Bend your smartphone today, and it'll probably break. Bend it three years from now, and it could snap a photo or turn a page in an e-book.
So suggests Roel Vertegaal, a professor of human-computer interaction at Queen's University's School of Computing in Ontario. Vertegaal thinks that the time is fast approaching when deformable screens will inform not just smartphone design but pretty much all computers.
The big breakthrough that is making flexible displays possible is organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs. This display type, used in the Apple watch and many Samsung and LG phones, makes plastic, deformable displays possible.
These screens aren't just another smartphone gimmick, says Vertegaal, like Samsung's weird dual-edge displays. Even in the short term, they could potentially open up a number of UI affordances to device makers, and these have the potential to be every bit as revolutionary as the touchscreen. To prove it, Vertegaal and his team built a prototype based on Android that showed how useful a bendy UI could be.
Called the Reflex, Vertegaal's deforming smartphone features a flexible plastic screen, coupled with some haptic motors for feedback. By bending the screen, the Reflex allows users to do things such as quickly flip through pages in an e-book. The more you bend the Reflex, the faster the pages flip, providing a navigation experience more in tune with a physical book. The same affordance can be used to pull back a slingshot in Angry Birds, allowing you to actually feel the resistance growing as you bend the Reflex. And because the screen is flexible and made of plastic, it's harder to break than your average smartphone, which generally consists of a glass screen, a rigid circuit board, and batteries.
That's all Vertegaal has shown off for the Reflex so far, but the mind leaps at other UI opportunities. Imagine, for example, being able to take a fisheye photo just by bending your smartphone. How about pinning an email by bending down a corner of your iPhone, almost like a bookmark? Switching keyboards while you're texting, by lightly flexing the screen? Or fast forwarding or rewinding through a YouTube video the same way? Bendable screens make all of these affordances possible, and more.
When Apple released the iPhone 6s with a force-sensitive screen, we hailed it as an effort to solve the biggest problem in mobile. Smartphone and tablet operating systems have no depth. They are designed to be shallow. For the most part, anything you do on a smartphone or tablet takes you to another screen to do it. One tap, one screen, one action. 3D Touch tried to change the game by introducing the equivalent of a "right click" to iOS, but developers still aren't doing much with it, and it's relatively hidden to casual users. Depth could be exploited in a mobile operating system with a deformable screen.
For example, imagine a device where just bending the screen could whisk away UI elements and replace them with others. Instead of swiping through pages of apps on your iOS home screen, you could just scrobble through them by bending your iPhone. Or think about trying to use Photoshop on your iPad Pro: By default, the UI might be programmed to show the simplest, most user-friendly options, but by curling your tablet a little, more sophisticated tools and options could be exposed. "I absolutely think that in the near future, bendable screens will be as ubiquitous in smartphone design as rigid touchscreens," Vertegaal says in a phone interview.
Practically speaking, it makes sense. Bendable screens are hardier than rigid, two-dimensional screens made out of glass that shatters if you flex it more than a couple degrees, especially when you're trying to do things like put them in pockets, shove them in bags, and wear them. These days, we sneer at dumb phones. The time may be coming when we talk just as dismissively about rigid phones.
Vertegaal thinks that bendable screens will pave the way for truly organic computing, in which every object is a computer. Imagine a Coke can with a seamless screen wrapped around it. This Coke can could function as its own app, revealing nutritional information about the contents with a swipe of the bar code. Vertegaal is convinced that bendy screens will eventually make this sort of organic computing possible. Because it's not enough for screens to just be able to curve: They also have to be limber enough to stand up to the rigors of real life.
Coke cans with built-in screens are likely pretty far away, but how long until bendable smartphones are mainstream? Vertegaal pegs them as coming out within the next three to five years. There are some challenges ahead—circuit boards don't like to be bent, for example—but it's nothing that can't be designed around, as Vertegaal has, by making sure that flexible screens and rigid components aren't sandwiched together. So while bendable smartphones might feel like sci-fi now, give them a couple of generations. When you tuck your iPhone 9 into your back pocket, it may well flex to conform to the contours of your butt.
Nayana Malhotra loves GIFs. Loves them. When she's not designing new fashions, she's filling her Tumblr with GIF after GIF. Now, the GIF-loving designer has figured out how to merge the two. Her new fashion experiment, Neurocouture, combines projection-mapping and brainwave detection to let people literally clothe themselves in their favorite animated files.
Debuting as part of VFiles' show at New York Fashion Week, Neurocouture is a projection-mapped parka hooked up to consumer-grade EEG devices. A nearby computer is programmed to detect certain brainwave patterns, then translate them into an animated GIF—which is then projected onto the parka as a sort of living animated texture.
So if you're feeling angry, Neurocouture could cloak you in the apoplectic visage of Donald Trump. Embarrassed after tripping? Raptor mascot eats it. Heart a-flutter after a good date? These cute kissing ghosts. "The awesome thing about GIFs is that they're decontextualized and universal," says Malhotra. The idea, she says, is to use GIFs in fashion the same way we use them on the Internet: to express the things we're not saying.
How did she come up with the idea? Malhotra thinks that some of it is reflective of her background. Born in India, where she had to "hack" her way into having access to media, Malhotra moved to high-tech Singapore, which she describes as "very Disneyland with the death penalty." This rapid transition from no tech to high tech helped make Malhotra hyper-aware of the relationship between technology and culture. After moving to New York in 2008 to study design at Parsons, the ideas behind Neurocouture clicked into place. "That's really where it started coming together for me," she says. "I wanted to find a way to wear the Internet in the language of GIFs."
Because the project requires projection mapping and an EEG headset, Neurocouture isn't exactly street fashion. But Malhotra says that she thinks animated fabrics and living textiles are a viable prediction for the future of fashion, and more. "What if you got into a car whose body responded to your mindstate?" she muses. And she's not the only one who's thinking that way. More and more designers are imagining a similar future for paint and pattern—when changing the look of your clothes or your cars will be as easy as changing the wallpaper on your smartphone.
Brutalism is a design movement that exists in the macro scale of cities, not the micro scale of desktops. But maybe it should be the other way around, considering how button cute this little Brutalist lamp by Kikkerland is.
The Tetromino-shaped concrete lamp plugs into a USB port, sipping power from your computer or laptop to bathe a small square of desk real estate with LED light. What's really cute about it, though, is that it's not just a lamp: The design also allows it to serve as a bed for a succulent or other house plant.
Brutalism came into fashion after World War II largely because it was functional and—thanks to its focus on using raw materials like concrete—pragmatic. But over time, the stylization of this focus on materials developed its own instantly recognizable language. This lamp might be tiny compared to the massive geometric forms we usually associate with the design movement, true, but it definitely reflects the functional side of Brutalism. It's also just as pragmatically priced: when Kikkerland's lamp ships in March, it'll cost just $30.
Charles Listo Vera, prison ID #A1-61401, is serving 19 years for attempted manslaughter. One of his pastimes is drawing portraits, some of which his family sells on eBay. His latest portrait, though, was done for nothing: it's a pencil drawing of a man Vera thinks deserves to be in prison more than he does. A man whose actions Vera feels help support child slavery and infanticide: Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chairman of Nestlé.
