Founded in 2006, the Commercial Space Flight Federation is a 70-member industry group dedicated to realizing the dream of commercial space travel. It lobbies Congress and promotes space tourism on behalf of members like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic.
For example, last year, it was partially responsible for an updating of the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, changing the way the industry had to report to Congress. It's also currently lobbying against the government to selling motors from the military's unused intercontinental ballistic missile arsenal to the commercial space industry. The CSF also helps set standards among industry members, bridges the gap between academic space research and commercial research, and serves as a sort of of catchall organization for promoting the industry through PR and marketing.
It's the kind of organization, says president Eric Stallmer, that wants to evoke visions of picnics on the ISS, vacations spent exploring lunar canyons, and colonists bouncing around on the surface of Mars.
Not that the Federation's existing website screamed any of that. Stallmer describes the old site as "stale, pale, and male." At best, it looked like an engineer built it, not unlike many other aerospace sites, including some parts of NASA: boring, old-fashioned, and purely informational. "In the past year, two companies have come up with reusable rockets, which is going to completely revolutionize how we access space," says Stallmer. That's an incredibly cool development, but nothing was cool about the old identity. It failed to relay the dynamism and excitement of today's space innovations.
The new Commercial Spaceflight Federation website, designed by Long Island-based marketing agency Viceroy Creative, tries to do a couple of things. First, it's designed to make visitors excited about the poetry and adventure of leaving the planet. But it's also careful not to make its activities look too sci-fi. "We didn't want to be hyperbolic," by using, say, images of intergalactic spaceships or family vacations on Pluto, says Viceroy founder and president David Moritz. "We want people to understand that commercial space flight is real—it's right in front of you, not some grandiose future 1,000 years from now."
To accomplish this, Viceroy Creative used a lot of beautiful, full-blown photographs on the CSF website to illuminate the reality of commercial space flight today. A reusable Blue Origin rocket, sitting in the desert after landing. The canopy of the clouds, viewed from low orbit. And almost infinitely dense field of stars, scintillating in the night sky. At the same time, Viceroy paid a lot of attention to the information architecture of the site, making sure that the new website does a better job of explaining what the industry actually does, and what's happening in commercial space right now.
"The whole concept was designed to be classic, futuristic, and powerful," says Gabrielle Rein, a cofounder and creative director at Viceroy Creative. "We wanted to create something clean and elegant and beautiful, but which was also—because the CSF is an industry organization—corporate. It's meant to put a stake in the ground: This website is a representation of the commercial space industry itself, and this company represents all of its members."
Viceroy also designed a new logo for the lobbyist group. The existing logo—a line-drawn silhouette of a lantern-jawed astronaut's head looking upwards against the outline of the moon—looked very old-fashioned. The new logo is an abstract fractal, which almost looks like an origami space glider being flung into the sky. Unlike the old line drawing, the new logo will be more useful across many different materials and scales, from official stationery to business cards to app icons.
At the end of the day, Stallmer hopes that the new identity will help the CSF escape from what he calls the "aerospace echo chamber."
"I think the space business is the coolest industry out there, but we were preaching to the choir [with the old design]," Stallmer says. "Our message just wasn't getting out there." With the new website and identity, he hopes that the CSF will do a better job reflecting the incredible innovation of what's happening in commercial space over the next five years, while inspiring a whole new generation of would-be space tourists.
After a third child's death in two years prompted the largest furniture recall in American history, Ikea USA president Lars Petersson told us that dressers tipping over aren't an Ikea problem, but an industry problem: "The only truly safe way to have a chest of drawers in your house is to secure to the wall."
Is that actually true? Last year, a team of Northwestern Engineering students at the university's Segal Institute of Design was tasked with modifying the design of a freestanding Ikea Malm dresser so that it couldn't tip over if a child climbed on it. The dressers were designed with the requirements that it not tip over when 50 pounds of downward pressure were applied to any given shelf, have similar storage size to standard dressers, have a low manufacturing cost (less than $200), and be capable of shipping flat—just like Ikea dressers.
These four designs suggest that what Ikea says is an "industry" problem to solve is actually something individual designers thinking outside of the box can solve on their own.
Every fall at Segal, as part of the Design Thinking and Communications course taught by Walter Herbst, students are assigned to tackle a real-world problem. "A lot of these students come to the school effectively having been told for 18 years there's only one design solution to every problem," Herbst says. "We try to break them out of it."
