Adult videos often get the short end of the stick in the graphic design department. Consequently, the covers of even classic porn movies are often as lurid as they are crude: at best, a garish phantasmagoria of boobs, snatch, and dongs that does nothing to illustrate what makes that film unique.
Lola, a Spanish advertising and design agency, in collaboration with the Tata&Friends design studio decided that some of the classic porn movies ranging from the 1970s to '90s needed a more elegant look. As a one-off, personal project, Lola redesigned the covers of 10 classic porn DVDs, and re-issued them as an elegant boxed set, called the No Shame collection.
The new covers are all very clean, but whether they're "classy" is up for debate. Thematically, they're all linked by their bold use of a single color, as well as a single object from the film that best summarizes the plot, usually covered in a suggestive white fluid.
In the case of Debbie Does Dallas, that's a football helmet; for The Devil in Miss Jones, it's a pair of Satan's horns; and for Deep Throat, it's a pair of lips with a diamond for a uvula. Other movies in the collection are Taboo, Mona: The Virgin Nymph, Behind The Green Door, House of Dreams, and more.
But it's too bad they didn't have this set when I was a teenager. Maybe then, my mother would have actually believed me when I told her that the stash of porn DVDs she'd accidentally stumbled upon were art films.
One of the coolest things about the old Lego from the '70s and '80s were the weird, wonderful computer bricks they shipped with. These fanciful blocks took their style from the analog computers of the era, and while they look strange and wild to modern eyes—kind of like some of the computers from 2001: A Space Odyssey—they actually weren't that far off from, say, the conceptual designs Hartmut Esslinger was doing for Apple at the time.
Love Hultèn, a Swedish artist whose work often focuses on marrying classic furniture designs with modern computers, has taken the computer consoles from classic Lego space sets and turned them into real, functioning computers for the first time ever.
Hultèn calls his collection the Brixsystem. It consists of eight modern computers, each sized up at a scale of six to one. They all work, and while some of the functionality of the original Lego bricks was obvious (for example, a telephone), Hultén had to use his imagination to flesh out the others. For example, my favorite is the recreation of Lego piece 3004PC0, which had indeterminate functionality as a toy but becomes a working retro game console in Hultén's vision. Tell me you don't wish the computers in your life were this cool.
"Like most people, I was raised on Lego," Hultèn tells me. Hultèn chose to work with some of the decorative accessory bricks from the Lego Space collection, first released from 1979 to 1987, which the artist remembered from growing up. "25 years later, and these bricks still trigger my imagination, just like when I was a kid."
A one-off collection of artistic recreations, you can see more of Love Hultèn's work on the Brixsystem here.
In the past 15 years, gas cans have been responsible for nearly a dozen deaths and 1,200 injuries. A small spark or flame shoots up the nozzle, and boom. Game over. The latest concept from Somerville, Massachusetts-based product design and consulting agency, the Gas Cube, aims to evolve the gas can into something prettier, more functional, and a lot less dangerous.
The common gas can hasn't changed much since the 1930s. Developed in Germany for military use, then adapted into the familiar red plastic container that we all know today, the only real design changes have been in response to government regulations: for example, to make the caps on all gas cans child-proof as part of the Children's Gasoline Burn Prevention Act in 2008. But that's not to say that the design is timeless. In fact, it desperately needs an update, argues Altitude's Alex Tee.
In Tee's Gas Cube concept, the chances of the container exploding are dramatically decreased by the addition of a flame arrestor in the nozzle. This small piece of mesh screen filters out flames and sparks like the mesh in front of a fireplace. Flame arrestors are not unheard of in gas cans; many already come with them.
In addition to a flame arrestor, the cap of Tee's Gas Cube has a seal that is replaced every year to maintain the Cube's air tightness, preventing dangerous hydrocarbons from leaking out. This seal also says how old the gas inside is—older gas is less efficient than new gas, and can be bad for your engines—and what type it is, so you don't put diesel in, say, your car by mistake.
Like other concepts Altitude has released (for example, this robot bottle caps for home mixologists), the Gas Cube concept is meant to spark a conversation about how design can fix products that we don't even really think of as being broken. There's no reason the Gas Cube couldn't become a reality. Tee estimates that the Gas Cube's design changes would only cost a few dollars more than current gas can designs.
E=MC^2. It's not just a fascinating equation, it was written in a fascinating hand. The handwriting of Albert Einstein, the legendary German theoretical physicist, was unique: a wondrous calligraphy that borrowed elements from both the Latin and Kurrent, an old form of German handwriting based on late medieval cursive. Now, thanks to German typographer Harald Geisler, Einstein's handwriting is becoming a font.
But before he'd started work on his Siggy font, Geisler toyed around with digitizing Einstein's handwriting. It wasn't until he met Elizabeth Waterhouse, however, that he thought about making it into a font. A graduate from Harvard with a degree in astrophysics turned dance theorist, Waterhouse had a connection to the physics world which allowed her to attain rights for a font from the Einstein estate.
Like his Sigmund font, Geisler started his digitization efforts by combing through samples of Einstein's handwriting, and identified four versions of each character, both uppercase and lowercase, which could be considered typical samples. Simultaneously, Geisler tried to get a sense for the rhythm of Einstein's hand: how the discoverer of general relativity linked an 'a' to a 'b', or a 'b' to a 'c', making notes of the kinds of slopes and distances Einstein used. From there, Geisler meticulously copied every sample letter into a grid, and started tweaking it to make sure that it worked as a typeface.