Vera did this portrait for Captured, a project overseen by Jeff Greenspan (formerly BuzzFeed's chief creative officer) and Andrew Tider, which pairs incarcerated artists with corporate executives of their choosing who, Greenspan and Tider feel, should be in prison, but aren't. The project has resulted in over 28 portraits of business leaders at Coca-Cola, FIFA, Goldman Sachs, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Walmart, and more, all drawn by talented prisoners spread across the country.
The Koch Brothers
According to Tider, the idea for Captured came after the pair binged on environmental documentaries. "We were seeing all of these egregious acts perpetrated by major corporations, with nobody going to prison as a result. It struck us that any ordinary person would certainly be jailed for the things these corporations do," Tider says. They wondered what prison inmates would think. Eventually, this idea distilled itself into Captured: people in prison drawing people who should be.
Finding prison artists to contribute to Captured turned out to be surprisingly tricky, though. At first, Tider and Greenspan approached prison wardens and individuals who ran prison art programs. It turned out to be a dead end, so Greenspan started reaching out to prison artists who were selling their drawings on eBay, through their families. Eventually, Tider says, the project went "viral" within the U.S. prison system, as inmates who were participating spread news of the project through word of mouth.
Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs
The resulting portraits run the gamut from the precocious to the garishly inept, the almost loving to the nightmarishly succulent. All together, the finished portraits have been anthologized as part of a limited edition art book, currently on sale for $40, with Greenspan and Tider planning to donate all profits toward efforts to elect Bernie Sanders as president (although all of it won't go directly to the Sanders campaign).
More broadly, Tider is hoping that Captured will encourage more consumers to stop supporting unethical businesses. The next time you buy a Nestlé bar, Tider hopes you'll think about Charles Listo Vera, rotting in prison, and Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, walking around free, despite evidence in 2001 that its cocoa may have been produced by hundreds of thousands of child slaves. "By not supporting companies endangering our health and freedom, and by questioning a system that wields punishment so unevenly," Tider says, "we can stop being mute witnesses."
Sure, digital design apps might be finally coming into their own, but there's still nothing better than pen and paper. Here at Co.Design, we're notebook fetishists, so we recently asked a slew of designers about their favorites—and whether they would mind giving us a look inside.
It turns out they didn't. Across multiple disciplines, almost every designer we asked was thrilled to tell us about their notebook of choice and give us a look at how they use it. Our operating assumption going in was that most designers would probably be pretty picky about their notebooks, but this turned out not to be true: While Muji and Moleskine notebooks were the common favorites, some even preferred loose paper.
But what makes the notebooks of designers special isn't so much what notebook they use, as how they use them. Below, enjoy a peek inside the working notebooks of some of the most prolific designers today—as well as their thoughts on what makes a great one.
"[My favorite notebook] is plain, simple tracing paper, (Bienfang's Parchment 100), and a medium-width felt-tip pen, such as Flair's PaperMate. Yet I am not picky. Anything goes, ballpoint, pencil, and more.
"It's just a quick (and dirty!) way of getting to the core of ideas quickly and moving forward."
"Since 1982, I've been using slightly different versions of the same 7-1/2 by 9-3/4-inch school composition book. I save all of them and am now on number 110. I never go anywhere without my notebook. They are so important to me that the first chapter in my new book is dedicated to them, and I reproduce nine spreads from them at actual size. At my recent retrospective at the School of Visual Arts Gallery, an entire room was dedicated to them.
"I like them because they are inexpensive, easy to find, and anything but precious. I could never use a leather-bound notebook. This page is about 20 years old and shows sketches for a logo for my brother Donald's business."
"For under $3, it's the perfect thing for capturing quotes, notes, and ideas without feeling so precious that I'm afraid to make a mark. It has the added benefits of being a) perfectly pocketable—fitting snugly in the back pocket of any pair of jeans—and b) precisely sized to support a three-by-five-inch pad of Post-its. If you've ever tried to brainstorm standing up, it's devilishly difficult to draw with a floppy pad of Post-its, so having a notebook as a backstop is magic."
"A number of years ago, I was headed down to Austin for SXSW and realized that I had forgotten a notebook. I happened to be in JFK so popped into the Muji store in T5 and grabbed a storyboard notebook, which has a preprinted grid of eight boxes on each page. The notebooks are super-cheap—around $2—as they are printed on recycled paper. You can also buy a sleeve for them, which is made of the same material as the brown patches on the back of your blue jeans, which I custom silk-screen. I generally go through two to three notebooks a year.
"I used to be one of those people who took copious notes in client meetings, which I rarely referred back to. As I got to be a bit more senior, I realized that there was a healthy digital trail for most meetings—agendas, files, and electronic meeting notes that were far more accurate than what I was capturing. So what was left?
"In most meetings, there are a few choice quotes, metaphors, or data points that really strike me, so I began capturing these visually. They serve as a sort of mnemonic device. For each meeting, I generally fill out a page or two of these little squares, which I can easily skim to remember not just the content but the intent of the discussion. These storyboards also give me license to doodle, which helps me to maintain my focus as a visual person."
"My notebook of choice for the last 15 years has been the Muji grid-line B5 notebook [for] several reasons: It has a stitched binding that allows it to lay flat without cracking the spine like a perfectly bound notebook. The notebooks are thin enough to allow a pen to clip into the notebook at any page. I love the size of the page, and the contrast and scale of the grid lines are just right."
"I've kept notebooks since I was a kid. I go through phases and swap them out every few years. I buy notebooks obsessively, usually a couple at a time. Right now, I'm using Magma notebooks by Laurence King Publishing. My favorites are from Japan. Marks unknown.
"I like notebooks with graph paper, notebooks that include heavy-weight unruled paper, notebooks with built-in page saver ribbons and elastic closures. I also like notebooks that have some heft . . . 100 pages at least.
"I'm not a morning person, but I have kids, so I walk out the door with them. They head off to the bus and I walk to work. I spend the first 15 minutes of the day in the empty office doodling, listening to music, and thinking about what I need to do that day. The lack of agenda often leads me to my best ideas."
"I think all of my notebooks are favorites in their own right. I go through at least one notebook every month and sometimes have a few going simultaneously. I started doing daily journals when I was seven years old and always used them to document what I dreamed of achieving in life, and notes from everyday matters and meetings. Later on in life, I realized the power of words and visual brainstorms (mind-mapping), and in this context my notebooks have become my own personal life guides.
"I like to buy notebooks and build collections based on covers, paper quality, sizes, colors, etc. What makes a notebook a favorite is based on the content I put into them. Those that become the beginning of bigger visions and dreams that I can almost taste when I do them become favorites."
"I normally don't use notebooks. Instead, I sketch and take visual notes on letter-sized blank sheets of paper that I afterward catalog in different folders.
"The main reason I prefer loose sheets of paper to [bound] notebooks is that they give a more natural way to organize and reorganize my sketches over time, especially since I always have multiple projects [and] topics that I need to think about. I simply carry white paper with me all the time (and Muji ink pens!), I sketch or draw whatever idea comes to mind, and I then archive my sketches on transparent plastic folders labeled with the name of the project they belong to. (I indeed have my obsessive method in cataloging my sketches, but this is another story).