Many of the design thinking problems that Herbst's students work on are suggested by Nancy Cowles, the executive director of the children's product safety organization Kids In Danger. This time, her tragic inspiration was the news of a child dying after an Ikea dresser tipped over. Cowles felt like there had to be some way to make furniture tip-resistant—beyond attaching it to a wall.
Cowles made the suggestion to Herbst, who loved the idea, and told his students to design something that would cost less than $200 to build, but which could support 50 pounds of weight on each drawer. On hand to advise the students were Cowles and Lisa Siefert of Shane's Foundation, an advocacy group founded upon Siefert's two-year old son, Shane, who died in a tip-over accident.
Finally, Herbst told his students that aesthetically, each dresser needed to look like something Ikea might sell, and have the same emotional design language. "We're trying to get students ready for the real world," he says. "The idea was if they could design something that met Ikea's standards, they'd learn to understand other clients as well."
The first dresser produced by the students was the SafeSlant. Designed by Devon Buckingham, Arjun Jaykrishna, Maximillian Nelson, and Ximeng Zhao, the SafeSlant takes a shape-based approach to improving stability. It transfers the center of gravity of the Malm line so that it is closer to the wall, while also preventing the drawers from coming out as far as the base Malm design. The slant, meanwhile, makes the drawers harder for a kid to climb. The result is a dresser that should remain stable, even with a kid using the drawers as a ladder—albeit at the expense of slightly less drawer space.
It might look from the front like a traditional Malm, but the TipStop Dresser has a clever trick up its drawers to prevent tipping. The top drawer has floor-length eaves on the side, which serve as a second set of legs when pulled out. It was designed by Cameron Averill, Blake Strebel, and David Oh, who found that the critical tipping point of a Malm dresser is when the top drawer is pulled out and has weight applied to it. "Basically the idea was to keep the dresser looking as close to a stock Malm as possible," Strebel says. "We thought of a design that made the drawers childproof, but then that discourages kids from dressing themselves, so we came up with an alternative that makes the dresser stable, even when a kid has pulled out all the drawer.
The largest departure from the Malm aesthetic, the Safe Shelves system is more like a lazy susan cupboard than a proper dresser. Designed by Austin Johnson, Jamie Zhang, Milan Samuel, and Noah Rosenthal, Safe Shelves prevents tipping by not allowing the furniture's center of gravity to be redistributed in the first place. "We didn't go the traditional dresser route, but instead came up with an idea of rotating shelves," says Samuel. Originally, the case of the dresser was round, like the shelves, but Samuel says her team found through testing that parents found the shape "too radical." Ultimately, they made the outside of the dresser rectangular, adding rounded corners and an extended base to guarantee children couldn't get hurt by falling on the Safe Shelves unit—or for that matter, having it fall on them.
Designed by Jethro Au, Katherine Hartman, Ethan Park, and Giovanna Varalta Ciavolella, the Stable Storage system is another one—like the TipStop Dresser—with built-in extensions to prevent the drawers from triggering a full-on dresser collapse. "We really didn't want our design to be too wild," says Hartman. "From interviewing parents, we heard what they really wanted was a bunch of different storage types." Instead of a bottom drawer, the TipStop has a built-in toy chest, which increases the unit's stability. This, in turn, is supplemented by replacing the second drawer with a couple of cubbies. This not only gives the TipStop fewer drawers which can be pulled out to create a tipping hazard, but Harman says it also encourages kids to put things away, since their research showed that kids were less likely to put toys away in drawers instead of cubbies.
None of these designs are production-ready yet, but they could be—something Ikea, as the world's largest furniture retailer, is perhaps better positioned to tackle than anyone else. Ikea has said in the wake of the recall that it will be making design changes to its dresser line, though it has not discussed specifics. (Kids In Danger passed Segal's tip-safe dresser designs along to Ikea. Ikea did not immediately respond to an inquiry about whether or not they would be using them.)
"Ideally, everyone should be strapping their furniture to the wall, but that's not going to happen," Lisa Seifert of Shane's Foundation says, arguing instead the stability of furniture should be better regulated. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, which regulates consumer goods in the U.S., has guidelines for designing chests that don't tip easily, but they're voluntary, so manufacturers decide whether or not to follow them. "The voluntary stability standard companies can choose whether or not to follow right now needs to be stronger," she says. "And after it's stronger, it should be mandatory."