It's a very labor intensive process, one that Geisler says required him to turn off his aesthetic instinct, especially when it came to designing individual characters. "I had to trust my process. When drawing the letters, I'd often be taken back by a letter that looked really odd or ugly by itself," Geisler tells me. "Only when it was combined with other letters did its place in the whole make sense."
Now that he's almost done after a couple years work, Geisler is currently taking pre-orders for the finished Albert Einstein font on Kickstarter. Backers who donate at least $25 will receive a digital copy of the font in June 2015, coinciding with the centennial of the General Theory of Relativity.
"Albert Einstein's handwriting was totally unique," Geisler tells me by email. "His rhythm is continuous, while his letters are both very disciplined and extremely playful, especially with his initials, A and E. His line spacing is also extremely accurate, as if he used a ruled paper under his writing paper to keep it in order. He was a thinker outside of mainstream physics, and this was also reflected in his style of writing."
When George Orwell wrote 1984, surveillance technology was strictly analog. What would 1984 look like if it was written in the world of the Internet of things?
That's the question posed by the Nemesis Machine, a new interactive exhibition by British artist Stanza. Currently on display in Bruges, the Nemesis Machine translates environmental data from sensors placed around London into a dystopian Circuit City.
"I think it's pretty obvious that we live in a surveillance culture, if not a surveillance state," Stanza tells me by phone. Sensors surround us, tracking everything from our location to our heart rate. Stanza says that he is troubled by how few people seem to be bothered by this. The Nemesis City, he says, is meant to raise questions about what mark the "infobesity" of our connected age will lead us in 50 years.
In appearance, the Nemesis Machine is like Big Brother parsed through the lens of the Internet of things. It gives visitors a bird's eye view of a cybernetic cityscape, where skyscrapers are constructed of silicon and circuit boards. Each one of these buildings is wirelessly connected to sensors placed around London, measuring data such as temperature, humidity, motion, and so on. When those sensors record data past certain tolerances, they cause their associated tower in Bruges to light up, beep, click, or move, often in strange, insect-like ways.
"What I'm trying to do here, first and foremost, is confront people with a wild spectacle, to make them engage with the ideas of the piece on an emotional level," Stanza says. There's supposed to be something alien and unsettling about the Nemesis Machine, paddle-shocking those who experience it into truly reflecting how much data about themselves they are giving up every day. "I want people to ask themselves: 50 years from now, what are the executives at Google really trying to build?"
The Nemesis Machine is on display as part of the Intelligent City exhibition at the Arentshuis Bruges Museum until May 10. You can read more information about it here.
Monotype, one of the world's largest type foundries, is used to churning out new fonts. Most of them take weeks, months, and even years to develop, but over the course of the past week, Monotype has been trying something different. As part of the company's very first font marathon, Monotype tasked two of its most talented young type designers with designing two entirely new fonts in less than a week, from initial concept to sale on Monotype's web store.
The idea for a font marathon came from Nadine Chahine, the typeface designer behind Monotype's recent Zapfino Arabic font (and a member of Fast Company's Most Creative People list). Over the winter, Chahine decided to shut herself off from friends and spent the weekend trying to design an entirely new typeface. "One thing I liked about it was that when you're rushed for time, you tend to embrace very intuitive solutions," Chahine tells me. "It pulls a design out of you that you normally might not have done."
Inspired by Chahine's experiment, Monotype allowed two of its rising stars, Toshi Omagari and Jim Ford, to explore typefaces they otherwise wouldn't necessarily have had the time to design. Omagari and Ford each spent five days locked in a room in Monotype's New York offices, working, eating, and sometimes even sleeping there. To make their deadlines, the two designers sometimes had to stay until 3 a.m.; Ford was so cramped for time that he even had to work on his typeface in the back of taxis to and from the office.
Cowhand 1
Two fonts emerged from the inaugural marathon. One is Cowhand, a font designed by Toshi Omagari. Omagari calls his font monowidth: no matter how many letters are in a word, his font will render the word exactly the same width, up to 20 letters long. That means in Cowhand, the word "the" renders just as long as "electroencephalogram."
To make words readable no matter how many letters they have, Omagari had to design a font with very thick serifs, and very thin stems. (What's more, he had to design 20 different variations of each letter.) Consequently, the font is almost Western in style: It would look good in an old Clint Eastwood movie. Omagari also envisions it being used on posters, menus, movie title screens, and more.
Esca 1
Jim Ford's typeface, Esca, is almost the exact opposite of Omagari's. For Esca, Ford wanted to design a typeface that was as condensed as possible, a veritable whisper of a font. What's more, Ford, who has a background in hand-lettering, didn't want his typeface to look artificial: He wanted it to have an almost calligraphic touch.
"Esca evolved out of calligraphy and brush practice," Ford tells me. "I made a mood board, and sort of blended a few different things to create it. It was challenging. In a typeface like this, the letter forms want to be very simple, so I had to work hard to maintain the calligraphic and brush characteristics in this ultra-condensed space." The result is a typeface that looks tall, almost like an elegant fence. Ford sees Esca as being perfect for album covers. The next Passion Pit album, perhaps?
Cowhand
Both Esca and Cowhand are limited typefaces. They don't support the full range of characters, italics, bolds, and all the other little niceties that make for a fully developed character set. They'll work well if you need a font for posters, covers, menus, and so on, but they might fail you if you try to do more than that with them. The designers will probably update them and tweak them, but there's no timeline for that yet.