"Moreover, I love the beautiful sensation [of drawing] on a white canvas with no binding, and I also believe there is a value in being able to see your five or six sketches in the same place, as opposed to flipping though a notebook's pages.
"If I need to use a notebook, I would use a big-sized Moleskine. I needed to use it for the Dear Data project, since Stefanie Posavec and I decided to sketch our intermediate data drawing on comparable paper."
"The Moleskin books have it all—the paper is nice, the binding allows them to lay flat. The elastic band and the pocket at the back mean you can carry lots of extra papers and bits and pieces with them. At a recent meet-up with a bunch of other creatives, I noticed more than half were using the same sketchbook."
"My notebooks are all these same-sized little black notebooks that are constantly being given to me at various conferences. I also bought a few in Japan with interesting covers. I ended up with stacks of them in my office dating back to years at Frog.
"I'm not much of a detailed note taker since others who work with me are tasked with that chore. Instead, I tend to create a lot of conceptual maps and little product drawings. Anything to recollect a spark or inspiration that occurs in a meeting."
"I'll grab whatever is in front of me, but I do love the Japanese notebooks that we have in the Argo studio [from Muji]. It's a nice Goldilocks size [7-by-10-inch]. Slim binding. Faint ruling, so that it's helpful but not competitive to my sketches."
"[My favorite notebook is] from Manufactum. It has lots of pages of very light, slightly yellow paper (60 gsm), it's very flexible, and it has two reading bands. The edges are painted silver."
Max Temkin's notebook, featuring a game he dubs "Destructo."
"I always have a Field Notes brand notebook in my pocket, and that is my go-to notebook for quick capture and sketching. At work, I use Action Method products (like the Action Method pad) to take notes in meetings and turn that into actionable items in Omnifocus.
"In the shower, I use a pencil and Aquanotes notepad. This is actually a great place for my brainstorming process, and I will often turn to a long shower to work out a tricky problem or dilemma.
"I like Field Notes because it is totally fungible. I never have to think twice about writing in my Field Notes or even ripping a page out to share with someone. In the past, when I've used Moleskines or other fancy notebooks, I've often questioned whether something was worth writing down or not: 'Is this thought really good enough to go in the Moleskine?' That's not what you want if you're trying to capture ideas quickly."
"It is like a classic white button-down shirt. It never hurts to have a few and it will never fail you. I love the inner pocket for loose swatches or cards and the plain layout allows for sketching as well as note taking."
"I'm always impressed with illustrated sketch notes and OCD color-coded grid system note keeping. But it's just not my style. It's not how my brain works. I keep two specific books. Actually, I have a book for each brain hemisphere, a right side and a left side.
"I'm a casual sketchbook user, usually a Strathmore acid free, hardcover, 8.5 by 11 inches. I naturally draw letters between one- and three-inches high, so I find the larger size better for what I draw most often.
"I always keep a daily planner, and have been for more than 10 years straight. My middle school teachers would be proud. I use this to track things like to-do lists, appointments, and notes. I'm in love with Passion Planner because of the layout, focus on goal planning, and the little Zen tidbits. This is pretty meta, but it's a goal of mine to have one of my typefaces used in a daily planner.
"As a bonus, I take those tiny little pocket-sized notebooks with me to AIGA talks or conferences for quick notes. In general, I find taking notes with a computer or phone too distracting for me. Something always comes up.
"I don't think there is a right or wrong answer when it comes to notebooks. You just have to figure out what works best for you, and what you're working on. I read some productivity advice once, and one of the bullets was 'Your memory sucks.'"
"This spread is for a personal project I'm working on—an interactive sculpture. I was trying to figure out how to embed fiber optics in a cement mold and what effects I could achieve. Truly thinking on paper."
"I love my Miquelrius journal. It has a soft leather-like cover, which bends without getting damaged whenever I put it in and [take it] out of my bag or purse. I take my journal everywhere, so it has to be able to handle the daily abuse. My notebook isn't precious; it's a workhorse. This one has held up really well, especially considering the price point (under $12). After half a year of use, I can still bring it into client meetings without being embarrassed. I love its small grid pattern (although I mostly ignore it) instead of lines that encourage writing over drawing. The grid pattern allows me to write, sketch, or diagram with ease. This notebook seems to have an infinite amount of pages! My current notebook is six months old, and I've only filled 75% of it.
"I capture anything I'm thinking about or working on. Thus, my notebooks are an unfiltered documentation of my professional work, personal projects, lectures I attend, people I meet, recommendations from friends of things I should check out, and doodles. I save all of my journals. It's great to flip through old journals and see what I was thinking about on any given day."
What makes us creative? Nothing, says Seema Sharma. Instead of a stifling void, she views nothingness as the wellspring of creativity, which is why she created Write Nothing in Here, a doodle and sketchbook that is the Seinfeld of notebooks: It's all about nothing.
Wait a second. Isn't every blank notebook about nothing? That's true, but Write Nothing in Here isn't just empty. It's a paean to nothingness: a notebook filled with quotes and writing prompts about nothing as a concept, not just as an absence of content. Write Nothing in Here demands that you take the empty page as a necessary part of the creative process.
"Every book is either about something or forces you to think in a certain direction. I like to let go of all directions and inspire people to do the same. I think that nothing is a perfect stepping stone to creating and coming up with the most amazing thing," says Sharma.
Sharma points out that when we're kids, a white piece of paper is a riotous playground for our imaginations, but as adults, we can find its blankness intimidating. That's why so many notebooks these days have margins stuffed with writing prompts, inspirational quotes, daily schedules, and drawing grids. Sharma supposes that if we got back to being inspired by the blankness of a page, as opposed to being intimidated by it, we'd be more creative.
Is Write Nothing in Here a gimmick? Sure. But it's a clever one, being perhaps the most meta blank notebook you can find. And Sharma's right: no one should be intimidated by a blank page. It's a universe of possibility unto itself. After all, even the best notebooks start from nothing.
Write Nothing in Here is available from Amazon for $17.
As writers, we're endlessly fascinated by the idiosyncrasies of authors and the way they use punctuation. Yet how much can the way authors use punctuation really reveal about their style? Plenty, it turns out.
Over on Medium, Adam Calhoun decided to strip eight of his favorite novels down to just the punctuation. The novels he chose were James Joyce's Ulysses, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, and William Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!.
Adam Calhoun
Like previous efforts to cut away everything but punctuation from famous novels, this left just a stream-of-consciousness staccato of commas, periods, question marks, quotation marks, and the occasional semi-colon to represent each book. But instead of merely turning his efforts into pretty posters, Calhoun actually analyzed them, visualizing the punctuation of these novels in a way that put their punctuation use in perspective.
His resulting charts aren't visually sophisticated, but they are informative. For example, in one chart, Calhoun visualizes punctuation density, or how many words (on average) an author puts in a row before he throws in a punctuation mark. Surprisingly, Hemingway actually uses punctuation more densely than Jane Austen, William Faulkner, or Charles Dickens, a finding that might have more to do with Hemingway's short, crisp sentences than anything else.