Ever been out under a beautiful night sky, and tried to take a picture of it with your smartphone or a handheld camera? If so, you know how bad the results usually are: the sky-filling moon in a sea of bright stars reduced to a smudge of silver in a lightless void. But the Tiny1 is a new digicam that aims to change that, helping amateur star gazers to take stunning photos of the night sky, while at the same time telling you exact what astronomical wonders you're shooting.
The reason most consumer cameras are bad at taking pictures at night is pretty simple: night is dark. The reason the human eye can soak in the details at night is because our pupils dilate to let in as much light as possible, while our brain fills in some of the details. Comparatively, most consumer cameras have tiny "pupils" (also known as apertures), and can't fill in the details when they don't get enough light, resulting in night pictures that are usually filled with dark, pixellated noise.
The Tiny1 isn't going to fill out the details of a star or planet where it doesn't see one, but it takes better pictures at night thanks to a few smart design choices. First of all, it has a much bigger aperture than the camera in your smartphone or most digicams: at between 1.2f and 1.4f, the optics of the Tiny1 are equivalent to some of the best SLR lenses you can buy. That means more light is hitting the sensor, capturing more clarity and detail. You can also attach any commercial lens, or even a telescope, to the Tiny1 with an adapter, giving it even more vision.
The Tiny1's sensor, though, was also wisely chosen to optimize night shooting. It's only 4 megapixels. In the consumer camera space, where digicam marketers have tricked the public into believing more megapixels equals more quality, 4 megapixels sounds pretty bad. Actually, though, the opposite is true. In digital cameras, the larger the pixels on a camera's sensors, the more sensitive to light they are. By using fewer pixels, but making them bigger, the Tiny1 can capture more light, more accurately. Couple that with a patent-pending noise reduction system, and the Tiny1 can take much better pictures of the night sky than most cameras at its price point.
According to Grey Tan, its creator, the Tiny1 was inspired by his own love of astronomy, and his disappointment with the photographs he took when he tried to capture what he was seeing in the sky.
"I was always curious about the stars and the galaxies. I used to play Starcraft as a kid and the cinematic scenes of the other worlds got me pretty curious about what's out there," he says. Eventually, this led him to take an astronomy course in university. "During the course, I went on a school trip to Malaysia to do visual observations as part of the course work. Some of the seniors were very kind and helped me to setup the telescope for astronomy imaging. I took a photo of the Great Orion Nebula through the telescope. I still vividly remember how strange and beautiful the nebula looked through a 9.25 inch telescope." When he got home, he tried to take the same picture with his own camera. "The results were pretty dismal."
Eventually, as his skills as a photographer (and his camera bag) grew, Tan says that he learned enough to take really great photographs of the sky with his SLR... enough that friends asked him how he did it. And since dropping a few grand and a few man years wasn't an ideal solution, Tan decided to use his knowledge to make a sub-$500 camera that made taking beautiful space pictures painless.
The camera also has some great software that facilitates photo astronomy. Not only does it include an array of presets that optimize the camera's settings for different types of pictures, like a photo of the moon or the Milky Way, the Tiny1 even contains a built-in star map, which will tell you exactly what that tiny twinkling object in the sky is when you point the camera at it.
Now on Indiegogo, pre-orders for the Tiny1 start at $449. And while Tan admits that if you want to take truly Hubble-caliber photos of space you'll need a telescope, even without one, the Tiny1 should make it easy for nearly anyone to take a picture that is as breathtaking as space itself, just by aiming their lens up at the sky.
The Lowline—the subterranean park project dreamt up by a former NASA engineer (and architect)—is one step closer to reality: the city of New York has provisionally approved the use of the space, requiring that the group fundraise $10 million and submit its plans within the next 12 months.
Today Alicia Glen—the Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development—announced that the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) has had chosen the group to develop its plan, which calls for the former Williamsburg Bridge Trolley Terminal to be converted into a public park that pipes sunlight underground to grow plants in every season, using a technology that captures sunlight on the street level and concentrates it for use below ground.
The vacant terminal totals approximately 60,000 square feet, and runs underneath the Lower East Side's Delancey Street between Clinton and Norfolk. Although it is currently leased by the MTA, the Terminal has stood empty, largely forgotten, for the better part of the century. By converting this space into a high-tech public garden, the City hopes that they will be able to transform a neglected, blighted remnant of the city's past into an innovation hub.
