For better or worse, a large amount of design work these days is visual. That makes sense, since the most essential products we interact with have screens. But as the internet of things surrounds us with devices that can hear our words, anticipate our needs, and sense our gestures, what does that mean for the future of design, especially as those screens go away?
Last week at San Francisco's SOLID Conference, Andy Goodman, group director of Fjord, shared his thoughts on what he thinks the new paradigm of design will be like when our interfaces are no longer constrained by screens, and instead turn to haptic, automated, and ambient interfaces. He calls it Zero UI. We talked to him about what it meant.
Zero UI isn't really a new idea. If you've ever used an Amazon Echo, changed a channel by waving at a Microsoft Kinect, or setup a Nest thermostat, you've already used a device that could be considered part of Goodman's Zero UI thinking. It's all about getting away from the touchscreen, and interfacing with the devices around us in more natural ways: haptics, computer vision, voice control, and artificial intelligence. Zero UI is the design component of all these technologies, as they pertain to what we call the internet of things.
"If you look at the history of computing, starting with the jacquard loom in 1801, humans have always had to interact with machines in a really abstract, complex way," Goodman says.
Over time, these methods have become less complex: the punch card gave way to machine code, machine code to the command line, command line to the GUI. But machines still force us to come to them on their terms, speaking their language. The next step is for machines to finally understand us on our own terms, in our own natural words, behaviors, and gestures. That's what Zero UI is all about.
According to Goodman, Zero UI represents a whole new dimension for designers to wrestle with. Literally. He likens the designer's leap from UI to Zero UI as similar to what happens in the novella Flatland: instead of just designing for two-dimensions—i.e. what a user is trying to do right now in a linear, predictable workflow—designers need to think about what a user is trying to do right now in any possible workflow.
Take voice control, for instance. Right now, voice control through something like Amazon Echo or Siri is relatively simple: a user asks a question ("Who was the 4th president of the United States?") or makes a statement ("Call my husband") and the device acts upon that single request. But ask Siri to "Message my husband the 4th president of the United States, then tell me who the fifth is?" and it'll barf all over itself. To build services and devices that can translate a stream-of-consciousness command like that, designers will need to think non-linearly. They'll need to be able to build a system capable of adjusting to anything on the fly.
"It's like learning to play 3-D chess," Goodman laughs. "We need to think away from linear workflows, and towards multi-dimensional thought process."
Whereas interface designers right now live in apps like InDesign and Adobe Illustrator, the non-linear design problems of zero UI will require vastly different tools, and skill sets.
"We might have to design in databases, or lookup tables, or spreadsheets," Goodman says, explaining that data, not intuition, will become a designer's most valuable asset. "Designers will have to become experts in science, biology, and psychology to create these devices... stuff we don't have to think about when our designs are constrained by screens."
For example, let's say you have a television that can sense gestures. Depending on who is standing in front of that TV, the gestures it needs to understand to do something as simple as turn up the volume might be radically different: a 40-year-old who grew up in the age of analog interfaces might twist an imaginary dial in mid-air, while a millennial might jerk their thumb up. A zero UI stereo will need to have access to a lot of behavioral data, let alone the processing power to decode them."
"As we move away from screens, a lot of our interfaces will have to become more automatic, anticipatory, and predictive," Goodman says. A good example of this sort of device, Goodman says, is the Nest: you set its thermostat once, and then it learns to anticipate what you want based on how you interact with it from there.
Although Goodman is serious about the fact that screens are going to stop being the primary way we interact with the devices around us, he's the first to admit that the Zero UI name isn't meant to be taken literally. "It's really meant to be a provocation," Goodman admits. "There are always going to be user interfaces in some form of another, but this is about getting away from thinking about everything in terms of screens."
But if Goodman's right, and the entire history of computing is less a progression of mere technological advancements, and more a progression of advancements in the way we are able to communicate with machines, then what happens after we achieve Zero UI? What happens when our devices finally understand us better than we understand ourselves? Is anything we want to do with an app, gadget, or device is just a shrug, a grunt, or a caress away?
"I'm really into all that singularity stuff," Goodman laughs. "Once you get to the point that computers understand us, the next step is that computers get embedded in us, and we become the next UI."
Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified Goodman's title. It has been changed.
With fireworks set to fly this coming July 4th weekend, maybe it's time to reflect upon another kind of rocket's red glare that—seemingly against all odds—haven't exploded in the sky over the last 70 years: nukes. Reddit user drwtsn created this visualization of the nuclear arms race, showing how the number of warheads in the world have grown and shrank since 1940.
Represented as a chronological spiral growing out of the artificial horizon of a nuke's abstracted first person view, each quill of the viz represents the world's atomic arsenal in a given year. It gives a good overview of just how quickly mankind's taste for destruction ramped up when we split the atom... and how hard it's been for us to tamp that appetite back down.
The first nukes, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, weren't immediately followed by wide scale nuclear proliferation, but things start changing in the 1950s, when America reacted to the USSR's first atomic tests by stockpiling bombs. America's nuclear arsenal continued to dwarf Russia's for the next twenty-five years.. After that, America's nukes started dwindling in numbers (if not in power), even as the USSR's kept growing. And while the number of worldwide nukes may have peaked in 1986, by 2005, the worldwide nuclear arsenal had dwindled to numbers not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
There's one inaccuracy in the infographic worth noting: America began testing the neutron bomb in the 1960s, where as the chart above confuses Senate debates on appropriating money to the production of nuclear warheads in 1977 with the creation of the first neutron bomb. Otherwise, it all seems accurate. The data was pulled from a slightly older Guardian story (which in turn pulled its data from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, whose most recent figures can be seen here.)
This isn't the first compelling infographic about the planet's nuclear proliferation before, but what makes drwtsn's viz so great is it tells a story about how mankind came to the precipice of oblivion. Have we backed far enough away from that precipice, though?
Not according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, who set the world's symbolic Doomsday Clock earlier this year to just three minutes until midnight. We might have fewer nukes than since the 1960s, but the ones we have are deadlier than ever... and with extreme drought a nationwide problem, we've proven we don't need to make the skies rain fire to create post-apocalyptic conditions.
Even if you're working your dream job, staying productive can be tough. That's why designers are such productivity experts: time after time, they overcome the temptation to slack so they can brainstorm new ideas, find fresh solutions, and get things done—all while hitting deadlines and keeping things under budget.
We asked dozens of designers from Google, Argo Design, Huge, ustwo, Sagmeister and Walsh, Moving Brands, OKFocus, and more about their best tips for staying productive. The answers we got back range from the physical to the mental to the chemical. Staying productive is a personal thing, but we guarantee at least one of these tips will work for you.
A number of years ago, it was rumored that Steve Jobs took his inner circle on a corporate retreat to talk about company priorities. At the retreat, he went around the room and asked his inner circle their top priority for the year and jotted them down. At the end, he erased all but one priority and said, 'This is what we're going to accomplish this year. We're going to crush this one thing and do it better than anyone ever has.'
