Alexandre Farto's Inconstant Murals

Mural Painter Alexandre Farto (aka Vhils) paints murals and then scratches and carves into them to suggest inconstance and yet permanence.

Elegant Engineering

Dean Kamen's group at DEKA was presented with a problem by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). What impresses me is the attention the engineers give to the suble and supple aspects of their design and the ability to translate thoughts of motion, almost, to impulse or the macro functions of the arm. Kamen is well known for having designed the Segway and the iBOT Mobility System - a wheelchair robot that climbs stairs and morphs itself to overcome obstacles traditional wheelchair cannot overcome.

Why Twitter Works

Twitter and Blogger co-founder Evan Williams explains the social phenomenon of Twitter before the TED Conference.

Sixth Sense Brain Tool

MIT's Media Lab has always been on the forefront of designing new interfaces between human action and computers. A large part of their study has been motion and gesture as a command for using computers. Since its beginning, Media Lab has always had a bit of a Hollywood complex, relating many of its exploration to movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and other science-fiction fantasies.

V&A in South Kensington

As a graduate student of art & design in London at St. Martin's School of Art, following exhibitions and shows at the Victoria & Albert Museum was a requirement. A requirement without saying, meaning of course, you must know everything going on there without being told you must attend to its programs.

In recent years, the V&A as it became simply known, has become a friendly museum that caters to the taste and sensibilities of a paying audience. It wasn't always this way and had gone through a transformation to become a exhibition space appealing to popular tastes. V&A was never a high arts museum like the Tate or the National Gallery of Art. Within its walls exhibitions of design, clothing, industrial design, graphics and crafts were assembled.

However, in the early 80s when I was attending grad school, the museum was known for its extensive survey exhibitions of design and defining the trends in architecture, furniture, graphic and industrial design. It was at the V&A I first experienced the Memphis Group of Italian designers like Ettore Sottsas from Milano. I also saw annual exhibitions of industrial design of young British designers who went onto design groundbreaking commercial products like Macintosh computers, iPods, and iPhones.

As one V&A employee remarks in the video below, 20 and 25 years ago when I was living in London, the museum did not try to reach out to the public and instead required that you grasps its importance. That was true of many British libraries and museums in that time.

Sneakerhead Design Obsession

Design and the obsession for the object of desire shows up in all kinds of places and with all different types and classes of people. Recently, I heard about a family with an autistic son who is fascinated by the "bumpers" in films -- those graphical lead-ins that tag the movie with the Hollywood studio or indie production company identity.

This fall the magazine I work for won an Emmy for this story by my man Steve Marsh about a Sneakerhead Heaven in North Minneapolis, where those who see art in the design of street footware flock for the latest releases of rare editions of their desirable objects.

Football As It Should be Played

Pre-Game Coin Toss Makes Jacksonville Jaguars Realize Randomness Of Life

POV Placemaking

In Melbourne, Australia Axel Peemoller developed a way-finding-system for Eureka Tower Carpark while working for Emery Studio a placemaking, branding, communications, publishing and graphics firm. Peemoller's distorted letters on the wall can be read perfectly when standing at the right position or while driving out of the ramp to direct your exit. This graphic design project won several international design awards.

Jam Design

Design is about learning from the materials and tools given to you in nature and crafting them into something amazing.

Julie Taylor makes jam but, of course, to say that is an litote. She makes fruit butters, marms, fruit oils, syrups, conserves, candied peels, fruit glazes for poultry and fish, and there is almost no end to what her creation might become in the kitchen or elsewhere.

In this video a statement by Taylor stands out, "Artisans do the work."

Taylor handcrafting and dedicated approach to the science of fruit, flavor, and natures combinations of elements brings art and design to her creations. Ultimately, as she suggested in her response to a customer who didn't want to eat her jam because it is so beautiful, she knows the temporary and passing nature of creation, "It's just food so just eat it and have good memories."

Generational Shift

Alternative energy is the answer to John McCain's idiotic call for offshore drilling along California Coast and Florida. Can a person be any more blunt than that?