Both Cowhand and Esca are available to purchase now through Monotype's web store. Proceeds are going to Room to Read, a nonprofit organization for improving literacy and gender equality in education in the developing world. As for future font marathons? Monotype says you can consider them done.
Yesterday, Yahoo pushed out the biggest update to Flickr, maybe ever. An update two years in the making, Flickr 4.0 is a total redesign on every platform that uses magical backend algorithms and a slick UI to make it easy to upload, access, search, or share any photo you've ever taken, no matter what the device. It's the type of update that screams: "Flickr's identity crisis is over. It's time to take Flickr seriously again."
First things first: the new Flickr really wants you to backup all of your photos on the service. Flickr will store up to 1 terabyte of photos online for free, so most people won't run out of space. On desktop, the new Flickr Uploadr app will silently scan your hard drive, and automatically upload any photos it finds to the web; meanwhile, the Flickr app for smartphone and tablet will keep your Camera Roll automatically backed up to the cloud. And don't worry about your dick pics leaking out unknowingly: everything's set to private by default.
Once your photos are uploaded to Flickr, though, is when the magic happens. Let's say you want to find a picture of a bird you took a few years ago. To find it, all you have to do is search for "bird," and Flickr will automagically identify all the pictures of birds you ever took. But what's really amazing is you can further drill down from there. For example, if you're looking for an artsy black-and-white picture of a bird you took with a shallow depth of field, you can do that, all from Flickr's new search menu.
The thing that makes all this possible is a visual machine learning algorithm that automatically looks at every picture when you upload it and tries to identify its contents. Flickr can detect photos of nature, people, animals, and more. There's even a Magic View that sits in your Flickr camera roll, allowing you to sort images by date, content (things like whether your photos contain people, animals, nature, landscapes, and so on) or even style (are they bright, or abstract, or full of patterns).
You can sort of liken the new Flickr to Gmail when it came out. Before, Flickr wanted you to do all the heavy lifting to keep images organized. Now, they've built the tools-in that manually organizing your photos are optional. Powerful search can pretty much do everything else.
In addition to just making it easier to find the photos you're looking for, another major change in Flickr 4.0 is a totally overhauled photo manager, which makes it easy to select, tag, move, folder, delete, download, and share multiple images. "We really wanted to focus on the pain points of photography for this redesign," Shaun Forouzandeh, director of user experience design at Flickr, tells me. "We wanted to make the in-between steps easy and fun."
The redesign does much to restore focus and sense of purpose to a great web product that has increasingly felt directionless. Just last year, Flickr redesigned its smartphone and tablet apps to work a lot more like Instagram: when you opened up the app, it took you right to a feed of your friends' images. Version 4.0 takes a big step back from that, for the better: although you can still easily access your friends' photostream, Flickr 4.0 takes you directly to your camera roll when you load up the app.
It's a seemingly small change, but it's actually profound. Flickr 4.0 is Flickr's way of saying, hey, we know you're going to share your images on all sorts of different services, and we're okay with that. We're just hear to make that easier. No matter what device you took a picture on, how many photos you have, or how long ago you took it, we're here to make it easy for you to do whatever you want with that: for example, share it uncropped on Instagram, send it in an iMessage, or put it in a Dropbox-style folder that anyone with the link can see. Trust us to hold on for your photos for you, and we'll do the rest.
You can learn a lot from shit. That, at least, is the hope of Italy's newly opened Museo della Merda, or in English, the Museum of Shit.
Located in the northern Italian town of Castelbosco, the Museum of Shit resides on a dairy farm, which is still in use. In addition to squirting out milk, the cattle pump out an extraordinary amount of excrement: over 220,000 pounds every day.
With such a bounty of feces at his disposal, farm owner Ginantonio Locatelli decided to put it to good use. Along with his partners, he opened the museum to educate the public about the history of crap.
As such, the Museum of Shit, which is located on the ground floor of a medieval castle, will host a series of installations dedicated to "the ability to transmute natural substances" in the hopes of re-establishing a "healthier relationship" between man and manure.
Fantasy novelists like Game of Thrones scribe George R.R. Martin spend thousands of pages building intricately detailed worlds, but geographically, these worlds can be hard to understand. Making matters worse is the fact that most fantasy maps look like they were scrawled on the back of a napkin at a ren faire: atmospheric, perhaps, but hard to translate into real-world terms. If only you could just Google Map it.
Here's the next best thing. Reddit user selvag has made a modern, Google Maps-inspired version of the land of Westeros where the Game of Thrones novels (and, by extension, the hit HBO TV series) takes place. And it's amazing how just doing something as simple as translating the fantasy map into a modern day cartographic style makes more sense of it.
One of the problems with Game of Thrones is that it often seems like it takes characters only as long as the plot requires to get from point A to point B. Characters like Arya Stark might take months to get from King's Landing to Harranhall, while another character, like Tywin Lannister, only takes a few days. Having the world of Westeros detailed as a Google Map makes it clearer that the issue is whether or not you take the main roads, or if you go off-the-beaten track. Or, in more GMaps-centric terms, do you let Google take you the most efficient route, or the scenic route?
Forget Silicon Valley and New York. If you care about technology and design, look across the pond to London, says New York's Museum of Modern Art. The MoMA Store is releasing the London Tech City design collection, 17 innovative British-born products that push the needle in music, making, and transportation.
London has a vibrant startup scene. In 2013, studies showed that as much as 49% of all new businesses in the UK were started with less than $3,000. More than 90,000 new business launched in the first six months of 2013 alone, many of them in London.We asked Emanuel Plat, who curated the collection for the MoMA Store, what makes London so special when it comes to innovative tech products.