You could send 100 tweets a day, 400 emails, and fill the world with more crap. But great productivity to me is having quality output, so each day I try to focus on one thing that I'll absolutely nail.
You want to be productive? Focus. Do one amazing thing each day. It could be for the world, your life, your partner, or for a friend. But if you do one great thing a day, well, that's a fucking productive day. —Golden Krishna, senior UX designer, Zappos
By far the most fruitful strategy to stay productive I know of is to go on sabbatical every seven years, to spend a year working on things that there never seems to be enough time for during the regular client oriented years. —Stefan Sagmeister, partner, Sagmeister & Walsh
For productivity, the No. 1 tool for me are old-fashioned lists. I make a lot of them. I make lists for the day, sub-lists for projects, and sub-sub-lists in rush-hours of work. Simply on paper or in Apple Reminders, the simplest and sturdy to-do list tool. —Florian Mewes, graphic designer
I start at the top and work my way down. Surprisingly, as soon as I think I'm done, there are new projects waiting. Right now I have about 40 of them of varying complexity, from looking at my taxes to having a new engine fitted into my vintage car, and, of course, design projects. I have stacks of other projects around and tend to ignore everything but the most urgent ones. If it doesn't hurt to leave undone, it's not important. —Erik Spiekermann, designer
I found breaking down big goals into smaller tasks to be the best way for me to get things done. I can make small progress and knock off these bite-size tasks whenever I have a moment. —Jannie Lai, head of UX, Light
For me, I simply design toward a series of trenches, with each trench being a presentable stopping point, just with a higher fidelity than the previous one in the series. I typically give myself a day or two for each trench, depending on the scope of the request. This keeps me from focusing too long on something small that could end up being scrapped or unimportant. —Matthew Santone, Argo Design
Being clear on the definition of success (a specific deliverable type) with my team from the beginning allows me to be more productive. I can focus my energy on being creative and iterative as opposed to second-guessing and worrying I'm falling outside any bounds. —David Schwartz, Argo Design
A lot of time can be wasted in pursuit of the wrong goal. The longer I have worked as a designer, the more I have learned establishing that you are working on the right thing from the beginning, not just working, boosts productivity. Sure, in the moment, time spent asking yourself, 'Am I working on the right thing?' makes you feel anxious, but it's worth it. —Jared Ficklin, Argo Design
I use my alone time during the beginning and end of the day as a time to plan, reflect, and strategize. —Jannie Lai, head of UX, Light
My trick is reading. The first thing I do when I get to the office is start reading. I have a stack of books on my desk, all design related, and I'll read for a little bit. Not long, maybe 15 to 20 minutes. I switch back from different books on different days. It calms me down, gets me focused, and lets me think about the bigger picture... When I am running out of steam and I'm getting distracted, I grab a book and do the same thing. Read for 15 to 20 minutes. I find myself re-focused and fresh, it's like taking a nap. I don't know enough about these things, but it seems like I'm using a different part of my brain—so my design brain gets to rest and my reading brain stimulates me. I come back ready to go and feeling content. —Joe Stewart, partner, Work & Co.
I voraciously consume science fiction and peruse several design blogs a day. It keeps the lateral thought pathways open. Vision pieces are not just marketing fluff. They exercise the design muscle one employs for clients. —Jared Ficklin, Argo Design
I used to tutor kids in SAT prep, and when they asked how to memorize the endless lists of vocabulary words, I would tell them to read books. Which probably annoyed them. I feel the same way about productivity—it's not about an app or short-term fix but building a long-term foundation. —Daniel Soltis, user experience director, Moving Brands
Whenever I need an extra hit of inspiration, I browse books from James Turrell, Tadao Ando, or Santiago Calatrava while enjoying a glass of scotch. I also go to museums and parks on a regular basis with my family. —Hector Ouilhet Olmos, product designer, Google
Think about all your haters and the people who don't believe in you. That's a huge motivator, as well as thinking about how good it feels to see something you made in the world. Focus on the ends and the means become easier. —Ryder Ripps, creative director, OKFocus
Make sure you end your day on a clear, high-point with your work so that when you come in the next day you're starting from a good place. —Renae Alsobrook, Argo Design
Every morning when I wake up, I ask myself, 'What task is causing me the most anxiety?' Sometimes, it's an easy answer since it's been keeping me up all night, but sometimes I need to think deeply. My strategy is to start the day by tackling the thing that generates the greatest stress. After having completed the most stressful task of the day, I get a huge burst of energy and my creativity and productivity soars —Joanna Berzowska, head of electronic textiles, OMsignal
When I have a lot of things on my plate I use President Eisenhower's Urgent/Important Matrix, which identifies which tasks and activities you should focus on. —Florian Mewes, graphic designer
When you really need to get something done, it can be helpful to force yourself to focus on it without distraction for an extended period of time. I find that it helps if you set a timer for an hour or two and set a goal to focus 100% on the design at hand until the timer goes off, after which you can give yourself a little break. Some people use an egg timer for this, but I just use the iPhone timer app. —Andrew Ofstad, co-founder and chief product officer, Airtable
The creative process is a flexible one. It rarely gets into economies of scale at a level that entrenched repeatable processes are needed. But knowing when and how to build a jig to speed up a repetitive or often repeated task is paramount for increasing productivity. —Jared Ficklin, Argo Design
When I really need to get stuff done fast, taking a walk is one of the best ways to increase creative output or get through a block. —Ian MacDowell, Argo Design
Productivity comes for collaborating closely with teams outside of design, so getting up and taking a walk to get coffee down the street helps us to reflect out loud. —Blade Kotelly, VP of design, Jibo, Inc.