The problem is that at his stubborn age he cannot imagine a future without all the entrenched dependencies and harmful addiction's the Arizona Senator fought to maintain all his life. Oil rigs. Grid electricity powered by nuclear. Automobile built on the combustion engine. McCain is not going to give these things up without a fight.

So this is going to be McCain's line of attack on his opponent Barack Obama? Line the coasts with oil rigs and use taxpayer money to subsidize big oil exploration! That's not a solution to the problem that is a continuation of the problem.

Philippe Starck has designed a miniature rooftop windmill, or wind turbine if you will, that will provide 80% of your home's energy. And it costs about a thousand bucks. A home owner can mount it on his rooftop in roughly 15 minutes and he's producing rather than merely consuming electricity. It's kindalike pirating cable TV.

The Rain Water harvesting is another concept that will, more than likely, piss McCain off. In the northeast regions of Brazil, one of the largest rain water harvesting projects in existence with government using it to increase moisture levels for urban greenry and bring up the ground water table and while it might require treatment before drinking it can certainly be diverted for gray water purposes.

On a neighborhood or association level these systems could radically change our dependency on water and turn back the privatization of water into the hands of a few as documented in FLOW: FOR THE LOVE OF WATER which probably has McCain grumbling about Hollywood celebrities who think they can change the world.

Alright, so it really is going to take a whole new generation to bring about change. Might as well start now.

Blobwall

Blobwall, made from a lightweight honeycomb material developed by Panelite, is “a freestanding, indoor/outdoor wall system made of a low-density, recyclable, and impact-resistant polymer.”

Designed by Venice Beach, California architect Greg Lynn, the idea originated while playing with his children and he began wondering how he might recycle his children's outgrown plastic toys to build outdoor architectural and reusable structures.

The elemental unit of blogwall is an innovative redefinition of the brick into a lightweight interconnectable object made of colorful plastic and reinterpreted into modular elements. Lynn presented the Blobwall Pavilion in Miami in December 2007 as a freestanding, indoor/outdoor wall system built of the recycled polymer forms.

The blob unit, or “brick,” is a robotically cut, mass-produced, hollow tri-lobed shape formed through rotational molding in collaboration with Machineous. located in Los Angeles performs precision multi-axis cutting using robotic arm technology.

The Intimate Goes Public

Everyone start text messaging!

While the cell phone SMS message and "bluing" have become contemporary social networking phenom, there is something slightly tantalizing about bridging the intimacy of a two-way discourse and throwing it up onto twenty-foot thought bubbles in the heart of Paris or New York.

TXTual Healing is the concept of New York public artist Paul Notzold and deploys mobile phones and SMS to project private inner voices in massively public spaces with a degree of anonymity.

The way it works is that Notzold projects photo images from a hotdog vendor cart with a Mac laptop and digital projector on the side of buildings. Passerby's send SMS messages via their phone that Notzold, using proprietary software, places inside thought or dialog bubbles as you might see in a comic strip or a Roy Lichtenstein at the Whitney. All very automated and instant public messaging.

This concept takes very well to a city like Paris, where the private affairs dialog is often scandalously public proportion (witness newly elected President Nicolas Sarkozy and his highly public martial affairs) and concepts like bluing (text messaging strangers in bars or on the street using bluetooth capabilities) are normative.

Notzold projects dialog bubbles onto the side of a residential multi-story apartment building. As street pedestrians enter text into the dialog bubbles, it is as if we are witness to intimate conversations between apartment dwellers in the building.

Roughly translated from French: Woman: "...good luck with all the things which you trusted in this moment!"

French Man: "I just want to dance with you, just to feel the heat with you..."

In Austin Texas, Notzold projected a large decal-like image of an American Flag on the University of Texas campus building. UT Police shut down the performance after a couple of massagers wrote the ‘n’ word along with asian slurs from their cell phones. Notzold understood the police reaction, however, he commented, "...given today’s politics, seeing the ‘n’ word being said by the American flag is somewhat appropriate and telling."