Cheap Rent Fuels Great Ideas
Since 2013, MoMA's curators have been paying close attention to what they see as a renaissance of smart, innovative design coming out of the British capitol: for example, the Ototo music kit, which lets you make music from anything, and the DIY Gamer Kit, which lets kids create their own video games. (Both were recently added to MoMA's permanent collection.) Almost all of the designers in the London Tech City collection come from the East London borough of Hackney. "Startups move there for the same reason they move to Williamsburg: rents are comparatively cheap," Plat says.
A Collaborative Spirit
But Hackney's tech scene has a very different character from that of Williamsburg or Silicon Valley. Plat says it's more supportive, with little in-fighting or overt competition between startups. It's also close-knit. The startup community meets up once a monty to exchange ideas, talk about what they're doing, and keep in touch; Plat says that most of the items in the London Tech City collection were acquired after meeting upcoming designers during such a meeting in a disused Hackney warehouse. Part of the reason London is able to foster a supportive startup community is because many of these designers went to school together. Plat says an astonishing number of the designers in the London Tech City collection graduated from the Royal College of Art.
Making and Music
The London Tech City collection is marked by three obsessions that, according to Plat, seem common among many of the designers MoMA has met over the last two years.
The first is making, represented by products like Sugru (a moldable glue that can be used to do everything from clean your appliances to fix your gadgets), Bare Conductive's Electric Paint (which lets you electrically connect circuit boards and transistors as if you were writing with a magic marker), and the Kano computer kit (which aims to teach kids and adults alike how to build a computer and code).
The most idiosyncratic obsession of London's design community is bike safety. "Despite the fact that London is a dangerous city to bike in, there's a really strong culture of biking there," Plat says. Over 580,000 trips are made on bicycle in London every day. To ensure cyclists can safely get from Point A to Point B, London Tech City designers have developed everything from glow-in-the-dark, wash-off paint to the Visijax Commuter Jacket, a highly visible biking jacket with built-in turn signals.
"There's a combination of factors at play that make London one of the most interesting design centers of the world right now," Plat says. "We're really glad to be able to bring that story of innovation to New York."
Seventeen products are available in the London Tech City collection. Read more about them in the slide show above, and to purchase them, visit the MoMA Store online.
Right now, the smartphone is the universal remote to the Internet of things. Whether you're flicking on your Philips Hue smartlights, queuing up a Spotify playlist on your stereo, or setting the temperature on your Nest, it's all done on an app running in the iPhone in your pocket.
But what if controlling all of the smart devices in your life was as easy and analog as turning a knob? That's the idea behind Nuimo, a capacitive smart dial by German startup Senic.
With aesthetics that come directly out of the Dieter Rams/Jony Ive school of thought, the battery powered knob can connect to your computer or smartphone over Bluetooth, and thanks to a capacitive trackpad built into the face of the Nuimo, you can control any of these gadgets or services fully, without ever loading up an app. Just swipe, pinch, and tap the knob to adjust settings, whether that's to brighten the color of your smart light bulbs, or pause the movie you're playing on Netflix.
Initially, the Nuimo should sync up with 30 different apps (Spotify, Netflix, Soundcloud, YouTube, etc.) and devices (Sonos, Withings, Nest, Philips Hue, and so on), but that's just to start: an open API makes adding more devices and apps possible over time.
According to Tobias Eichenwald, who created the Nuimo along with engineer Philip Michaelides and industrial designer Felix Christmann, the biggest problem with controlling these devices with a smartphone is that there are too many steps. Take something like a Philips Hue smart lightbulb: to take full advantage of its abilities, you need to unlock your phone, open an app, and navigate through menus. That's not how we want to interact with physical objects, like a lamp, says Eichenwald. We also want to interact with it physically. And that's true for most of the connected devices in our house, too, whether it's adjusting the thermostat, listening to some music, opening a smart lock, or even watching something on the television.
Even better? Nuimo doesn't just pair with one app or gadget: you can connect it to as many smart devices and services as you have, and then easily scroll through them on the knob. As you switch between functions, a subtle, integrated LED display will light up the face of the Nuimo, showing you what it's currently controlling.
The Nuimo has other benefits over a smartphone as a universal remote, too. For one thing, says Eichenwald, a smartphone is usually joined to the hip of another person, who doesn't want other people fiddling with it. That's fine when they're checking their email, but more than one person should be able to control what's playing on the stereo, what the thermostat's temperature is, or a room's lighting at once. The Nuimo allows anyone to control the apps and devices in today's smart homes, even if they don't have a smartphone or know the house's Wi-Fi password. And because it's magnetic and battery-powered, you can put it pretty much anywhere.
Eichenwald tells me that the time for something like the Nuimo is going to become rapidly apparent in the coming years, as the Internet of things pervades every aspect of our household lives. "We want to seamless to interact with our homes, our music, our lights, and our locks," he tells me. "Nuimo fills a gap that gives you seamless and simple control over all the things you love in a natural way."
Nuimo is currently accepting preorders on Kickstarter, starting at around $110. Delivery is expected in October. You can fund the campaign here.
Located just north of Copenhagen, the Gammel Hellerup High School has one of the coolest campuses in the world. It's all thanks to the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), the architecture firm that last year helped the school construct an underground gym, the roof of which doubled as an undulating outdoor student hangout. We loved it so much we made the Multi-Purpose Hall a finalist for our 2014 Innovation By Design Awards.
