like the academic achievement gap in the US. Image via 
Homeless Hotspots features profiles of some of the people carrying wi-fi signals, along with a suggested fee to be paid for the service. Screenshot from 
Little Big Details helps designers catalog the many UI details they encounter.
All images via 
A male lion graciously helps test out the new BeetleCam...
...which fared better than this wildebeest
The Vimeo iPad app features a beautiful full screen interface that allows you to view and browse for videos at the same time and even access your site stats. Screenshots by the author.
The editing feature is clean and easy to use, with color-coded layers and a bevy of options, including transitions, audio (with easy access to Vimeo's music store), and text.
Fashion designs by Dooling Jiang. All images courtesy Design China.
The interior at Liang Dian Design Center, Beijing's first space dedicated solely to contemporary design.
iStockPack offers a clear preview format so users can see the finished product and the vector file.
This set of intersecting cubes uploaded by user ikarusmedia comes with extensive directions on assembling the finished product.
QR code business card by 
Guactruck is Manila's first designer food truck.
Guactruck's food is all sourced from local businesses, thus substantially reducing the company's carbon footprint in an island nation.
The interior is as thoughtfully-designed as the exterior