Many of my design ideas and strategies came from my showers or evening walks. —Jannie Lai, head of UX, Light
I'm a believer that divergent experiences, with the right mindset, can be inherently creative. If I'm struggling to make strides in something more conceptual (like a framework), I'll let myself off the hook and work on something else but keep it in the back of my mind. Then, when I'm in an art gallery or in a plane or falling asleep, I'll come up with a connection I couldn't have understood before had I tried to force it while sitting in front of a monitor. This mindset is all about trusting yourself to get the work done in the practice you've chosen for yourself. —David Schwartz, Argo Design
To stay productive as a designer means you have to remain creative. It is important to reserve time to unwind, recharge or get inspired. I try to have a personal project that is not work related, say a painting project. —Jannie Lai, head of UX, Light
It's hard to tear myself away, especially when I'm stuck and I'm starting to get get anxious, but it helps ground me and puts me in a better mood if I take a moment to do something I enjoy. Instead of trying to get inspired by looking at Dribbble, or other apps, I look at something completely different. For example, I love mid-century furniture. So I'll go on my favorite sites, Instagram accounts, Etsy, and look at beautiful mid-century furniture and accessories. I also love to cook, so I'll go to my favorite YouTube channels and watch a couple videos. —Addy Beavers, UX designer, Google Play
It's important to make sure that when I'm not working, I'm not working. My job requires me to be in front of a screen all day, so I try to spend weekends away from screens—hiking, cooking, reading a book. And it's important for me to have a life outside of work. Most of my friends aren't in the design or tech industry. When life is interesting, meaningful, and offers different perspectives, then productivity at work comes naturally. —Daniel Soltis, user experience director, Moving Brands
When I'm working on my own, I try to toggle back and forth between the overall structure of a design and the tiny details. I'll typically spend some time laying things out and trying to get everything on the page, but will then jump into the details, such as designing icons and getting them perfectly on a pixel. In my opinion, this is something that designers don't always spend enough time on. It slows you down, so you should do it for a while then return back to the overall design. I'll usually repeat this process until I'm happy with the work. Inevitably, if I get up from my desk and come back, I might hate the work and may even start over—but that's an important part of the process. —Ian Burns, group creative director, Huge
There is plenty to be gained from when you stop talking about a solution or approach and move into building an example. Think by making, deliver by demo, not 'think by talking, deliver by more talking.'—Jared Ficklin, Argo Design
Chris Rock has this one covered. As much as designers want to be uncaged and eccentric, too much unpredictable behavior takes a toll on productivity at some point, especially among team efforts. Chris was speaking to us designers, too. —Jared Ficklin, Argo Design
It's hard to get any serious work done when you're in an open office full of distraction. Meetings, casual conversations, and the bustle of an office can all draw you away from your work. Go in early (or stay up late) before anyone else is around in order to get some quality design time in. —Andrew Ofstad, co-founder and chief product officer, Airtable
A trick that keeps me productive and organized is naming my layers and having structure. I'm helpless without this process, but I've also seen great, fast designers who are fine skipping that step. Heaven help you if you have to open their files, though. —Ian Burns, group creative director, Huge
Earlier this year, I wrote a book (The Best Interface is No Interface) which was a monumental project. I told myself, 'I can do this! I'm great! I can do amazing things!'
Three weeks in, I was utterly depressed. The internal deadlines I set for myself? Missed them all. Progress on the book? Dismal. I was lost in a sea of unproductivity. Then I did something that dramatically changed my productivity levels. I turned off my Wi-Fi and hid my phone. Instead of being mid-sentence in my writing and jumping online (perhaps looking for Google's quarterly revenue and then spending an hour watching kittens chase lasers) I made a note to myself to check it out later. I shifted my work from online and distracted to offline and focused and my new process led to a dramatic change in pace.
So, don't install an app to become more productive. Just turn them all off. —Golden Krishna, senior UX Designer, Zappos
The problems that appear the simplest are usually the most interesting. They tend to be deceitfully simple, and can lead to either an obvious solution or to an elegant and complex solution. I don't tackle simple design problems right away. I let them linger in the back of my mind, sometimes for days. I often find that the most compelling solutions come from elsewhere. I am inspired by art and literature, various other disciplines, unusual materials and unexpected experiences. By taking my time with simple problems, I often find a truly elegant and unique solution. —Joanna Berzowska, head of electronic textiles, OMsignal
When I'm working with others, I make sure to share my thoughts on the work early and often. To me, good work comes from a combination of persistence and a commitment to being flexible and changing direction. —Ian Burns, group creative director, Huge
I've found that putting up work on social media is a huge help here—it becomes more tangible and keeps you honest. Give your Tumblr/Twitter/whatever a bit of structure, set up a schedule and then go for it. Make the project doable in chunks and tie it to something external rather than just a pure design exercise. The reactions from your audience will create a useful feedback loop that drives you to the next installment.
The real advantage is that it will give you momentum in all your work, and you'll begin to find useful connections where projects bump into each other. Again and again, old ideas that seem completely unrelated can prove useful. And by staying productive on the fun stuff, you'll find you have more energy when it counts. —Jake Mix, lead product designer on Kong
A tool I picked up from the Seanwes podcast: if you have hankerings to Facebook, tweet, etc., just write it down instead on a piece of paper. I wonder if our brains have these little nervous ticks of energy that need to come out but don't have to take up so much time and attention. This is also why I'll sketch or doodle—it's a brain dump. That's good. It unloads while forcing you to pay attention. —David Schwartz, Argo Design
I have my sketchbook on me at all times. Sketching helps me to externalize the craziness going on in my head, allowing me to see a clearer path of what to move forward with. —Leah Shea, product designer at ustwo
My favorite productivity tool is my notebook because it's with me all the time so I can quickly jot down or sketch ideas. I also use it to keep me on track. I really like the Bullet Journal approach. —Jen Kozenski Devins, user experience designer, Google
The beat of my day is set by the music I listen to. Music is also how I can slip away into my own world and get into a focused state. I listen to different music for different tasks, and even different music for different moods. Regardless, music helps me move through my thoughts more smoothly and efficiently, often shielding me from the city around me. As long as I have my headphones, I'm able to work in any environment. —Leah Shea, Product Designer at ustwo
I listen to heavy metal. —Ian MacDowell, Argo Design
I usually listen to new music as I find it inspiring. My coworkers and I contribute to a playlist that is always growing with new stuff. During the evenings when I ride back home, I listen to songs I know as I like to sing to them (terribly, by the way). That makes me forget about work and tune out. —Hector Ouilhet Olmos, product designer, Google
Embodying a positive mental attitude keeps me productive, and I see it increasing the productivity of the people around me when I project it in the right ways. Now, I am by no means the most bubbly-happy person, but having the right mind frame can be the difference between crushing a project or just barely getting by. Work can be stressful, but it's my choice as to how I want to deal with it. When I am thinking positively, I feel my creativity increasing, my number one power. —Leah Shea, product designer at ustwo
One method I've leaned on for the past five years is capturing a screengrab every day of something I've worked on. The can be rejected work, happy accidents, memorable moments, or abstract visuals of development. It is part system of record and part timeline of my career but is often a useful way to park ideas in order to move onto something new. The sense that ideas have a conclusion or destination I think frees us to more easily explore other avenues. —Jonny Naismith, design director, Moving Brands
My number one productivity killer is 'more of the same.' UX people probably more than anyone else need stimulation to be productive and inspired. I catch myself being most productive if I challenge myself with new experiences at least once a week. For example, when you are observing blind users orient themselves, using their hands and their ears instead of their eyes in a way that you never knew you could, I immediately start generating ideas: What do these extreme experiences mean for technology? How could I transform my observations into innovative design ideas for everyone? —Astrid Weber, UX researcher, Google
Set goals for yourself, be disciplined, and drink lots of coffee. —Jimmy Watkins, Argo Design
Take Adderall. Water helps too. —Ryder Ripps, creative director, OKFocus
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The Nation, America's oldest continuously published weekly magazine, is 150 years old today and up until last week, its website at TheNation.com looked at least that old. Now, the self-described "flagship of the left" is getting a redesign, courtesy of Blue State Digital, the guys behind Obama's 2008 and 2012 digital strategies. Gone is the circa-2005, tri-columned front page, chronologically streaming progressive and left-leaning political news at a rate of about 15 stories per day. In its place is something distinctly modern—a 21st-century digital publication that looks just as deliberately designed and laid-out as what goes to presses every week.