But that was just Phase I. Today, BIG announced that it has completed its work at Hellerup High School with a couple of new additions: a new arts building, which connects to the gymnasium in a continuous flow of wood paneling, concrete, and light. The arts building contains classrooms and a cafeteria, and like the multi-purpose hall, it has a roof that does double duty as a student hangout. The roof extends the school's existing football field into a green carpeted hill that students can lounge upon, socializing with each other or watching a game.
To execute the new arts building, BIG reversed the materials it used in the multi-purpose hall; whereas the hall was made of concrete with wooden finishes, the classrooms have wooden walls that span the length of the building, and they're complemented by concrete ceilings and floors. The continuity and repetition of materials creates a coherent visual identity for the school. The finished building is 15,000 square feet, and as the video above proves, the curves of the walls are so natural and organic, you can do parkour off them.
BIG didn't work on the Gammel Hellerup High School expansion randomly: Founder Bjarke Ingels actually used to go to school there. None of us can go back to our high school days, but with this expansion, it seems Ingels has done the next best thing.
The offices of Seattle-based design consultancy Artefact is located near a corner on Second Avenue where two white bicycles are perpetually chained. The white bicycles each denote a death: on this corner, two cyclists have been struck and killed by a car in the last few years. A cyclist himself, Artefact designer Tucker Spofford bikes past this corner every day, and wonders how better design can prevent needless deaths like this. Which is why he created the BrakePack, a cycling backpack with integrated turn signals and brake lights.
As envisioned by Spofford and fellow Artefact designers Nick Alto, Sam Baker, and Benoit Collette, the BrakePack aims to make cyclists more visible and understandable to drivers. A dumb backpack when it isn't in use, the BrakePack automatically powers on when you buckle the chest strap, and thanks to a series of integrated LEDs becomes a way for cyclists to not only make themselves more easily seen on the road, but to signal their intentions.
According to Spofford, the biggest threat to bicyclist safety is the fact that car drivers just don't really understand what their intentions are. Are they turning? Are they braking? Sure, many cyclists use hand signals, but "the truth is that while hand signals are a vernacular everyone is supposed to understand, many drivers don't," argues Spofford. A bike doesn't act like a car, which is enough to confuse a lot of drivers ... and that confusion often turns fatal.
BrakePack isn't the first LED-equipped cyclist backpack we've seen, but it is the best thought out. Though it's currently just a proof-of-concept prototype, you wouldn't need to attach anything to your bike, and wouldn't need a smartphone for the BrakePack to work: an accelerometer built into the backpack can automatically detect when a cyclist brakes, while switches in the BrakePack's straps can be tapped to signal which direction a cyclist wants to turn. But if you do choose to pair the BrakePack to your smartphone, the backpack can not only signal your turns automatically (provided you've plotted your route on the accompanying BrakePack app), but it can even give you directions by flashing lights in the periphery of your vision, showing which way to turn.
Asked why a backpack is a better form factor for bike signals than a jacket or smart handlebars, Spofford argues that a backpack is self-contained. With the BrakePack, there's no need to install anything, it's easy to put on, and the backpack form factor allows the device to carry a bigger battery, which can go a week or longer without being recharged. "A backpack makes the most sense," he says. "It just fits in with the urban commuter persona, because it's an accessory most cyclists have with them anyway."
Having been successfully incubated from concept to finished design, Artefact is now talking to potential partners for a way to bring the BrakePack to the world. Whether the BrakePack becomes a Kickstarter or takes some other path to product, Spofford's not sure, but the one thing he does know is he wants to get the BrakePack out there. There's too many white bicycles on the street corners of Seattle as is.
San Francisco's housing crisis is legendary. The median housing price in San Francisco is now $1.1 million, more than the California and U.S. median by $700,000 and $900,000, respectively. The average rent in San Francisco is $3,586 a month. The bottom line is that middle class people can no longer afford to live in San Francisco.
Writer Steve Dombek does not have an urban planning background, but he does think he has a solution that could address both San Francisco's housing crisis and improve the city's quality of life. On his site, Narrow Streets SF, Dombek advocates for a more human-centric approach to urban planning by making streets just 15 feet wide, and designating them as pedestrian paths, first and foremost. Then slap more housing in the space you used to dedicate to roads.
"Narrower streets are just better streets," Dombek tells me, pointing to places like Ciutat Vella in Barcelona, the Seijo district of Tokyo, and many other international cities as models. For one thing, they're more walkable, and they're safer, because cars can't travel as quickly down them. They also encourage cleaner methods of commuting, like biking, and leave room for parks and green space.
They could also, potentially, make way for more housing. In Dombek's vision, instead of devoting as much as 40 feet down the middle of the street for parking and roads, which many roads in San Francisco do, you could shrink that down to 15 feet. Take San Francisco's McAllister Street, which runs from dowtown all the way up to Golden Gate Park. You could replace the road with an entire row of buildings, both housing and businesses, Dombek says. Cars and trucks could still use the roads, but they'd have to do so sparingly, otherwise dedicating themselves to the larger thoroughfares surrounding the street.
Dombek became fascinated with the idea of narrower streets in San Francisco after his wife, who was eight months pregnant at the time, was almost hit by a car three times in two weeks at a crosswalk near Alamo Square Park in the Western Addition. Why dedicate so much space to something that makes cities more dangerous to live in, especially when San Francisco's authorities are already looking for ways to redesign San Francisco's most deadly intersections to curb a surge in pedestrian deaths?