Calhoun also breaks down each novel by most-used punctuation mark, highlighting each author's favorite. Commas and punctuation marks tend universally to be the most-used marks, but some authors have a fondness for apostrophes (Mark Twain), exclamation points (Lewis Carroll), and semi-colons (William Faulkner).
Adam Calhoun
My favorite charts, however, are Calhoun's heat maps, which assign colors to different punctuation marks (periods and question marks are red, commas and quotation marks are blue, semicolons and colons are blue) and then simply places them in order. It really helps show how much more well-rounded some authors are (Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens) with punctuation than others (Cormac McCarthy, James Joyce), as well as surface surprising patterns, like the bright streak of red running through the middle of Huckleberry Finn.
The best thing about Calhoun's experiments is that he has made the code freely available for taking the text of your favorite book and getting a breakdown of how it uses punctuation. If you've got the chops, try it for yourself.
For more than 30 years, the Film Independent Spirit Awards has been held a day or two before the Oscars to recognize the independent films and filmmakers all too often overlooked by the Academy Awards.
But this year's 31st Annual Spirit Awards will look a bit different, thanks to new identity courtesy of Pentagram. Overseen by Pentagram's Emily Oberman, the aim was to help the Spirit Awards shed the "grungy" reputation independent film is often saddled with, in favor of something bright, colorful, and more dynamic.
An identity almost two years in the making, Pentagram's team (Jonathan Correira, Todd Goldstein, and Franziska Stetter, overseen by Oberman) started by working on last year's Spirit Awards, throwing out the old Film Independent logo as they went. "It just wasn't conveying who Film Independent was in a dramatic way," Oberman says. "The logo was too long, and no one knew what the grease paint was about." Instead, they replaced it with a placeholder wordmark in plain, all-caps Helvetica, used in a series of colorful, typography-based animations for the various award category intros. The placeholder approach worked to give the design team some breathing room—a kind of blank canvas from which a fully redesigned identity could take shape.
What was useful about this exercise, says Oberman, was that it allowed Pentagram to do a dry-run with a lot of the concepts it would end up using in the 2016 Spirit Awards, now with a totally overhauled identity. After serving as Film Independent's placeholder font, Helvetica's now out. Replacing it in both the Film Independent logo and the larger Spirit Awards identity is a custom typeface called Font Independent.
As used by Film Independent, the new typeface is designed to look good when typeset in untraditional ways. For example, Oberman says that originally, Film Independent wondered if its name was too long, and asked Pentagram to investigate whether it should consider a new one. "What we discovered was their name wasn't too long, their logo was," Oberman laughs. Using the Font Independent typeface, the new logo is stacked to be broken up over several lines.
Created for Pentagram by Grilli Type, Oberman describes the new typeface as looking "like Saul Bass and Jean-Luc Godard had a baby." The all-caps geometry of the letters is all West Side Story ("You can't go wrong ripping off Saul Bass," Oberman jokes, referring to Bass's iconic work on the film); the lowercase 'i', meanwhile, apes the French director's famous typographical quirk as seen in his films Les Chinoise and Pierrot Le Fou ("It represents the common man," explains Oberman.). Font Independent was also designed to be dynamic and easy to animate. "When we used it in motion graphics, we wanted it to look like blocks of ice pushed across a frozen lake," Oberman says.
For this year's Spirit Awards, Pentagram created around thirty motion graphic sequences that will be used to introduce Spirit Award categories like Best Director, Best Actor, and so on. Each sequence makes a nod to the history of film: one might be animated so it looks like Darth Vader's Tie Fighter spinning off into space in Star Wars, while another sequence might be slanted so that it evokes the Hollywood sign at night. "Without there being a distinct plot, we wanted each sequence to have a sort of animator's logic," says Oberman. Pentagram also wanted its new on-air graphics to feel a little more cinematic, so it treated each segment with a different film-based technique: for example, by exposing them to light leaks, or playing with the camera's depth-of-field.
Although bits and pieces of Pentagram's work for Film Independent have rolled out over the course of the last year, this Saturday's Spirit Awards celebration will mark the first time all the elements come together into a single identity—and Oberman and her team have literal front row seats for its unveiling. As for whether she plans on dropping by the Oscars after? Not this year, Oberman says, but never say never: "I'd kill to work on the Academy Awards." Maybe next year?
In addition to his 38 classic plays, William Shakespeare also wrote 154 sonnets that gave the world some of his most memorable lines ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"). In Sonnet Signatures, digital artist Nicholas Rougeux visualizes each sonnet as a sweeping, signature-like glyph that is a geometric representation of the beautiful poetry contained within.
To create the signatures, Rougeux took each of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, stripped them of their punctuation, then assigned each letter used a numerical value (a=1, b=2, c=3, and so on). He then used the number of letters on each line as his x axis, and the total value of the letters as his y axis. Plotting these points on a grid, Rougeux connected each sonnet line with a sweeping exaggerated stroke, in the order the lines appear in the sonnet.
Although they look random, the resulting signatures are strangely compelling. Some look like bizarre squiggles, while others resemble beautiful calligraphy. It's unlikely that the shape of each signature would tell you much about the sonnet it was based on by itself, but there's still something beautiful about them. You can almost imagine a prospective lover memorizing them to scrawl in the margins of a love letter, or someone asking for one of these signatures to be imprinted upon a locket to give to a partner.
Like Rougeux's previous literary visualizations, the Sonnet Signatures are available for purchase as prints, either individually (with the sonnet itself written out) or as one mega-print (without the full text of the sonnets). Each one costs around $28, and can be purchased directly from Rougeux's website here.
Since construction was completed in 1973, the Sydney Opera House has become one of the most iconic buildings in the world. Over 8 million people a year take a picture in front of the building's rippling sails, but only a small fraction of those people—less than 350,000—actually walk through the doors for a guided tour. And although the Sydney Opera House is a popular arts destination, with over 1.2 million attendees a year, the venue doesn't have much of an identity of its own, independent of the building's soaring facade.
That's a shame because the Sydney Opera House was never meant to be seen as just a shell, says Kieren Cooney, CEO of Interbrand Australia. The content of the Sydney Opera House was meant to be seen as one with its exterior; you were supposed to want to go in as much as you wanted to walk around it. Now, Interbrand Australia has created a new identity for the Sydney Opera House that Cooney hopes will finally succeed in integrating the organization's iconic exterior with the vibrant arts inside.
Inspired by the interplay of geometry, light, and shadow of the building's exterior, Interbrand Australia's new identity encompasses a custom typeface, a new logo (an abstract, geometric representation of the Opera House's profile), and a visual language that references the building's iconic architecture, without beating you over the head with it. "At the heart of it, we wanted to help the Sydney Opera House reassert its purpose," Cooney says. "To be a source of inspiration within a building, not just a building."
It's a problem unique to the starchitecture age, of which the Sydney Opera House—designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon in 1957—is arguably the proto-example. Everyone wants an iconic building. But what happens when your building is too famous? How do you refocus attention when the building is viewed as more important than the cultural institution it was designed to promote?