"For a long time, The Nation was a print magazine that also had a website," says Executive Editor Richard Kim in a phone interview. "Since 2010, though, we've really grown our online presence to around 90 stories a week, but the site's design never kept up with that. It looked like an afterthought."
According to Blue State Digital's executive creative director Matt Ipcar, there were a few problems the redesign had to solve. First and foremost, it had to be responsive and mobile-friendly: over 50% of TheNation.com's daily visitors were accessing the device on smartphones and tablets, which the site couldn't natively accommodate. Now it does.
It also needed to allow for editorial flexibility so The Nation's editors had choices in how to group content on the homepage. Consequently, the new design has two dozen modules, which editors can mix-and-match to turn the homepage into less of a chronological news stream and more of a living magazine page.
The biggest challenge was figuring out how to present stories in an engaging way, without necessarily relying on full-bleed images to liven things up. Ipcar points out that unlike many digital publications, The Nation doesn't always have art to accompany its content: it's a magazine just as likely to publish a piece with half a dozen big photos as it is a three-line haiku. That meant that the new website had to be typographically beautiful. As a nod to The Nation's print heritage, the redesign relies heavily on the Mercury typeface family by Hoefler & Co. for both story headlines and bodies. First created for Esquire and the New Times newspaper chains, the font was designed to take into account the way that different humidity levels could distort a typeface, depending on the environment in which it was printed, says Ipcar. It's not the same typeface The Nation's print mag uses (although that could soon follow) but it's still meant to evoke the feel of pages hot off the press.
Another important goal of the redesign was to lift The Nation's archive from obscurity. "If you look over our history, we've been quite prescient about writing about important issues before they've become part of the national consciousness," Kim says. "But one of the problems about being prescient is that by the time everyone else is talking about it, the content's no longer on your homepage." TheNation.com can now can easily group past coverage together in sidebar modules as a sort of dynamic primer on hot-button issues, embedded right in the text of a new article. "Our archive's no longer just this dead thing that only librarians are interested in. If we write an article about climate change, we can easily group past articles in a module, explaining to readers why they should care."
The redesign was relatively cheap. Kim declined to provide a specific figure, but says, "The Nation is a for-profit magazine that has run at a budget deficit for 148 out of 150 years. You better believe it was a shoestring." Ipcar pegged the budget as in the "very low six figures." (A typical redesign for a major media property may cost anywhere from $250,000 to $500,000.)
But Ipcar says his agency jumped at the chance to work on the project. (The fact that Kim tells me Ipcar's wife is a Nation writer probably didn't hurt either.) "The Nation just has so much history behind it," Ipcar says. "It's a magazine that started publishing 10 years before Custer's Last Stand, a publication that reviewed Gone With The Wind the week it was published. Given the alignment between what we stand for and what The Nation does, we jumped at the opportunity to work with them."
Can design help correct for butterfingered receivers who keep fumbling the pigskin? The Tennessee Athletics is hoping so. As part of a new overhaul to the University of Tennessee's uniforms and sports brands, Nike has put a little target on the gloves of Volunteer football players, made up of the team's logo. There may as well be a little sign pointing right towards it: "put the ball here."
It's a small but nice touch as part of a larger rebrand that sees the University of Tennessee get a new universal 'Power T' logo for all of its various sports teams. It's all really solid and really classy branding work that helps consolidate the hot mess of Volunteer Athletics' branding.
"Power T" logo
But we especially like the gloves, even if they're a bit silly and assume perfect catching form. It's just a great little design detail. It's certainly not the first time we've seen a target on football receiver gloves—Under Armour does something similar with a skull logo on its Alter Ego Punisher gloves, and the Chicago Bears have two 'C' targets on its receiver gloves—but usually, it's a lot more overstated than this. It's a great example of how a logo can be used productively for something besides branding or aesthetics.
You'd be hard pressed to get even the most daring thrill seekers to enter a collapsing building or a burning tunnel, but for fire fighters around the world, it's just part of the job. To teach his fellow South Koreans to be more appreciative of the rescue workers who risk their lives every day, architect Soon-min Hong has dreamed up the Risk Theme Park, an amusement park concept filled with burning buildings, crashing monorails, and collapsing platforms—all while teaching people how to survive if they ever find themselves in that situation for real.
As envisioned by Hong, the Risk Theme Park would stand in the middle of the South Korean city of Daegu, above an existing fire station, police station, and senior citizen center. Resembling a megastructure with a largely uncovered facade, the park would have nine attractions. Entering the park, visitors would first pass through a remembrance garden for fallen firefighters, before being asked to leap from a high platform onto a large air mat. From there, park goers would traverse a seemingly unstable platform to pass by a seemingly burning building, then jump on a raft to experience large waves, whirlpools, and the risk of drowning.
Next, visitors would haul themselves up and down ropes to simulate evacuating a high rise building, then enter a concrete building to experience what it's like to be trapped in a burning building for themselves (think Backdraft: the Ride here). Finally, Hong wants to place park goers into a simulated monorail disaster, then drop them onto the simulacrum of a South Korean mountain to show visitors all the things that can go wrong while hiking.
"We live in a society that is obsessed with personal safety, but as a result, people are no longer prepared to take risks on a daily basis which might prepare them for dangerous situations," Hong says. "This creates a risk deficit in society, forcing others to take on that risk on behalf of the public." But because so few of us experience risk anymore, we don't appreciate those who put themselves in harm's way on a daily basis.
This is particularly true, Hong says, in his native South Korea, where firefighters are paid low wages and are badly equipped for their jobs. There's just no appreciation for what they do. To deal with the problem, South Korea is currently proposing seven centers to educate the public about the nation's emergency services, in which emergency scenarios are simulated for the public in a completely safe environment. Hong's Risk Theme Park is a proposal for just one of those centers, rendered in a beautiful ukiyo-e woodblock style that looks like the artist Hokusai dabbled with disaster porn.
Hong says that his Risk Theme Park would be constructed to be as safe as possible, although the very nature of the park means that injuries could happen: you can't learn about risk unless it's possible to get hurt. Of course, the fact that people could get hurt at his park is why Hong says he thinks it's unlikely it'll ever get built, but he hopes that the Risk Theme Park will at least influence the design of one of the public centers built in South Korea by 2021.
In a post-privacy age, everyone has to acknowledge that they could be under surveillance by the government. "Seen" is a new computer font by Emil Kazole that lets you know in real time if what you're typing is likely to make the NSA's surveillance antenna twitch. How? By using ligatures to cross out verboten words that typically make NSA computers take notice.
In computer typography, ligatures are a wonderful little invention. They're little cheats that tell a computer to render two or more characters placed next to each other in a different way; for example, to render 'a' and 'e' as an æ when they are next to each other. Most of the time, your favorite fonts use ligatures in such a way that you barely notice them, subtly adjusting the letters you're typing to optimize them for beauty and readability. But in the hands of more adventurous font designers, ligatures can be almost magical, allowing you to recreate the idiosyncratic handwriting of Sigmund Freud or make a data visualization in a word processor.