Dombek doesn't have any hard stats to prove that narrower streets will help solve San Francisco's housing crisis—after all, much of the city's housing shortages stem from restrictive zoning laws and a deeply entrenched culture of NIMBYism, a toxic mix no European-style road could remedy. And one could argue that narrower streets would lead to more traffic—especially if the goal is to squeeze in more people per square mile. Dombek point outs that his idea would have to work in tandem with other solutions: regulations on the types of vehicles allowed in certain areas, better public transportation, better cycling infrastructure, and improved zoning laws. It might well be a pie-in-the-sky idea, but clearly, San Francisco has to do something. The city is investigating turning 18 acres around Balboa Reservoir into more housing. Dombek sees that as an opportunity to try going narrower, building streets with more housing, more parks, and fewer cars than the San Francisco average. "Then, if people like it, you have something to point to," Dombek says. "And then, decades later, maybe there's more of an appetite to retrofit the rest of the city. It's worth a try."
You can read more about Dombek's vision for San Francisco here.
In old Warner Bros. cartoons, one common gag is a single can of paint that contains an elaborate pattern, like plaid, which can be applied to a surface with a single brush stroke. The reason it's funny is because it's totally physics defying.
The closest thing we've had to this up until now is a technology called hydrographic printing, which would apply a patterened film layer to an object when you dunked it in a pool of water. But the problem, though, was that it wasn't precise. How a piece of plastic film stretched across an object when it was dunked yielded inconsistent results. Until now, that is.
Thanks to a jaw-dropping new breakthrough in hydrographic printing, researchers have figured out how to precisely paint multi-colored patterns on an object just by dipping it into a pool of water.
A team comprised of researchers from Hangzhou's Zheijiang University and NYC's Columbia University to figure out a solution to the problem, which they call computational hydrographic printing. Essentially, what they do is 3-D scan whatever object they want to print on before they dunk it. Algorithms then take whatever pattern you want to paint on it, and print it on the layer of transparent film in such a way that, when lowered into the water bath by a robotic arm, the pattern will be applied perfectly, every time.
According to the researchers, this technique could be used to easily paint 3-D printed objects, or even more traditionally manufactured items, like a mug. And by dunking an object multiple times, you could even apply three-dimensional paint patterns to an object, making it look painted by hand.
Since this is still in the research stage, there's no telling when, or if, this technology will truly change how we paint 3-D objects. But one thing's for sure: watching a plastic tiger dipped into a swirling pool of green eyes, whiskers, and stripes, then rise up, fully painted, is how we wish all our toys were painted growing up.
Move over, High Line: Rotterdam-based design firm MVRDV has developed a winning concept for a skygarden in Seoul that might just become the new gold standard for public parks that repurpose old infrastructure.
The Seoul Station Overpass is a 3,000-foot elevated highway running through the South Korean capital. Originally build in the 1970s over Seoul's largest train station to connect the Namdaemun Market to parks in the west, the Seoul Station Overpass was declared unsafe for vehicles in 2006. MVRDV's plan for the Seoul Station Overpass turns it into some sort of fantasy garden out of Rivendell.
It's hardly the first idea for a public park that reuses old infrastructure. Ever since the opening of New York's magnetic elevated High Line, we've seen no end of copycats: an elevated park for Washington D.C., Thomas Heatherwick's idea for a floating park in New York, and Chicago's El Line, to name just a few.
MVRDV's idea is unique for repurposing car infrastructure—the bane of vibrant city living everywhere—into a sort of "living dictionary of the national heritage of Korea," to quote to MVRDV's press statement. In cooperation with Dutch design studio Studio Makkink & Bey and landscape designer Ben Kuipers, MVRDV plans to convert the overpass's 104,000-square-foot area — about the size of two football fields — into a pedestrian walkway, as well as a public arboretum of 254 trees, bushes, and plants. The flora will be organized along the skygarden according to where each species' name falls in the Korean alphabet.
The Skygarden is also expected to have a consumer element. It'll be lined with cafes, flower shops, street markets, libraries, and even greenhouses. MVRDV even intends for the skygarden to function as a nursery, raising trees and other plants for distribution in public spaces throughout Korea.
Now that MVRDV's design has been selected, construction on the Seoul Skygarden will kick into high gear: the government of Seoul wants the project completed just two years from now, in 2017. That seems ambitious compared to projects like the High Line renovation, which took six years (any many, many more years of planning), but the Seoul Skygarden will only be a third as long.
More information about the Seoul Skygarden can be found on MKRDV's site here.
To help them better understand their own breathing patterns, third-year Interaction Design Students at the ArtEZ Academy of the Arts Amy Whittle and Willem Kempers created Lung, a strange machine that blows large bubbles to simulate breath.
Ethereal and invisible, breathing is something you rarely think about. But when you do, you can control it. And the benefits of doing so are great, allowing you to more effectively manage stress and anxiety.
To better understand their respiration even when they weren't thinking about it, Whittle and Kempers started measuring their breathing. They placed temperature sensors in their noses ("It looked ridiculous, really! But it worked!" Kempers tells me), which let them record their rates of respiration while doing different activities: watching a movie, playing a game, listening to music, reading a book, smoking a joint, and so on.
Lung visualizes this data. A series of circular hoops, Lung blows a simple soap bubble to simulate exhalation, then allows it to deflate on the inhale. The bubbles are highlighted with integrated LEDs, while the machine itself is controlled by an Arduino processor running the Processing programming language.