To understand Interbrand's approach, Cooney says it's important to understand the history of the Sydney Opera House. It was commissioned at a time when Australia, formerly regarded as a backwater colony, had just stepped onto the world stage as one of the Allied victors of World War II. "Up until that point, people had very simple ideas about what Australia was about," explains Cooney. "But Australia's premier at the time, Joseph Cahill, understood that not only is public infrastructure important to the building of a nation, but so was building an infrastructure of the arts. So he put out the challenge to make an arts center." This arts center, which became the Sydney Opera House, had "huge, noble, lofty goals," Cooney says. "The project was a crucial part of Australia working out who we wanted to be, and how the world saw us."
In other words, the Sydney Opera House's original purpose was to shift perspectives. Shifting perspectives is also the goal (and even the name!) of the Sydney Opera House's new identity. "We looked to the structure's details for inspiration," Cooney says. "Most of the shapes we use are inspired by the building itself, which is both beautiful in its magnitude, and beautiful in miniature."
The identity includes a new custom typeface, Utzon. Designed by Swiss typographer Laurenz Brunner, Utzon's letters are beveled so that any given glyph is made up of multiple slopes and angles. When animated with a light source, these bevels create dramatic shadow patterns, which evoke the Sydney Opera House at sundown. And these letters don't just exist as vectors: they have been designed to be real-world objects, so that they can be used as physical signage, and illuminated by real light sources.
Another key element of the identity are the colorful new sails used to tie together its posters, commercials, and other marketing materials. The sails emulate the subtle chevron pattern of the Sydney Opera House's exterior, but unlike Utzon's shells, they aren't monochromatic: They are vibrantly colored with shades plucked from the famous tapestries (designed by Utzon, with contributions from Le Corbusier) which hang on the inside of the building. It's another example of how Interbrand Australia is trying to unite what goes on inside the Sydney Opera House with its exterior. These sails look good in static form (for example, as the background pattern on a poster for an upcoming program), but like everything about the new identity, also lend themselves to motion. "When you walk around the building, it feels like it moves," explains Cooney. "We wanted our work to have the same effect."
It's a little too early to tell if the opera house's new identity will push the attendance needle: It only started rolling out in December. But by another metric, Interbrand Australia has already succeeded in what it set out to do: The new identity looks native to the place, not retrofitted. When Utzon sat down at his desk to draft the original design of the Sydney Opera House, he didn't simultaneously create an integrated brand identity for the organization his arts center would house. But now, thanks to Interbrand Australia, it looks like he did.
Splitting her time between Los Angeles, New York, and Berlin, Aja Edmond isn't just a minimalist by choice: luggage only being so large, she's one by necessity. And she doesn't think she's alone. "Everyone talks about minimalism as a niche, but if it's a niche, it's a large one," she says. "I think it's more than that. When we look back, I think minimalist design will end up being the style that defines our generation."
A lifestyle brand strategist whose past clients include Ralph Laurent, Gilt, and eBay, Edmond's new project is Minimalism & Co, a subscription box surface that appeals to fellow design ascetics. For $105 each ($95 for subscribers), Minimalism & Co. will ship an appropriately minimalist box of themed lifestyle goods to your doorstep, sourced from indie designers, mom-and-pop shops, and smaller design brands. All items are dual-gender in nature, and were chosen to be highly functional.
The first box, which just shipped out, is themed around Travel Essentials. It contains a Memobottle, a slim, flat canteen shaped the size and shape of an A6 notebook; a sleek Baggu flat pouch made of black leather or gray suede; and a Siwa paper passport case, a washi paper travel wallet made in Japan that can be used to safely store all sorts of valuables. The next parcel, shipping in May or June, will focus on beauty and grooming, while the following box will have the theme "fall style."
Minimalism & Co. isn't the first design-centric subscription box we've seen. One way it is trying to differentiate itself, though, is by shipping quarterly instead of monthly. Part of the reason for that, Edmond says, is that it doesn't make sense to preach minimalism and then send people a box of random crap every four weeks. "We want to be thoughtful on how we craft these parcels," she says, before throwing some shade at the likes of Birchbox. "The last thing we want to do is just shove a bunch of free samples in a box every month."
Which raises an important point: in the aftermath of Birchbox's success, the market for subscription boxes seems oversaturated. My Subscription Addiction, a site devoted to cataloguing and reviewing subscription boxes, currently lists over 1,000 different subscription box services. Is there really room for another one? But Edmond says looking at subscription boxes as a "market" is a mistake. "At the end of the day, subscription is just a form of distribution, same as an online shop or a storefront," she says. "It's a discovery engine. The way you distribute isn't as important as finding an audience, and paying attention to the product and experience."
And does Edmond think she's found that audience? Minimalism & Co. has just started shipping out boxes, but over 1,000 people have expressed interest. Minimalism & Co. also has a Tumblr with over 20,000 followers. Those numbers bode well for Edmond's thesis that the market for minimalism is more than just a niche.
As technology takes over our lives, we're all trying to figure out a balance between our always-on mindsets and healthy, mindful living. Unread Messages is a new exhibition at London's Aram Gallery that explores how design can help bridge the digital and the analog. Curated by creative agency Six:Thirty, five different designers will put projects on display as part of the show. These interactive products have all been designed to help people explore healthier relationships with technology.
Dean Brown's Social Storage tries to reimagine the role of physical objects in the digital age. When things were analog, shelves were just as much about storing your books, records, and pictures as they were about showing off who you were. That's no longer possible now that the media that reflects people's interests is just a bunch of bytes stored on their phones. That's why Brown's shelves feature blank sculptures of a few books, an album, a statue, a frame, and even a plant. With the help of some projection mapping, these physical shelves can reflect an owner's digital interests.
Matan Stauber's concept Away from the Moon uses a person's distance from a screen to control UI. You know how you lean in when you want to see more detail in a painting, or stand away when you want to see the whole thing at once? Stauber's concept takes the same approach with online articles. Using a laptop's webcam, it tracks a reader's distance from the screen. When a reader is farther away, the whole of an article is displayed. When they lean in, though, they can drill down into the details of the article in a larger, more readable font.
Matteo Loglio's Nōmu is a series of four, brightly colored blocks that act like a tool for planning out online time. Each block represents a two-hour period spent browsing and working on certain websites: the green block might represent social media sites, while the orange block might represent banking and bill-paying sites. By arranging them in order, you can plan out your digital workday. When you're done, the blocks wirelessly transmit your day's schedule to your browser through an extension, locking you out of certain websites at certain times of the day to cut down on distractions.
Rounding out the show is a series of medieval-looking wearables called Fidgety Machines that monitor social media anxiety, and I/O, a browser plug-in that visualizes all of the time you're spending online, to encourage you to spend less of it.
The common thread running through all of these "veeblefetzers"? Ultimately, they're about mindfulness. Although disparate in purpose, they all ask you to pay attention to how you use technology, and treat it more like the time you spend in the real world.
The designs will be on display from March 11 to April 9 as part of the Unread Messages exhibition at the Aram Gallery in London's Covent Garden.
Atomic City, Idaho: located at the edge of an 890-square mile nuclear complex, Atomic City was once called Midway—until the world's first electricity-generating nuclear power plant, Experimental Breeder Reactor-1, was built next door. The town boomed, wholeheartedly embracing the promise of the Atomic Age.