In the case of the Seen typeface, ligatures are used to automatically censor words on the NSA's "spook word" list—a list which, incidentally, is pretty weird in its own right, encompassing not just words like "Guantanamo,""CIA,""Illuminati," and "panopticon," but seemingly commonplace words like "basement,""birthday,""blackjack," and "blowfish." These words are part of an NSA Prism database of terms originally leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 that are used like a surveillance scoring system by government spy agencies. As the NSA is watching your email, messages, or chat logs, the more of these words you use, the more the NSA is likely to subject you to scrutiny. (Hi, spooks!)
The point of the Seen font is to get people thinking about the privacy implications of what they are writing, as they are writing. That email you send your buddies suggesting Beef Wellington for dinner and then a little blackjack in the basement? It's a potential minefield of NSA spook words that could send agents kicking down your door, if you use enough of them.
Seen can be downloaded and installed on any computer as a standard font, no special software required. You can download it here
A few weeks ago, Google created algorithmic feedback loops in the artificial neural networks it uses to power Google Photos' image-searching abilities. The result was a series of hallucinogenic still images that looked like a trippy mash-up between Neuromancer and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Now, artist Memo Akten has taken Google's Deep Dream source code and applied it to a video selfie. The result is an infinitely recursive hallucination of Akten's face, as it might appear to an advanced neural network that has gone out of its mind on acid.
In the description of his video, which Akten calls "Journey through the layers of the mind," the artist gives a good overview of what exactly is happening here. An advanced neural network is a linked series of chips, each of one playing the role of a neuron in your brain. Trained on a database of millions of photos, some of these neurons will "light up" when they scan an image or video and see something they recognize. Where things get psychotropic is when you take an image of all those lit-up neurons, then feed it back into the network, ad infinitum.
Which is exactly how Akten's video was made. The artist explains:
[W]hen the network is fed a new unknown image (e.g. me), it tries to make sense of (i.e. recognize) this new image in context of what it already knows, i.e. what it's already been trained on...The effect is further exaggerated by encouraging the algorithm to generate an image of what it 'thinks' it is seeing, and feeding that image back into the input...This is like asking you to draw what you think you see in the clouds, and then asking you to look at your drawing and draw what you think you are seeing in your drawing.
Depending on your point of view, the results are either beautiful or queasily nightmarish. If you fall into the latter camp, all I can say is if you think this is freaky, you really don't want to know what Google's Deep Dream Code does to GIFs.
Nuclear war. Disappearing natural resources. Overpopulation, then underpopulation. Rising sea levels. These are just some of the challenges Londoners will have to face over the next 10,000 years. Royal College of Art graduate Alice Theodorou has designed a skyscraper concept she thinks can weather those ten millennia. How? By leveraging classical sculpture and the beauty of the human form to instill an innate desire in future Londoners to preserve it.
In Theodorou's concept, which she calls "The Future Will Just Have To Wait," London's Mount Pleasant Mail Centre would be the site for a skyscraper, the supports of which are made of massive marble caryatids, Atlases, and other Greco-Roman inspired sculptures. Even if it lasts 10,000 years, or even just 100, the building isn't meant to be a completely static structure: Theodorou expects that it will be renovated, repurposed, and rebuilt.
Think of it like a modern day Parthenon, which has been an Athenian temple, a mosque, a Christian church, a museum, and a marketplace in its 2,500 year history. Theodorous wants to do the same thing here. As part of her concept, she imagines how the Mount Pleasant site could be used as a nuclear shelter in 2049 when global thermonuclear war results from the depletion of the world's lead resources, or how the collapse of the European Union in 2040 might require the Mount Pleasant building to cope with laws requiring all households in Britain to grow their own food. She even imagines what the Mount Pleasant site might look like as an underwater lighthouse powered by gallium indium phosphide cells in the year 12,000, when all of London is at the bottom of the ocean.
But why does Theodorou think her building will last so long? When researching her project, Theodorou discovered that one of the oldest pieces of art on Earth is a 40,000 year old figurine of a woman, carved out of ivory. Asking herself how such an object could survive to be passed down to us, Theodorou's central premise is that humanity is hard programmed to try to preserve anthropomorphic art and design. The Mount Pleasant building of her concept will survive for the same reasons the Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, and the Laocoön have: humanity cherishes itself, favoring "the endurance of the human form over the fleeting nature of architectural style."
In Theodorou's vision, future artists would add their own caryatids and atlantes to the Mount Pleasant structure over time: for example, after weathering atomic war, the fallout shelter would be surrounded by lead statues, paying homage to the depletion of the resource, while also representing solidarity and serving as symbolic guardians from danger. "If architectural treasures are the milestones of human progress, our ruined monuments will stand as a testament to our civilization long after we're gone," she says.
Looking for an idiot with a god complex? Just keep your eyes peeled for the helmetless cyclist wearing headphones. But Royal College of Art Graduate Gemma Roper is looking to change that. She thinks she's come up with a way for cyclists to listen to tunes as they ride, without diminishing their awareness of their environment: a specially designed pair of headphones that can vibrate the music directly into your brain through a bike helmet, while leaving your ears wide open to hear the road.
Dubbed Safe + Sound, the helmet places bone conduction modules on the strap of a standard bicycle helmet strap. These modules take the whatever jam you're listening to and converts them into a high-frequency vibration which is then beamed directly to your cochleas without ever passing through the ear. The result? If you wear this helmet, you'll feel as if you're "hearing" music softly playing directly in your brain, even as your ears stay alert for the tell-tale signs of screeching brakes, honking horns, and oncoming traffic.
There's nothing new about bone conduction technology. You can actually buy a pair of bone conduction headphones for as low as $50 from Amazon. But the major design innovation here is integrating them into a helmet. That said, Safe + Sound's conduction modules aren't stuck there. They can also be removed, transforming into a more stylish pair of over-the-ear cans when you're not on the road, adding a versatile twist.
Biking while listening to music is, of course, still potentially more distracting and dangerous than keeping your full attention on your surroundings. But for regular bike commuters, the temptation to listen to music or a podcast while riding can be irresistible. Roper equates the Safe + Sound experience to listening to music playing through a speaker in a room, as opposed to isolating yourself in a pair of monitors. Sure, you might miss some detail, but at least you're not shutting yourself off from the world...let alone an out-of-control truck blaring its horn for you to get out of the way.
You can read more about the Safe + Sound headphones here.
We build wheelchairs for paraplegics, prosthetic limbs for amputees, yet we ignore the biggest disability of all: death. Why don't we design devices for the dead to communicate with? In an old San Francisco mortuary-turned-gallery space, two morbid artists are doing just that as part of a new exhibition, After Life.
First, there's the art of New York-based Fernando Orellana, who—with tongue planted firmly in cheek—creates magical interfaces between the living and the dead. Orellana mounts a beloved object of a deceased love one in a sleek, wall-mounted box. Sensors then detect minute changes in temperature, infrared light, or electromagnetic energy (the same things that professional ghost hunters look for). If any two of those three things fluctuate at the same time, the box sets the departed's object whirring into motion, whether it's a dictionary, a religious idol, or a Mr. Peanut peanut grinder.