Kempers tells me that getting Lung to work took major effort. "We had a clear vision of what we wanted to make, but it was only gradually realized by trial and error," he says. He says, though, that the team is very satisfied with how Lung turned out. "We really believe that in some cases, data is better understood as an experience, not an infographic."
As for what's next for Lung? Kempers says they've sketched out a device to wear under the nose to visualize breathing data in real time.
That certainly sounds better than cramming thermometers up your nose.
Famous Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo is so good at what he does, he can score a goal even when he is plunged into darkness. What makes that possible? Advanced calculations by our subconscious that take over when our eyes are closed to let us know where we are in the physical world. Now, MIT is aims to explore this mental math with an app.
Darkball, an iPhone game designed by Che-Wei Wang and MIT Media Lab's Playful System Group, challenges users to catch a ball in the dark by tapping the screen when they think the invisible ball is passing through the circle. Combining stark colors, simple shapes, and clean typography to good effect, each round starts with a randomly placed line popping up to bisect the screen. You can only see the ball when it first drops, and as it crosses this line. To catch the ball, you need to predict how fast the ball is falling based upon how long it takes to cross the line.
The objective of Darkball is to see how many times you can catch the ball in a row. But the real value is if you give the app the proper permissions, since Darkball will report its findings to MIT Media Lab. The goal? To construct a map of the dark playground in our brains where we keep our sense of spatial awareness, and allow us to exercise it.
"I imagined some kind of exercise would be able to increase the brain's performance the same way we lift weights to strengthen our muscles," Wang says. "I started a conversation with the Jazayeri Lab in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, where they run lab experiments to gain insight on human time perception. They've been collecting data from a game very much like Darkball in a lab environment. It seemed like a perfect fit to extend their research to the general public and try to collect data from a wider audience."
Wang himself is no stranger to experimenting with design and technology: as part of the design duo which comprises CW&T, he's produced such apps as Crowsflight, a map app which gives you a compass-like UI that guides you to your destination, and Tempra, an app which tests your natural sense of time.
Although the data Darkball has gathered so far isn't strong enough for conclusive findings, Wang tells me that, on average, people catch the ball 4.16 times in a row. The longest streak ever is 33. Even if they are good at the game, most people playing Darkball hit a wall at around 7 catches, and have to practice for a long time to get beyond the hump.
As for what Wang would ideally like everyone to get out of the app: "I'd like to find out how elastic timing is in the brain. How good can you get at Darkball?" Wang says. "If you get really good, does that level of performance atrophy? And if it turns out playing Darkball can help human performance in other areas like sports, that would be a nice bonus."
Play Darkball enough, and maybe you could become the next Ronaldo. You can download it free from the iTunes App Store here.
Sunrise is a cross-platform calendar app for Mac, iOS, Android, and the web that consistently gets rave reviews. On the iOS side of things, though, the latest update to the app is so brilliant, you might love it even if you hate Sunrise. It's called Sunrise Meet, and it's a keyboard extension that makes scheduling meetings a snap.
Instead of switching between your calendar and iMessage to laboriously type in a bunch of different possibilities, Sunrise Meet replaces the keyboard at bottom of your screen with a calendar. Just tap the empty blocks in your calendar to suggest possible meeting times. When you're done, Sunrise dumps all those possibilities into a web link, which is then copied into your iMessage. When the person on the other end clicks on the link, they get to select what time works for them. The agreed upon appointment is then added to your calendar.
If you have a busy calendar, it's really impossible to describe how slick this execution is:
The sly brilliance here is this keyboard extension is a great way to win users to Sunrise's calendar service, even if you don't want to use it as your main calendar app. For example, I love Fantastical's lightning quick and accurate natural language appointment entry: just type "Call with Suzanne every other Tuesday at 4pm starting two weeks from now" and it'll figure out the rest. Sunrise isn't as good in that regard, in my opinion, so I'd never use it as my default calendar app.
With Meet, though, you don't have to. Because Sunrise interacts with your online calendars like GCal and iCloud without replacing them, once you set it up, the Meet calendar is just a tap away no matter where you are: email, iMessage, typing into a web forum, and so on. That means even if you use another app for your calendar, Meet is still enough to convert you into a Sunrise user. It's win-win.
But my wonderful editor Adrian Covert makes another excellent point. Unlike the Microsoft Surface, iOS doesn't allow you to have true split-screen multitasking. An iOS app always takes up the whole screen, so you can't, say, browse Facebook while also watching a movie. But apps like Sunrise Meet have seemingly figured out something that even Apple hasn't: by using the keyboard extension functionality in iOS, developers can run their apps on the same screen as other apps, even if those other apps don't want someone else crowding their screen. For apps like Sunrise, the iOS keyboard could be a Trojan Horse into true multitasking.
In 2013, acclaimed filmmaker and author Errol Morris ran a bold experiment. With the collusion of the New York Times, he asked 45,000 readers to take an online test. The test allegedly measured whether or not readers were optimists or pessimists. But in reality, Morris was trying to find out if the typeface a statement was written in had any impact on a reader's willingness to agree with that statement. Simply put, are some typefaces more believable than others?
The answer is yes. Baskerville, a 250-year-old serif originally designed by John Baskerville, was statistically more likely to influence the minds of readers than Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans or Trebuchet. The results of Morris's experiment were published online in a two-part essay called Hear, All Ye People; Hearken, O Earth! and have now been put into print, as the 44th edition of the Pentagram Papers, the monograph that the design firm Pentagram sends to an exclusive list of individuals each year. Pentagram partner and long-time Morris collaborator Michael Bierut put together the typographically exquisite monograph, with with the help of designer Jessica Svendsen.