But it didn't last. In 1955, the EBR-1 suffered the world's first partial meltdown; six years later, another neighboring nuclear power plant, the SL-1, lost three employees in a nuclear accident so grisly that the victims needed to be buried in lead coffins sealed with concrete. The town declined; the population dropped.
By the time photographer David T. Hanson came to Atomic City in December, 1986, only 29 people still lived in town (this, coincidentally, is the same number of people who live in Atomic City today). But for all intents and purposes, Atomic City was totally deserted: a nuclear boomtown turned ghost town, surrounded by the crumbling towers of an Atomic Age that had failed to deliver upon its promise. 30 years later, for the first time, Hanson's haunting photographs of Atomic City are finally being published in March as part of his upcoming book, Wilderness to Wasteland.
"It was a strange place, almost abandoned," remembers Hanson. "It was clearly an impoverished community, with most people living below the poverty line." Everyone who still lived in town seemed to live in a trailer, mobile home, or even old railroad cars, with the occasional dilapidated house to break things up. Yet although the town itself seemed to have no future, the evidence of its booming past were still plain to see, including a post office sign that proudly broadcast the town's nuclear heritage, as well as the Atomic City Raceway, which used to host stock car races in the summer.
Despite walking around Atomic City all day, though, Hanson says he can't remember seeing a single soul. "It was very much like being in a recently evacuated town or an abandoned movie set," he remembers. "Not having people in the pictures seemed appropriate for this place and accentuated the look and feeling of a modern-day ghost town."
Hanson says he came to Atomic City because he feels the boom-bust story is perhaps the most essential story of the American West. Though it was spurred by a different boom, what happened to Atomic City is the same thing that happened to Deadwood, Tombstone, and Dodge City. "Looking back at the Atomic City series now, I find that in addition to describing a small ghost town at the edge of a military complex, the pictures seem to be about some aspects of the taming of the West that are such an important part of our heritage—inhabiting the wilderness, carving out a home for oneself, living on the edge of civilization," the photographer says.
Atomic City is also a kind of strange monument to the 20th century, at least according to Hanson: "It seems frightening yet somehow appropriate that the most enduring monuments America will leave for future generations will be the hazardous remains of our industry and technology."
On your laptop, apps exist in a grid. You can drag a link, a contact, or some text from one app into another. On a smartphone, though, apps pile on top of each other as a stack: You can only deal with one at a time. That's why multitasking is one of the biggest UX problems on smartphones, but now Microsoft wants to solve it—not with new touch gestures or OS tricks, but with a simple software keyboard.
When we talk about multitasking on mobile devices, we're talking about more than whether or not your smartphone and tablet can run more than one app at a time. At this point, they all can. The really crucial part of multitasking is being able to easily use apps together, side by side. For example, dragging a link from your browser into an email to share it. We take this kind of multitasking for granted on desktops and laptops; tablets such as the iPad and the Microsoft Surface are pretty good at it, too. But there's no way to side-by-side multitask on a smartphone. The screen is just too small to run two apps next to each other.
Microsoft was an early pioneer at trying to tackle this on mobile. Its first tablet operating system, Windows 8, introduced the ability to run two apps side by side. The Windows maker's latest app, though, takes a stab at solving it on smaller screens, too. How? By integrating outside apps into the one app that runs side by side with every other app on your smartphone: the on-screen keyboard.
Developed by Microsoft Garage, Redmond's own answer to Google's "20% Time" initiative, the Hub Keyboard is a regular software keyboard with one major difference. Similar to the signature UI element that binds together Microsoft's Office Suite, Hub Keyboard has a ribbon at the top that allows you to easily bring in information from outside apps. There are four options—search and paste information from your clipboard history, search and paste from your contacts, find and paste an Office document from OneDrive, or automatically translate your text into another language. All can be done without leaving the app you're in.
It doesn't sound like much, but it's actually the next best thing to running apps side by side. For example, let's say you're writing an email, and you realize you want to share a Word document while you're writing it. Normally, you'd need to copy and paste the text you've already written, leave your email app, open OneDrive, find the Word document, share it with your email app, then paste the text of your letter back in. With Microsoft's keyboard, though, all you would do is tap the OneDrive button, enter your search term, and hit return to have the appropriate Word doc pasted right into what you're writing. Otherwise, it works the same as any other keyboard.
Microsoft is not the only software developer that is taking a ribbon approach to multitasking on small screens. On iOS, ReBoard is a multitasking keyboard that is arguably more fully featured than Hub Keyboard, pulling in apps such as Slack, Google Drive, Dropbox, eBay, and more. Unlike ReBoard, Microsoft seems to have stuck with its own apps and services for at least the first version of Hub Keyboard, which may not be useful if you don't use Microsoft products very much. (I don't.)
But given Microsoft's place in the pantheon of software giants, the fact that the company is experimenting with keyboard ribbons as a solution to a major mobile UX problem is a pretty big deal. It's possible that such a solution could come to a future version of Windows. Just as possible, though, is that it's a thought exercise and could lead nowhere. After all, Microsoft Garage is also the division of Redmond responsible for MyMoustache.net, a website that adds facial hair to your pictures, and Fetch, an iOS application that will tell you what breed of dog you look like.
Solar cells are a great way of collecting and storing energy to power gadgets. There's just one problem: they're heavy. A typical silicon-based solar module can only produce about 15 watts of power per kilogram of weight. That's just too heavy to be used in most gadgets, especially mobile devices like smartphones and wearables that could otherwise easily benefit from powering themselves through solar power.
A new innovation from MIT could change that. A team of researchers overseen by MIT professor Vladimir Bulović have figured out how to create flexible solar cells that are around 400 times lighter—so light enough you could add them to nearly any material and not change its behavior or performance. You might even forget they're there.
Most solar cells are made of three distinct parts. You've got the solar cell, which absorbs light, the substrate onto which it is applied, and a protective overcoating to help shield it from its environment. It's this protective coating, usually made from glass, which is responsible for most of the weight of a solar cell. And since these three elements need to be manufactured separately then sandwiched together, producing working solar cells has a lot of potential points of failure which drive up costs: for example, getting dust between the protective outer coating and the solar cell.
Bulović's team, however, has proven that it's possible to "grow" the solar cell, its substrate, and the protective overcoating in a single process—and from most of the same materials. In their proof-of-concept experiment, they used a common flexible polymer called parylene for the substrate and protective coating, and an organic material called DBP for the solar cell. They then "grew" all of these layers, one atop the other, using a process called chemical vapor deposition. The resulting solar cell is so light, it can be laid on a soap bubble without popping it. Despite this, though, it produces an incredible six watts of electricity per gram, all while keeping production costs lower by minimizing the possible points of failure in the creation of a solar cell.
It's this latter aspect that gets photovoltaic nerds like Bulović excited. "The innovative step is the realization that you can grow the substrate at the same time as you grow the device," he told MIT News. But he also admits that the technology is perfect for creating solar cells light enough to power wearables and other portable electronic devices. "It could be so light that you don't even know it's there, on your shirt or on your notebook," he says.