The other artist, San Francisco-based Al Honig, creates idiosyncratic funeral urns out of found objects. Built at human scale, they come in the shapes of spread-eagle birds and '50s-style robots. The idea is to better represent an individual in death by creating an eccentric, personalized avatar for his or her ashes.
Ultimately, the question both Orellana and Honig's art asks is this: Is there a better way to use the things we leave behind to immortalize us? Whether by turning the belongings of the departed into the power sources of otherworldly UIs, or creating sculptural avatar to human quirks, both artists remind us that we leave more behind us when we die than just corpses.
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PillPack had a problem. By sending customers a box of all their medications pre-sorted into chronological packets, the IBD-nominated, Ideo-accelerated startup had reinvented the pillbox for the Netflix age. But PillPack didn't really have a digital component, making it analogous to Netflix without streaming. It also required a leap of faith from customers: you had to switch pharmacies to get any benefit from the service.
So how do you onboard new customers without getting them to switch pharmacies? If you're PillPack, you stream customers their existing meds in digital form by creating the most fully functional, easy to use, and delightfully designed pillbox app out there. And once people are already tracking their medicines through your service, make it as easy as a tap to switch pharmacies.
Available now for iOS, the PillPack app for iPhone and Apple Watch aims to be the "best medication reminder app on the planet, first and foremost," says PillPack CEO T.J. Parker. That starts the second you open the app. Where as most medication reminder apps require you to laboriously type in each and one of your medications and set individual reminders for each of them, PillPack automates almost all of this. All you need to add your medicines to the app is your name, gender, and birthday. PillPack then searches pharmacy databases around the country for your meds, and loads them up. According to Parker, no other medication reminder app currently is able to do this, because they don't have access to the data: you have to be a healthcare provider, or a pharmacy, to do that sort of search.
Once you fill the app with your meds, the user experience is designed to be easy, efficient, and slightly whimsical. A physical PillPack ships as a roll of time-stamped plastic packets filled with pre-sorted pills, so the main screen of the app virtualizes that. When it's time for you to take your meds the app alerts you on your iPhone or Apple Watch, and you have the option to either skip them, or take them, which rips them off the virtual roll.
Right now, reminders in the PillPack app are delivered according to time, or whether you're leaving or arriving at a destination, but Parker says Apple Watch integration opens up some new possibilities down the line. "The idea is that we will be able to build in more and more triggers over time to remind you to take your meds based on the sensors on your phone and wrist," he says. "You can imagine how biometric and activity driven medication reminders start to get really interesting." Parker says they've left the infrastructure of the PillPack app open to make adding such functionality easy once WatchOS 2 ships later this year.
Ultimately, the goal of the app is to let people see what PillPack can do for them without having to sign up first. The app is PillPack's physical service, digitized. "For some folks it feels like a big leap from 'cool service' to 'please transfer my prescriptions to PillPack'," Parker says. "Hopefully over time we can build trust with these folks so that eventually they feel comfortable switching their prescriptions to PillPack ." And if not? Parker says: "We're learning a ton about what it's like for most people to have to manage medications. It only makes sense that we turn that knowledge into useful products."
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Front passenger air bags have been responsible for at least 180 child deaths over the years, many of which occurred in situations which would have been avoided if the child had been riding in the back. Volvo's new concept vehicle, though, imagines putting a rear-facing child seat right in the front of the car by jettisoning the front passenger airbag and putting a parent in back. And the Swedish car maker says it's probably safer for your child than the car seat you're already using.
Volvo's concept is built atop their flagship luxury crossover XC90, a car not specifically designed to appeal to parents—or at least not to those who think of themselves as parents exclusively. The idea is to remove the passenger's seat and replace it with a flexible, adjustable console so that riders in the back can put their feet up, use it as a work desk, and so on. If the office of the future is the driverless car then the XC90 is a small step towards that for people who just can't wait for autonomous vehicles to hit the market already. (Provided they have a chauffeur.)
But the XC90's implementation of a child seat is interesting enough to call out. At first, the idea of putting a rear-facing child seat up front seems dangerous and counterintuitive (our dad-in-resident Mark Wilson was openly horrified), but Volvo's child safety expert Lotta Jakobsson swears its safe. In fact, she tells me it's safer than most aftermarket child seats. "It's important to emphasize the fact that this isn't the same as just putting a child seat in the front of your car," she says in a phone interview. "The danger of allowing children to ride in the front seat is the front passenger airbag." But in the XC90, the passenger airbag is totally disconnected when the child console is installed.
That alone makes it safe for a child to ride in front, and the emphasis the XC90's design puts upon rear-facing child seats makes it even safer. Jakobbson is quick to point out that while rear-facing child seats are universally considered safer than front-facing seats, the standard configuration of most automobiles tempts parents to face their child towards the front, so they can maintain eye contact through the rear view mirror. But by putting the child seat (safely) in the front of the XC90, parents can always maintain eye contact with their kids, whether that's a parent who is driving, or a parent who is riding in the back seat. Given how important eye contact is forging a bond between a parent and a child and helping diagnose autism early, it's a nice touch.
Whether the child seat concept for the XC90 ever hits the market, though, is another thing entirely. Jakobsson says that while there's interest in moving forward with the multi-purpose front seat, Volvo still hasn't made a final decision on bringing the concept to reality. Still, if it were made, Jakobsson doesn't anticipate any hurdles for the vehicle to clear when it comes to safety regulation. As long as your car is designed for it, and the seat faces back, it's safe for your child to ride in front.
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For decades, MTV electrified the frontal lobes of bored teenagers, with only VH1 to compete with. But now it's 2015. MTV is not just competing with other television channels; it's competing with Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, and more flash-in-the-pan social networks too numerous to count.
So how does MTV stay fresh to an audience raised in the GIF-age? It becomes a living GIF itself. Earlier this month, MTV International—which spans more than 160 countries, 32 languages, and 785 million households—rebranded itself. What once was "I Want My MTV" has become "I Am My MTV."
It's a fitting tagline. MTV's new bumpers are filled with grinding Sims, vector cats in sunglasses, rainbow unicorns, and more. The whole rebrand looks like it tapped directly into the millennial id, which is, at the end of the day, MTV's core consumer.
The rebrand is the brainchild of a small team of creatives at MTV International including Sean Saylor, MTV International's creative vice president. Based out of Miami, Saylor calls the aesthetic "online, on-air" and the goal is to give MTV's many satellites and partners a sort of dynamic visual language with which to brand themselves—one that is every bit as vibrant and alive as the web. If most companies' branding manuals are treated like bibles, MTV's is like an emoji app: a constantly updated digital sticker book filled with fun visual elements that can be mixed and matched any way a local market might want, yet remain consistent across the entire MTV brand.
"One thing we wanted to make sure about this rebrand was that it didn't stick to one specific, static aesthetic," Saylor tells me. "We wanted it to constantly be evolving and iterating, like the Internet."