Truth and its many influences have always fascinated Morris, who is a tireless investigator—in films, he has freed an innocent man from prison and gotten former Secretary of State Robert McNamara to confess to war crimes. Typography might not be a matter of life and death, but it touches neatly on the theme that permeates Morris's corpus of work. I sat down with Morris in his Cambridge office recently, surrounded by the preserved heads of horses and monkeys, to ask him about typography and how it can shape our perception of truth.
Co.Design: How long have you been interested in typography? Errol Morris: I've always been interested in typography. I'm not sure when I first started to think about typography and truth but I'm always thinking about truth in one form or another. That seems to be an ongoing theme in my work. It's a question that almost suggests itself.
How did your Baskerville experiment come about?
Part of it is probably influenced, if I tried to peel it back, by Saul Kripke's important 1980 book, Naming And Necessity, which deals with the notion that truth and reference is independent of the beliefs that we have.
For example, if you say, "the atomic number of gold is 79," there's a view that that has to be true, that it couldn't be otherwise. But what if the font in which that sentence is expressed influenced our perception of that truth somehow? Would there be a way of testing that, to test our capacity for credulity? Whether we're more willing to accept it as true because it's written in one typeface or another?
I've been writing for the New York Times for four or five years. I thought, I could use the Times to do this test. In a usual social science test, you might have access to a couple hundred people. Here, I had the readership of the Times, which is not unsubstantial. I wanted to see if there was a way to use the Times' readership to test that hypothesis.
In the New York Times experiment, you tested the "truthiness" of six typefaces—Baskerville, Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans and Trebuchet. How did you choose those six?
I'd like to say there's something that really went into it, that was scientific, and I wanted a combination of serif and sans serif fonts, so we picked three of each. It could have been more, but we picked six. Why those six? Your guess is as good as mine.
Did you have a working theory on how the experiment might play out?
Yes and no. If you're asking me if I had any feeling what typeface might stand out, absolutely not. But did I think there would be some measurable result? I wasn't sure, but I liked the idea that there would be one. There is something absurd about the essay. It's absurd to think that we would be nudged by one typeface over another, into believing something to be true. Something disturbing about it, I'd go so far to say.
The New York Times experiment found that readers were more likely to agree with a statement written in Baskerville than other fonts. Do you think the experiment would play out differently on other websites?
I don't know. There are a lot of reasons in any social science or psychology experiment why it might misrepresent some underlying reality. Do I think I've proven anything, that I can stamp a big Q.E.D. on this experiment? No, I don't think that. I do think, however, that it was a worthwhile experiment, and that the results are meaningful, quote-unquote. What meaningful means is not exactly clear to me. All I know is that a lot of people responded, in excess of 40,000 people. That's a huge sample in this kind of test.
Was there any resistance at the New York Times to the idea of taking part a social experiment that involved lying to their readership?
No. Although I was surprised they ran it, because you're right. Doesn't it involve tricking the reader in some way? Is that a proper use of the New York Times? Personally, I think yes, it is, and I was really glad my editors there went along with me.
The original essay was published online. How do you feel about its physical incarnation as a Pentagram Paper?
I think it's beautiful. I'm just deeply grateful to Michael [Bierut] for doing this. I had no idea what to expect. It's very cool. It's full of amazing details. It has marbled end papers, which I've just never seen done in a paperback before. And, of course, the typography is just wonderful: it's a book about Baskerville, printed in Baskerville, that looks like it could have been published by John Baskerville, during his life. My only complaint is that I originally wanted this to be in hardback, but Michael persuaded me that this is just as good. Having seen it, I agree, but I really wanted it to have deckled edges, like a hardback. Any book with a deckled edge, in my opinion, is better than one without a deckled edge.
Pentagram Papers are notoriously hard to find, unless you know someone at Pentagram. Are there any plans to make this printed version, or something like it, available to the public?
I would love for this to be in bookstores, or available so that people could purchase it, because it's a beautiful object. It's not just a book, it's an objet d'art. If books are going to exist at all today, which is a big if, they have to be in some sense objects we want to possess. This, for me, fits that bill. I would love to see this at a table in a bookstore.
Publishing is really changing in so many ways. Books aren't going out of existence, but I think the appetite for books like this is going to increase. I think there will be more interest in beautiful books, and books as objet d'art, as opposed to just simply a vehicle for conveying content.
Your Baskerville essay is ultimately about how we perceive the world through typefaces. Do you think that argument is augmented by Pentagram turning it into a beautiful typographic object?
Yes. I'm the author, and I take it even more seriously seeing what Pentagram has done with it than I ever did before! When I got my copy, I said to myself, 'Wow, this is much more substantial than even I thought it was.'
When people read this for the first time, how do you hope that will change their own perception of the world?
I'm not really sure. I'm not even sure what exactly to make of the results, in truth. Everything I do—everything I write about and everything I make movies about—is about the distance between the world and us. We think the world is just given to us, that there's no slack in the system, but there is. Everything I do is about the slack of the system: the difference between reality and our perception of reality. So in the sense that this essay lets us further reflect on the world around us, and even makes us paranoid about the slack in the system, then I think it's a good and valuable thing.
Final question: have the results of your Baskerville experiment changed the typefaces you use?
Oh yes, I'm drinking my own Kool-Aid now. I used to write all of my manuscripts in Bembo. Now I write them in Baskerville.