That said, Bulović's lightweight solar cells are still just laboratory proof-of-concepts. It'll take considerable money, effort, and time to manufacture at scale. But Bulović says it's doable. "We have a proof-of-concept that works," Bulović says. "The next question is, 'How many miracles does it take to make it scalable?' We think it's a lot of hard work ahead, but likely no miracles needed." Soon, everything from your smartphone to the brim of your hat could soon be slathered with solar cells so light, you don't even know they're there.
Whether you use OK Google, Siri, Alexa, or Cortana, you reach a point, sooner or later, when your voice assistant doesn't know what to do.
Sometimes, that's because you've phrased your command in an unexpected way: "Alexa, I could really go for some Van Halen right around now," instead of "Alexa, play Van Halen," for example. Other times, it's because you've asked the computer to do something it just doesn't have the capability to do. Either way, the user ends up going away thwarted, and the computer doesn't learn anything. For both user and computer, it's just a fail state, not a learning experience.
As design lead for all of Google's search products, Hector Ouilhet looks to his three-year-old daughter, Anna Julia, for inspiration on how Google can help solve this kind of problem.
Hector and Anna Julia don't always understand each other—Anna Julia is at an age when she likes to make up new words, and even a gesture as simple as pointing at the floor can have four or five different contextual meanings. Likewise, Anna Julia doesn't always understand what Hector expects of her. But Hector and Anna Julia figure out how to adapt to each other's needs.
The question that fills Hector's days is simple: How can Google be more like Anna Julia? Not just in the way Google responds to a user's request but in training users to view Google as an intelligent, learning, evolving entity. Just like a three-year-old.
What makes Google different from Anna Julia? There are a million answers to that question, but they all boil down to the fact that Anna Julia is a little girl and Google is . . . what exactly?
"When you're talking to a 3-year-old, or even a 90-year-old, you have a set of expectations about what he or she can do," Ouilhet says. In other words, we have a mental model of a people's capabilities that is always evolving, according to what capabilities they (or people like them) have already demonstrated.
But what is Google? It's everything and nothing. It's a company, an operating system, and a bundle of algorithms in a bleeping black box, all at once. It does a million things yet comes with no instructions. How can users build a mental model of something as big and as powerful and as random as Google so that they know how to interact with it?
Ouilhet is convinced that the answer is for Google to act more like a person. That's why, during his tenure in Mountain View, Ouilhet has been working hard on pushing Google's zero UI initiatives, such as the OK Google voice assistant. It's not an issue of trying to anthropomorphize Google, or—god forbid—turn it into an AI. "It's about helping people wrap their head around, what is this thing I'm talking to?" says Ouilhet.
Google isn't alone in chasing voice as a solution to the problem of how we communicate with computers. Apple has Siri, Microsoft has Cortana, and Amazon has Alexa. But while voice assistants are theoretically a more natural way of interacting with computers than taps or mouse clicks, Ouilhet says they also introduce a lot of friction and cognitive dissonance in users' minds. Voice assistants sound like people, but they don't act like people.
Let's say you have an Amazon Echo. You can tell your Echo to do a lot of things—play jazz, set a timer, dim your smart lights, add an item to your Amazon wish list, or even find a word that rhymes with potato. But ask Alexa to, say, turn off your oven or call your mother, and it'll just fall over. It'll do the same thing if it doesn't quite hear you, or you don't voice your command exactly the way it expects, because computers— unlike people—suck at coping with ambiguity.
This isn't just what happens with the Amazon Echo. It's a problem with all voice assistants, including Google's. So after some initial experimentation, people using voice assistants tend to stick to a few things they know work and never try anything else. But all of these products, at the end of the day, are capable of evolving. They're all driven by data and algoithms. The more data a company such as Google has on how someone is trying to use a voice assistant, the more quickly Google can adapt to meet a user's expectations.
Ouilhet looks at his relationship with Anna Julia for inspiration on how to get over the roadblock of perception for voice UIs.
Like Google's own voice assistants, Anna Julia doesn't always understand her father's requests, or know how to go about completing them. Sometimes, she's daydreaming when he wants her to do something, so she misses what he says. But Anna Julia responds very differently when she can't do something her dad wants compared with, say, an Amazon Echo.
Let's say Ouilhet is cooking dinner, and he asks Anna Julia to set the table. She's only three, so she doesn't know how to do it yet, but Anna Julia would never just shake her said and say so. She's too eager to please. Plus, it's not like she doesn't understand everything Ouilhet asked her to do. She knows what a table is, she just doesn't know what "set" means in this context. So she might reply: "Daddy, do you mean you want me to sit down for dinner?"
There are three things going on here. One, Anna Julia is capable of atomizing her father's request to set the table into discrete parts, including the parts she understands ("table") and doesn't understand ("set"). Two, she understands context: Dinner is being prepared, and Ouilhet usually asks her to sit down at the table around this time. Three: Anna Julia isn't sure whether she misheard the word "set" or just doesn't understand it, so she says so. But at the same time, she's eager to please, so she makes her best guess as to what Ouilhet wants anyway.
The end result is that even if Anna Julia turns out to not be able to do what her dad wants, she still adds information to her mental model of her father. This makes it more likely she'll be able to do what he wants her to do in the future if he asks her to set a table. And Ouilhet himself also gets a better understanding of Anna Julia in a way that encourages him to keep trying—she might not understand setting the table today, but tomorrow, she might. Because this isn't just about a single request. It's about building an ongoing relationship.
Along with improved voice transcription technology, Google is getting better every day at understanding its users' requests. Knowledge Graph is helping Google do more than just match search queries with search results, but actually understand semantics: what things are and what they can do. Google Now and Now on Tap, meanwhile, are all about understanding context—building up Google's mental model of individual users, so that it can custom-tailor its results. And although this is the sort of thing that gives privacy advocates headaches, Google is getting better every day at remembering what its users have historically done, and using it as a model for what they'll do in the future.
But the challenges in voice search and zero UI aren't really technological. Ouilhet argues that they're mostly about designing voice UXs that feel less like talking to a computer than talking to a person. Or rather, voice UXs that can act like Anna Julia—eager to please, eager to learn, not afraid to make guesses, and which strive to learn about us while encouraging us at the same time to keep on learning about them.
Ouilhet admits Google isn't there yet, but he thinks in the next few years that they will be. "Humans are great at salvaging meaning from context, by peeling it like an onion," he says. "Imagine how powerful computers will be when they're just as good at peeling that onion."
Corruption is a serious issue for any government, but in the last few years, China has swept tens of thousands of "corrupt" government officials out of office. Whether or not these officials are actually corrupt is open to debate: Although corruption is a long-standing problem for China's Community Party, critics inside and outside the country argue that "corruption" is simply the bugbear Chinese president Xi Jinping is using to justify the consolidation of his power.
Whatever the case, the Chinese anti-corruption purges that have happened over the past few years have ended the careers of a huge number of both senior and minor officials—"tigers and flies," in Jinping's own memorable words. That's also the name of Schema and ChinaFile's latest visualization, an interactive tool which aims to help illustrate the extent of China's ongoing anti-corruption campaign.