The rebrand is about evolving with MTV's demographic. The last MTV International rebrand was in 2008, and it largely dedicated itself to uniting each MTV affiliate around a common look and feel. Butthat effort essentially froze each individual station's branding in time: you couldn't change one channel without changing all of them. "We felt it was just too structured in the way it worked, which caused it to rapidly lose its authenticity," Saylor says. "For this one, we wanted to make sure that all of the elements could be constantly kept fresh."
The MTV International rebrand comes in three parts. The first is a series of bumpers—short transitional segments up to 15 seconds in length between programs and commercials used to brand the station—by prominent Internet artists like Katie Torn and Johnny Woods. (MTV is going out of its way to court Internet talent. You can read more about that here.
And when all else fails, MTV International has given its network operators the ability to create meme-worthy bumpers just by dragging and dropping. Using an app, MTV's producers can mix elements like backgrounds, emojis, animated characters called invaders, and music to create fresh—but still consistently branded—bumpers. For example, a producer in Brazil could pull in a Vine from Rio de Janeiro, then slap it on a smartphone held by a holographic cat, while a producer in Japan might grab an Instagram from Tokyo and project it on the screen of an arcade console with a naked green man grinding in front of it. And because the elements can be expanded over time, MTV hopes it will be able to keep up with the Internet.
"No matter where in the world you are, we want MTV to feel like a televised GIF," Saylor says. "The way audiences consume media these days, it's disposable. They see something on Facebook or Tumblr, then move on to the next thing. To keep up, MTV has to feel as direct and unpredictable and totally new as a fresh GIF in your feed, every single time."
Of course, it's one thing to channel the aesthetic and spirit of the web, and quite another to compete with it. Can MTV International really compete with a digital frontier that not only comes up with new GIFs daily, but runs them through the subconscious of hallucinating AIs?
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Seph Lawless is obsessed with ruins and abandoned structures, making a career of documenting everything from the abandoned shopping malls of the 1980's (Black Friday: The Collapse of the American Mall) and the decomposition of America's rust belt (Autopsy of America). The Cleveland-based artist and social activist's latest project points the camera lens at the crumbling, candy-colored skeletons of the world's amusement parks, showing that everything is eventually reduced to ruin and rubble.
To assemble Bizarro: The World's Most Hauntingly Beautiful Amusement Parks, Lawless visited 10 abandoned amusement parks, ranging from the Abandoned Wizard of Oz theme park in North Carolina to Berlin's legendary Spreepark, the former GDR-controlled amusement park that served as the third act set piece for the 2011 action thriller film, Hanna).
For dramatic effect, he timed his shots for near sunset, or during severe thunderstorms, giving many of his images a post-apocalyptic quality. According to Lawless, it was Spreepark that was especially memorable. "The architectural style there is creepy in its own right, and most of the rides are still blowing in the breeze," he writes by email, pointing out that he was eventually arrested by German police in Spreepark for trespassing.
But other amusement parks that Lawless visited had different horrors in wait for him. The former Six Flags in New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrine 10 years ago; there, Lawless says, he stumbled upon live alligators hidden throughout the park, lurking in the flood waters. (Lawless says he'll be exploring the ruins of post-Katrina New Orleans in greater detail as part of an upcoming photo essay for The Guardian.)
Asked why he photographs ruins, Lawless says it's because he enjoys tapping into the strong emotional connection people have for relics of the past. "I want to create something beautiful and intimate for the viewer," he writes. "Abandoned malls, abandoned NASCAR speedway tracks and abandoned theme parks were all communal spaces for a lot of people. They shared good times there, formed memories. These people don't want to forget these places, let alone slowly watch them die."
Mixing boards have long been the domain of DJs and music producers, but why haven't hardware interfaces caught on with designers and creatives? If Calvin Chu gets his way, they will. Chu is the inventor of the Palette, a snap-together mixing board that connects over USB to control all sorts of creative apps, including Adobe's CC suite. And he thinks every designer should be channeling their inner DJ.
"The audio world has really had interfaces figured out for decades," Chu says by phone. "It's been under our noses all along. Mixing boards allows you to be hands-on in a way that translates very obviously to photography, video, design, and other types of media."
First launched on Kickstarter in 2014 and now available for sale to everyone, the Palette comes as a series of dial-, slider-, and button-based modules that can be snapped into a central core which then conntects to your computer. The look and feel of the physical interface is only limited by your imagination (and workflow requirements), supporting up to 32 modules at a time. And once you've designed your own physical controller, you can use it with anything.
By default, the Palette is a fully functioning MIDI controller for, meaning it'll work with GarageBand and almost any other audio app for music production and performance. But it's also built to work just fine with non-audio apps. For example, if you spend a lot of time in Photoshop, you could use a dial to saturation levels, a slider to adjust hue, and a button to the select tool. You could even configure the controller with video games, web browsers, movie editing apps, and word processors. All you do is map a keyboard shortcut to the physical control you want to use for it in Palette's companion app.
According to Chu, the idea to create the Palette came to him while he was a student studying human computer interfaces at the University of Waterloo, Canada. "One day, my friend was DJing at a party, walked away for five minutes, and someone stole his deck," Chu remembers. "I was going to make a custom DJ controller for him, but at the same time, I was studying all these different interfaces, and the thought process collided. I was like, why not take the fundamental building blocks of our interfaces and just strap them together so you can use them for anything?"
Chu thinks taking a DJ-style approach to the apps we live in is a natural fit for designers and other creatives, because it allows them to be expressive in their body language as they work."Everyone has a unique style, a unique way of working, and when we're in our zone, that's when we work best," says Chu.
You can order a Palette starter kit starting at $200 here.
We talk about things going viral on social media, but what does a social network designed to literally spread like a virus look like? Look no further than Plag. Currently on iOS and Android, Plag (stylized as Plag**) is a new social media that aims to spread content like a global infection. With a lot less dead bodies, and a lot more cat videos.
In most social networks, you start by choosing people to follow. Not Plag. When you sign up, you're automatically connected to every other Plag user in the world. But that doesn't mean you can send updates directly to them. Instead, each update you make has to spread out as an infection mapped to the physical meatspace around you.
Here's how it works. The app is minimalist and card based, like a streamlined Google Now for content. Let's say I want to post a GIF of my parakeet trying bacon for the first time. In Plag, I create a content card with that GIF, which then "infects" the card stack of the four nearest Plag users. If they like my GIF, they swipe up, spreading the infection to the next four users closest to them. If they don't, they can halt the contagion by swiping down, choosing not to spread it further.
There's not much more to it than that. You can comment on other people's posts, but there's no way to follow individual users. You can see statistics as to how viral your content cards are, but if there's a way that Plag distinguishes itself from other social networks, it's this; ultimately, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social networks are about creating your own personalized communities. Plag, on the other hand, is about taking part in a constantly evolving super-community... a living macro-organism, very much like a virus.
Since it launched late last year, Plag has been doing fairly well. Six weeks after launch, it chalked up over 100,000 users, and my Plag stream is filled with content from as far away as Budapest and Hong Kong. New updates have steadily come to the app over time: for example, a recent update that added a feature in which infections are bounced back by political borders, keeping certain content quarantined to countries. If only real outbreaks were so easily repelled.