"The Lowline represents an incredible fusion of technology and public space," said Glen. "For 80 years, this underground space has sat idle. Now we're putting it to use for the people of the Lower East Side and for all New Yorkers to enjoy. We can't wait to see this experiment unfold."
But there are still some hurdles to clear before the one-acre underground garden becomes a reality.
Although the Lowline group now has approval to use the space they've earmarked for the project, they still need to meet several goals and deadlines for the project to ever become a reality. For example, they will need to implement a "robust" community engagement plan that includes at least "5-10 public design charrettes and quarterly Community Engagement Committee meetings," complete schematic design documents and present them for approval, and raise a fundraising target of at least $10 million over the next year.
Still, given all the press attention the Lowline has received over the years, as well as its high-profile celebrity endorsements, these requirements seem easily met. In 10 years, who's to say the Lowline won't be just as much a part of the daily life of the Lower East Side as the High Line is on the West Side?
Designers have a deeper appreciation of the beauty of objects compared with most people, but they also tend to live minimally. That got us wondering: When designers do cave in to their basest impulses and start hoarding, what do they collect, and why?
So we reached out to more than a dozen of our friends in the design community. To say we weren't prepared for the responses we got is an understatement. Designers collect lots of things, and many of their collections are far weirder than you would ever possibly expect. (Ahem, the cofounder of a designer sex toy company who collects three-headed parakeets). Here's what the designers we asked collect, and why.
I'm a collector of Stig Lindberg ceramics. My first piece was from the Reptile vase collection and a gift from my husband, Mike. Over the past 15 years, I have collected pieces from a range of series—Pungo, Domino, Fajance, and more. When I look at the pieces, I see rational beauty. I love his work so much that my husband agreed to naming our Welsh Terrier Stig!
I collect coffeemakers. I have an espresso machine, a Chemex pot, a syphon pot, two Mokapots (small and large), and a French press. My interest has mainly been around the different methods of coffee extraction and how each method can provide a different taste or experience, even though they all really just do the same thing, mixing coffee and water. I also tend to use them for different occasions. My family is Cuban and has traditionally used the Mokapots for making coffee. I typically use those or the espresso machine when they are over. For other larger groups, I tend to use the French press, as it's fast and can brew a large amount at once. My personal favorite is my Chemex pot as it has the right balance of time and difficulty to brew, consistency, and overall taste and mouth feel.
I collect all types of maps, but I have a particular love for retired USGS quadrangles with fascinating line patterns or comical place names. Usually I get them for free when libraries purge their collections. If I see a place I have a connection to I will take it, but mostly I take ones that grab me visually.
Why the fascination? First, these maps are retired. They're retired because the landscape has changed significantly or the place has been mapped in more detail. There's something super-neat about owning a slice of geologic time. Second, the lines. They're drawn, but they're real. Earth made them, but they look like they're from make-believe worlds. Lava flows radiate and quiver. Glaciers look like suctioned slugs with slime trails. I'm drawn to the subtle, the striking, and of course, the pretty colors. Third, the names. Everything everywhere that's named was named by someone for some reason. Flaming Gorge Reservoir is met by the Green River. Did the same person name both of those? What's it like at that intersection? Do they have dragons? There's a place called Jackpot. Jackpot! I hope it was named after the fact versus wishful thinking.
I collect taxidermy of mythical creatures—animals that don't really exist, for example, the jackalope, the fur-bearing trout, or a unicorn horn. They are bizarre, yet magnificent creatures. Many—such as the fur-bearing trout—carry a folklore that people attach to it. When you look at them, these are ordinary animals that are now remembered for something much more than they were. I think it's a beautiful sentiment. The fact that someone had the sense of humor, time, and taxidermy skills to immortalize these creatures into works of art ought to be appreciated.
I have a collection of transistor radios we house at the d.school. A portable radio is a really simple user-interface design problem of electronics in a box with a need to control only power, volume, and tuning (and maybe tone), but the solutions are all over the map and each speaks to its own era. I use them, too. We have a low power radio transmitter and scatter the radios around our space to broadcast whatever music we like. People really respond to the facades of each radio and their newfound novelty in the age of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Radio also happens to be magic: Music delivered invisibly across a great distance. The radio collection is utility, curiosity, preservation, comparison, and inspiration all rolled into one.