It's a tool with some fascinating takeaways. Using data plucked from Chinese media and the CCDI, the organization overseeing Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, Catching Tigers and Flies currently covers the fall from grace of 1,500 Chinese officials in just the last four years. Most of the targets in the database are "flies," or relatively low-level officials on the local or provincial level. Only 231 of these officials have been sentenced so far, but between them, they are accused of embezzling, stealing, or taking illicit gifts of more than 6 billion yuan—or close to a billion U.S. dollars.
The tool can also sort between both tigers and flies, and you can see what each government official is accused of doing and how much money they took, and even discover lurid details: For example, Quan Xiaohui, a municipal official in Henan, who kept three mistresses on the side. You can also see how Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign has built up momentum over the years, with almost twice as many officials being accused of corruption in 2015 than in 2014.
Nervous Systems is a generative design studio founded by MIT alums known for merging the natural world with 3-D printed fashion. For its latest project, the studio teamed up with Boston's Museum of Fine Arts to create a fairy-like party dress made up of thousands of delicate nylon petals.
As beautiful as the so-called Kinematics Petals dress is, though, the most impressive part isn't how it looks. It's how it's made.
Inspired by petals, feathers, and scales, the dress is made up of 1,600 distinct pieces, which interconnect through 2,600 hinges. Although these interlocking petals are individually rigid, they behave like a rippling, flowing textile when joined together. This is possible due to Nervous Systems'"Kinematics" technology, which turns any three-dimensional shape into a flexible structure using 3-D printing. Though they've tested the tech on smaller projects, the design team is finally scaling up the system to create a full-scale garment.
The Kinematics system let the studio do something seemingly impossible: print the dress in a 3-D printer smaller than the dress itself. The system folded up the full dress pattern into an optimized shape that could fit into a 3-D printer's small bed—only once it was printed did the team unfold the tightly packed dress into its full, final form. This wasn't done on any old Makerbot, though. Instead of using a conventional printer that squirts out filament dollop by dollop, it was 3-D printed in a special machine that uses a laser to melt together thin layers of powder from a solid block of nylon dust.
Thanks to the team's handy work with the software, it's also possible to tailor the dress automatically to any body. By taking a 3-D scan of the intended wearer, Kinematics makes it simple to adapt the fundamental dress perfectly to a particular person's unique geometry. (It's also modular, so you can print out a longer dress that converts into a miniskirt thanks to a seamlessly detachable train).
You can see the Petals dress on display at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston from March 6 through July 10, 2016. Unfortunately, though, you can't buy one just yet. But the MFA gift shop will supposedly be selling the next best thing: a special line of Kinematics jewelry. You can buy some of Nervous Systems' other designs here.
There are ghost towns, and then there are ghost towns. Picher is the latter.
Once a bustling center for lead and zinc mining, this Oklahoma town was poisoned by the industry that once made it thrive. Dangerously undermined by catacombs of mining shafts beneath its streets, the buildings of Picher began crumbling underfoot, even as the groundwater became so contaminated that 34% of the children in the town measured positive for lead poisoning. By 2006, the EPA declared Picher the most contaminated city in America and ordered the town abandoned. By 2009, it was officially disincorporated.
Although Picher can't even be called a city anymore, it still lives on in the apocalyptic graveyard of crumbling buildings and infrastructure that remain. This version of Picher is the subject of the photographer Seph Lawless's latest book, The Prelude: The Deadliest City in America. If you notice mountains in the blood red backgrounds of Lawless's photographs, take a closer look. They're actually toxic piles of chat, a poisonous by-product of zinc and lead.
Lawless came to Picher in 2015, by the invitation of Gary Linderman, the town's former pharmacist. Although all citizens were ordered to leave Picher a decade ago, Linderman obstinately stuck around within city limits to provide medicine for residents who remained in nearby areas. Although Lawless spoke to Linderman over the phone on more than one occasion, the photographer never got to meet him: Linderman died shortly before Lawless arrived to photograph the town. No autopsy was ever performed, but otherwise, he was healthy. It's unknown if his death was because of his decision to keep living in Picher. Yet as he photographed the town, Lawless says he was a constant inspiration. "Gary knew the struggle for his town to recover was a daunting task, but he had no misconceptions about that either. He wanted to prove that if he stayed in that city that it meant the city still had a chance of survival," Lawless says.
When he actually arrived in Picher, though, Lawless couldn't believe what he was seeing. Against the backdrop of an appropriately apocalyptic sky, the city itself looked like it had been dead a thousand years. "I kept thinking the earth could open up any minute and swallow me and no one would ever know," Lawless says. "At one point my foot went through the ground and I fell to the ground thinking I was going to cave in and die. In complete astonishment of the situation, I found myself photographing the hole where my foot went in, realizing later just how chilling that moment really was for me."
Eventually, Lawless was run out of the town by a tornado, but not before capturing dozens of rolls of a dead town condemned in hell. Lawless says it's easily the scariest project he's ever worked on, and looking over his photos, it's easy to see why. If Gary Linderman truly believed that Picher had a chance of survival, it could only be as America's most haunting ghost town.
As a generative designer, Jenny Sabin doesn't go into a project knowing exactly what's going to come out of it. She's more interested in the materials and math that go into creating a sculpture than in its final form. What's amazing about her art is that the final form never feels like an afterthought.
Case in point? Sabin's latest, a pulsing, light-absorbing pavilion that looks like a web from an alien world. On display at New York's Cooper Hewitt as part of the fifth installment of the museum's Design Triennial, it's big enough for 20 people to stand under, yet light enough for a single person to lift.
According to Sabin, the Polythread Knitted Textile Pavilion was inspired by her fascination with minimal surfaces: The branch of mathematics devoted to geometries that have the smallest surface area possible. A kite's a good example of a minimal surface; so is the iridescent film on a coat hanger dipped into soapy water. She wanted to see if there was a way for her to create an entire structure that was describable through minimal surfaces.
At the same time, she was interested in creating a large fabric structure that was fully integrated. In other words, even though the pavilion contains an armature, the skeleton isn't what defines the finished structure's shape. It's supported by the approximately 100 pounds of fabric threaded through the armature, and vice versa.
To design her Textile Pavilion, Sabin started by choosing her materials—twill tape, aluminum tubing, then both photo-luminescent and light-activated yarns. Using a series of computer models, Sabin generated her design parametrically, or by playing with parameters and letting the computer do the rest. Once the finished design was settled on, Sabin used 3-D printers to mock it up as a scale model, before outsourcing the armature and knit fabric for production. It was then brought to the Cooper Hewitt for assembly.
What makes the Polythread Knitted Textile Pavilion so special, though, is the way it emits light. The fabric shell of the pavilion is made up of both photo-luminescent and light-activated yarns. In other words, half of the pavilion glows in the light, and half of it glows in the dark. The result is a beautifully eerie effect in which the skin of the pavilion is constantly reacting to itself, something which Sabin highlight at the Cooper Hewitt through a simulated day-night cycle every 20 minutes.
Although her Pavilion is stuck inside the Cooper Hewitt for now, Sabin says she eventually hopes that a similar structure can be erected on a permanent basis outdoors. In the meantime, it will be on exhibit until August 21.