Screen-printed posters were an important part of the Bauhaus, Constructivist, and Pop Art movements. To pay homage to that history, François Chambard of New York design studio UM Project has created a screen-printing press with an industrial design that itself resembles a screen-printed poster.
The Print Shop is a new screen printing studio at the Museum of Arts and Design that assembles historic items with contemporary works to showcase the possibilities and legacy of screen-printing. It's a fully functioning print studio, but the centerpiece is the colorful, geometric screen-printing press in the middle of the room.
"When MAD invited me to design the Print Shop, it sounded like such an incredible and unusual opportunity that was appealing on so many levels," Chambard writes in an email. "Immediately images of Bauhaus, Constructivist and Pop Art posters came to mind and were an obvious starting point for design of The Print Shop, and particularly of the print press. In many ways, the design of the print press is a kinetic rendering of a Constructivist poster with simple geometric shapes staggered in a balanced arrangement and punctuated with dynamic lines."
Most manual screen-printing presses are simple machines. They're flat surfaces on which a squeegee applies ink through a screen, and hinged clamps hold the screen in place. Chambard's machine is still simple enough to be run manually, but it's slightly more advanced: for example, the Print Shop press has a vacuum table, which holds the paper in place by air suction alone. Meanwhile, the squeegee is mounted on a sliding arm, which uses a to apply ink to a screen evenly, something which is virtually unheard of outside of automated presses. It all makes for a more reliable, easy-to-use press.
According to Chambard, there was a steep learning curve. "I knew what everybody knew about silk screening, which was very little," Chambard says. "I had to learn things pretty extensively, and quickly, I spent a lot of time in print shops to observe and understand how posters and other things are printed and how silk screening work."
Screenprinting is not as easy as it looks. Even small variations in the way ink is applied to the screen can mess up posters. But Chambard thinks his efforts trying to design a really good one paid off: all the people who have tried his screen-printing machine have walked away with a beautiful poster every time.
Or so he claims. If you want to test those claims for yourself, you can check it out on the sixth floor Open Studios at the New York Museum of Arts and Design. Meanwhile, you can read more information about the project here.
What separates a good reader from someone with low literacy? Everything else being equal, a good reader reads in chunks, skipping over words and grouping them together into phrases and clauses, as opposed to trying to digest them one word or letter at a time. But whether you're a sub-par reader—or just reading in a sub-par scenario—Asymmetrica thinks it can make reading easier for you. Created by Chris Nicholas, a neuroscientist, and Ken Brownfield, an ex-Paypal exec, Asymmetrica is a browser extension for Chrome, Safari, and Internet explorer that tweaks the typography of text on the web to make it easier to comprehend.
Over the last 50 years, cognitive psychologists like George Armitage Miller have shown that 'chunking' a sentence into discrete parts (for example, by drawing lines under phrases, or bracketing clauses) can drastically improve reading comprehension. "The idea is that the brain processes things better when they are organized into higher units of meaning," Nicholas tells me by phone. "So just as you recognize a word faster than a number of individual letters given to you one by one, the same is true of phrases and clauses."
"The idea is that the brain processes things better when they are organized into higher units of meaning," Nicholas tells me by phone. "So just as you recognize a word faster than a number of individual letters given to you one by one, the same is true of phrases and clauses."
Asymmetrica automates the chunking process, taking a web site's text and then adjusting the white space between words to subtly group different parts of a sentence together. As a simple example, Asymmetrica might take the phrase "A dog barked" and insert an extra half-a-space between dog and barked, segmenting the sentence between the subject and the verb. More complicated sentences would have additional space added, adjusting the length of the spaces between words so that their slight differences in length convey a sort of visual rhythm, guiding readers through the sentence with a white space beat.
Once you've installed the browser extension, Asymmetrica's chunking is a nearly invisible thing that all happens automatically. But according to Nicholas, the results can be dramatic. "Lab studies show that depending on the technique, chunking can increase reading comprehension and speed by up to 40%," he says. And that goes for everyone. Even if you're a great reader, he says, Asymmetrica can still help you read better because you're not always reading in optimal conditions: you're reading when you're tired, on smartphones, on subways, or maybe all three at once.
While Asymmetrica is just a browser extension for right now, what really interests Nicholas and Brownfield is the possibility of striking deals with publishers. "A lot of websites really overestimate the literacy rate of their readers," Nicholas says. According to the National Adult Literacy Survey, up to 23% of Americans have literacy rates low enough that they might struggle to fill out a government form. A back-end way to typographically "chunk" content could have an equally big impact to publisher's engagement metrics and click rates.
"The dream is to see this built into something like Facebook," Brownfield says. The day when Asymmetrica runs by default on the world's largest social network is still far off. In the meantime, you can see whether or not Asymmetrica helps your web reading by downloading their browser extension.
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There was a time when keeping your cell phone charged without a working electricity grid seemed like a third-world problem. Not anymore. According to the Department of Energy, aging electrical infrastructure, increased population, and more extreme weather due to climate change have increased the number of American grid outages six-fold in the last 15 years, from 44 in 2000 to over 200 in 2013.
Given the increased likelihoods of power outages around the world, Andy Byrnes, co-founder of the alternative energy and Stanford design school startup Stower, thinks he has come up with a product everyone should have in their homes. It's called the Candle Charger, and it's a collapsible mini-stove that can charge a modern smartphone twice over six hours, just by heating up a can of Sterno.
The Candle Charger is not Stower's first product aimed at charging gadgets with fire. In 2014, Byrnes and his partners launched a successful Kickstarter for the Flamestower, a rugged stove you could put over an open campfire to charge your USB gadgets. It worked by using a blade extended into an open fire, then using the temperature differential between that blade and the relative coolness of a reservoir of water, a principal known as a thermodynamic effect. The Flamestower worked great, and since then, Stower has helped build that technology into a few third-party camping stoves. Yet the Flamestower was more of an outdoor product, and not super portable.
"We found a huge percentage of our customers were buying the Flamestower for home preparedness, but it's not really designed to work indoors," Byrnes tells me in a phone interview. "We wanted to design something that was safe, more personal, and could be used indoors, which is where the idea of building it around a candle came from."
The Candle Charger uses the same thermodynamic principles as the Flamestower, but instead of an open flame, it works by burning off a can of jellied alcohol, which is suitable for indoors. The design is built to be rugged and collapsible, meaning it can easily fit into most home preparedness kits. Despite its small and humble form factor, though, it generates a lot of juice, especially compared to other off-the-grid power sources. Byrnes says that while a hand-cranked generator might take ten hours of cranking to charge a smartphone to 100%, the Candle Charger can charge two smartphones to 100% in just six hours, saving your arms if not your Sterno supply.
With weather likely to get more extreme in the coming years, and our power grid only getting older, Byrnes says that the day could be coming when grid failures are just as much a part of the average American's life as they are in India, Africa, or Guatemala. Reason enough, Byrnes hopes, that customers will consider backing his Kickstarter, where a Candle Charger can currently be ordered for $65.
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