I collect midcentury Japanese prints. Ever since art school, I've been drawn to printmaking and works on paper. It's an underappreciated medium. I'm drawn to the way contemporary Japanese printmakers are modern and bold, yet their traditional techniques and craft have been preserved and respected.
I collect die-cast Japanese robots from the 1970s. Before there was Netflix we had The 4:30 Movie. As a geeky kid growing up in N.Y.C. in the era before streaming media, you had very few choices to amuse yourself in the hours after school, while avoiding your homework. The 4:30 Movie was a television program that filled that gap, showing an odd rotation of classic and B movies loosely organized by theme. My favorite was "Monster Week"—a seasonal installment of Japanese monster movies replete with actors in rubber suits (trampling model cities and trains) and choruses of Japanese girls. So you can imagine my delight when my local comic book store (on 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue) began to stock sets of die-cast figurines loosely based on these movies. These little robots were not cheap, even in the '70s, so I had to beg my parents to get them for me—pretty much every birthday and Hanukah gift for three to four years—along with my close friend Billy Farrell who went on to design BMX bicycles in high school.
They are designed in an absurd range of color, shapes, and materials with an extremely heavy die-cast feel. My favorites are almost surreal in nature—a mechanical King Kong that shoots knife blades out if its nipples, for example. The two series that I collect are fully modular and reconfigurable (like Lego). Each joint, limb, and head are separate pieces, which can be combined into an absurd array of concoctions. And they shoot a staggering range of projectiles and weapons. Another one of my favorites throws off actual sparks when you roll it along the ground. Yet, in true Japanese fashion, the dedication to the craft and execution reveals a level of seriousness and commitment to the "art of play" that continues to blow me away. I only found out later that in many cases the movies were a loss-leader so that the toy companies could sell more of these fantastic toys. Brilliant! I have been filling in gaps in my collection on eBay for the last few years and am almost done—which is actually a bit bittersweet at this point.
I have a small collection of hammers from previous generations of my family. It started when my grandfather, an engineer, passed away, and I inherited both his hammer and the hammer of my great-grandfather, which is a blacksmith's hammer because he was the town blacksmith. It was always meaningful to me to have them because it felt like they represented an identity that I had inherited as a maker, a builder. Subsequently, as they passed away, I inherited my other grandfather's hammer (standard hammer), an old family friend's hammer (mechanic's hammer), and my wife's grandfather's hammer (outdoorsman's hatchet/hammer).
I find way too many things interesting, so I have several collections. The largest collection is the books, of course, which I started in 1992 and has about 1,200 items now. There's also a collection of enamel signs, which has several hundred pieces now, from small office door signs to large subway and street signs. Also banknotes (several hundred) and stock certificates (a few hundred), and other ephemera like bus tickets and horse racing stubs. And of course old manual typewriters. The photographs are a kind of collection as well, saving examples of public lettering before they disappear. With the books, I want to learn as much as I can about the history of my discipline, both technically and stylistically. This "official" typographic history is exceptionally valuable, but it also tends to be a closed system, rarely referring to other letter-making crafts. So the other collections are a deliberate counterweight, recording traditions that were ignored by the old foundries, and again by the history books.
I collect all sorts of objects from my trips, but I specifically love collecting Legos. Each one is emblematic of a certain time in my life, from a trip I have taken abroad, to the car I drove. As a kid, I loved building things, and Legos were an avenue in which I could channel that creative energy. My favorite piece is actually the tiniest: the tiny yellow SUV, which is a representation of the car I drove for many years. These small toys are a great link between one of my favorite childhood hobbies and some of my favorite memories.
I love to collect arrows. Discarded street signs, hand-painted signs, or even metal arrow planters. The simplicity of the graphic form and the meaning behind it fascinate me. An arrow is a nice little packaged semiotic study. With a line and a triangle, a clear unmistakeable message is communicated.
Clay-based work is heavily manipulated by the hand of the maker. There are never straight lines or perfect angles in ceramics, it's just not possible. Therefore the ceramist must embrace those qualities in order to move forward. As a studio, we strive for perfection: As an example, the Starrett precision square is a frequently used tool during fabrication. Our ceramic collection serves as a beautiful reminder that we should allow space for imperfections. In the right hands, it will only elevate the work.
I collect historic California tiles. It all started with a fireplace in our 1936 San Francisco house. It had a strange tiled mantel depicting Mayan scenes. The tiles looked old, so I assumed they were original to the house, but I had no idea who made them or when. After weeks of online research I learned about Batchelder, Claycraft, Malibu, and the Golden Age of California art tiles in 1920s and 1930s, but I was no closer to identifying the maker of the fireplace tiles. Discovering Tile Heritage Foundation, the only nonprofit in the U.S. that is dedicated to preservation of historically significant ceramic tile surfaces, was the breakthrough. The kind people at the foundation knew that my tiles were made by Woolenius Tile Co. of Berkeley, California, and even sent me a page from the original catalog showing the Design No. 367, my exact mantel. And so it began—the journey through the wonderful world of historic tiles and, more specifically, tile tables.
Tiles are as beautiful as paintings and as resilient as stone—the modern equivalent of cave art. They adorn walls of buildings and survive for many centuries, outliving many other art forms. Decorative yet functional, mass-produced yet handmade, art tiles are an often overlooked and underappreciated intersection of art and architecture.
I collect obscure hot sauces. They are generally a record of our travels. We typically buy two, one to ingest, one to go on the wall. And you never know, maybe one day I'll design a barbecue restaurant and they can be the design statement. For now they reside in the Lundberg Design conference room, affectionately known as the "Hot Sauce Bunker."
I collect too many things. My grandfather had many cork boards pinned full of various collections (tiny key chains on up to huge tools collections). I would stare at everything each time I visited. Additionally, my personal work often comes in the form of repetitive patterns and executions, so my collecting habit is pretty intense. Examples include: tiny props and furniture, boom boxes with TVs in them, vintage toys and action figures, mechanical counting watches, dice, film crew jackets, sci-fi sport hats, old Macs, signed NBA jerseys, or old NASA patches. Often these collections end up as props on sets or collaged in my artwork.
I collect patches. I love to travel, and these offer both a tangible and iconic memory of a place. (Plus, they are easy to pack for the trip home.) And when you return home and wear them on something, they make that thing unique and special, your very own. I especially appreciate the retro design of many of them, and the heralding cheer of the Best Made patches that underscore their brand promise. The bowling patches from my mother's leagues are kitschy and cool, and remind me of how fun-loving she is. They are like temporary tattoos. And, of course there are all the Girl Scout merit badges (not pictured) that represent a so-called accomplishment. I laughed when my mom opened up a box with my old sash—apparently I rocked at rollerskating because I had two!
I personally collect pocket square and ascots. I like how intentional, colorful, interchangeable, portable, and cheerful they can be. I really enjoy how they can make almost any outfit better.
I collect memories. Rather than hide them in boxes or the attic, they are displayed in acrylic canisters to bind together a series of objects that reflect the moment.
I share a collection of matches with my fiancé. We love the design of matchboxes: It's visually punchy branding that doesn't take itself seriously. Our matchboxes have nostalgic value, too: they're souvenirs of shared meals or late nights spanning Venice Beach to Jaipur, India. Half the collection comes from my late grandfather, who pocketed them up and down the eastern seaboard between the 1940s and 1980s.
I collect old McDonald's Happy Meal toys, and old Magic Wand reader books. I like the Happy Meal toys because while they're produced with a limited budget, some of them are very well-designed, and have great technique behind them. As for the Magic Wand reader, it's an old textbook for children that uses barcodes to speak the text out loud. I'm just amazed by the technology.
I collect board games. I have a few hundred titles going back to the 1800s. I got into boardgames in high school through Matthew Baldwin's Defective Yeti blog in the mid-2000s. We're currently in the middle of a tabletop gaming renaissance, driven by the democratization of publishing (through services like Kickstarter) and the organizational power of the internet (through services like Twitter and Meetup). Even though the technologies involved (dice, cards, boards) are thousands of years old, it's a time of great conceptual innovation. I am somewhat obsessed with tracing the creative evolution of the games I love today back to their predecessors, and seeing how simple ideas with crazy constraints (size, cost, analog components) can be used over and over again to reveal new angles and ideas.
The collection is a great professional resource. I often borrow cards and tokens from games to use in my own prototypes, and there's at least one person's lifetime worth of mechanics and rules to think about. But more importantly, I also try to make my game collection available as a social resource. A good chunk of my games are currently organized into a library at the co-working space we run in Chicago, and each game has a library card in the cover. Anyone can check a game out, have a game night with their friends, and then bring it back. My colleague Sandor Weisz and I have called out a few of our favorite games as "staff picks" and they get little cards describing what we like about them.
I collect corks, and write the meal/occasion details with dates on them, then save them as memory triggers to revisit in the future. Old ones, new ones: They all have something special usually associated with them, whether a good time with close friends or an amazing meal. It helps remind me of life's little moments.
Dyslexia, which affects around 4% of the world's population, is often thought of as a learning disability. Jim Rokos thinks that's absurd. The London designer believes dyslexia is just a different type of brain structure, whichm yes, makes those who have it worse at reading and spelling than most people—but also primes them for a life of creativity.
His new exhibition, the aptly titled Dyslexic Design, aims to prove it. Taking place in September during the London Design Festival, the exhibition gathers out-of-the-box designs from eight dyslexic designers in an attempt to show the creativity that can arise from a common disability.
Jim Rokos
Rokos was inspired to put together the Dyslexic Design exhibition after hearing a report on the radio that the U.K.'s largest sperm bank was turning away dyslexic donors (a decision many listeners called in to support). "I was so angry and shocked," Rokos says. "If you're not good at drawing, no one thinks anything's wrong with you, but if you're bad at spelling and great at drawing, you're somehow disabled? I think Einstein said it best: Judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, and it'll spend its whole life believing it is stupid."
Rokos perceives Dyslexic Design as a corrective. Each item on display has been chosen to highlight the skills Rokos believes are more common in dyslexics than non-dyslexics, such as excellent spatial thinking and nontraditional problem solving.
Sebastian Bergne
Take Sebastian Bergne's Egg, a handblown wine decanter in the shape of an oval. "Most designers wouldn't dare think of making a decanter in this shape, because they'd be terrified it would fall over, but Sebastian has some kind of 3D computer in his head that allows him to figure out how to make that shape stable, without ever even testing it as a prototype," Rokos says. Another example: a hunting jacket, by Rohan Chhabra, which can actually be unfolded ("like a Transformer robot," says Rokos) and reassembled to actually disguise the hunter as his prey.
In Rokos's telling, designers with dyslexia are especially good at solving problems in unconventional ways. Consider Vitamin's Knot Pendant Lamp. It's a glass lamp shade that takes a unique—but obvious when you think about it—approach to keeping the shade on the cord: a simple knot tied on the existing cable. There's also Jim Rokos's own Gauge vase, which has a completely rounded glass bottom but doesn't tip over, since it relies upon the water in the vase to keep it upright.
Rohan Chhabra
But is Rokos right that people with dyslexia exhibit a unique form of creativity? On that, the science is surprisingly thin. While anecdotally many psychologists and dyslexia researchers believe there is a link between dyslexia and certain creative skills, there haven't been many empirical studies setting out to prove it. However, in 1999, a team of researchers from the University of Surrey successfully found a link between dyslexia and more innovative thinking and problem solving—although they didn't draw any conclusions about whether this was a matter of nature (dyslexics were born more creative) or nurture (dyslexics are forced to be more creative to cope with a world that isn't designed with their strengths in mind).
Whatever the story, Dyslexic Design highlights the undeniable talent of many dyslexic designers. If you're in London this fall, it will be running from September 22 through September 25 at Designjunction.
Last year, the Unicode Consortium—which decides upon and standardizes emoji—added more skin tones to its catalog. Today, Unicode took another step towards making emoji more diverse: emoji are finally embracing gender equality.
Approving a suggestion that Google made back in May, the next version of the Unicode standard will make sure that wherever there is a male emoji, users will be able to choose a female equivalent. So, for example, if you want to use the police officer emoji, you'll soon be able to specify its gender in the same way you can specify its skin tone: with a long click or tap.
Not only that, but the Unicode emoji standard will be gaining 11 new professions. These include symbols for mechanics, computer programmers, chefs, scientists, farmers, and rockstars replete with Ziggy Stardust facepaint.
The goal is to give a more diverse range of career options for emoji users to express themselves with, regardless of their gender or skin tone. At the end of the day, between gender and skin tone choices, these changes should result in over 100 new options for representing people with emoji.
As the Unicode's document on the new standard explains, the way emoji became so chauvinist to begin with is sort of accidental—at least on the part of Unicode. When the Unicode Consortium adds a new symbol to the standard, it does so in an explicitly gender-neutral way: for example, they tell all companies following the standard they need to have a police officer emoji, but not a police man emoji.
When companies come up with their own emoji designs based on the standard, though, they tend to default to adapting these gender-neutral specifications as male. It's the inherent sexism of Silicon Valley, embodied in pictograms! The new standard just insists that for any gendered emoji, there must be a design for both men and women.
Usually, when the Unicode Consortium adds new emoji to the standard, it does so as part of a major release. With the next version of the Unicode standard not due until July 2017, though, Google convinced the Unicode Consortium to approve these changes now, so that gendered emoji could be introduced in the major operating system revisions coming this year, including the upcoming Android Nougat, and presumably, iOS 10.
Our cities are mostly made up of stone, but many of us don't think of the billions of years of geological history each stone represents. When Ruth Siddall walks to work every day as part of her job as a geologist at the University of College in London, though, she travels back through time, just by paying close attention to the granite, ilarvikite, and other stones that surround her.
That's an experience Siddall wants to share with others. As a resource for the many geological wonders of the capital, she's put together a project called London Pavement Geology, recently highlighted by Hyperallergic, which allows visitors to drill down to see details, pictures, and even the history of the stones that most Londoners ignore every day—whether that's a rare piece of meteorite-blasted granite, or a sidewalk paver swimming with fossilized ammonites.
Screenshot of the London Pavement Geology website.
To many people, the stones that surround us are anonymous, abstract materials. But to Siddall, these materials tell rich archeological stories.
For example, by just sitting down at a London pub where the bar is made of granite instead of marble, she can tell when it was built, and what clientele it catered towards at the time. "In the 1890s, there was an explosion of working-class pubs in London," she tells me. "Working-class people didn't want their pubs to use marble, like the Ritz, but they still wanted a material that was nice, and bright, and shiny. At the same time, the first railway lines were built from London to Scotland, so they began shipping polished granite down from Aberdeen, which revolutionized what London pubs look like."
Other stones tell different architectural histories. While many stones have been used in London construction for centuries, certain rarer stones are of a very definite place and time. For example, the post-modern buildings of the 1980s were marked by the bright, unusual stones of the masonry. These stones came from countries like Brazil and China, where they'd been used in construction for centuries. It was only with the refinement of the diesel engine in the '60s and '70s that it became practical to transport these stones away from their native quarries, and ship them internationally.
Then there are the rare stones. One of Siddall's favorite buildings is the unassuming Irongate House, an office block built slightly north of the Tower of London in 1978. Architecturally, it falls somewhere between dullness and being an eyesore, but geologically, it's constructed of a fantastic material: slabs of Parys granite imported from South Africa that were hit by a meteorite about 2.7 billion years ago. The granite has all these beautiful black veins running through it—the melts generated by this huge astronomical impact. "I doubt the architects who built it were very interested that it has extraterrestrial glasses embedded in it, but I sure am," says Siddall.
Asked what the most fantastic geologic discovery she's made in London's construction materials, though, and Siddall crosses her fingers. She says she can't quite prove it, but there's a fossilized bit of bone embedded in a block of Portland Stone, about 30 feet up from the ground. "I'd need a ladder to confirm, she says, "but I'm pretty sure it's from a dinosaur!"
A chunk of possible dinosaur's bone at St. Maraget's.
A dinosaur bone is a rare fossil indeed, but others are more common. For example, in many places throughout London, Siddall says, you can find Jura marble, a type of marble quarried in Bavaria that commonly contains many impressive, photogenic fossils. This type of marble is so common in London, she says, that if you ever go into a Tube station or a shopping mall, you've got the shells of calcified prehistoric creatures beneath your heel.
Siddall hopes that the London Pavement Geology site will inspire people to look more closely at the stones that they see every day, but ultimately, that's not her real goal. "I see this as an important resource for architects and historians in the future, as well as stone and building conservators," she says, citing her own background helping restore Westminster Abbey and various Roman-period sites in the Mediterranean. Still, even Siddall has to admit she's partly in it just for the joy of it. "I'd be lying if I said some of my motivation wasn't purely geek," she laughs.
Beloved by musicians and designers alike, Moog synthesizers have inspired three generations of music, including Kraftwerk, Daft Punk, David Bowie, the Beastie Boys, and deadMau5. Now, these synth-loving musicians (and more) have been shrunk down in size by Dorothy, the London-based print maker, as part of its new poster: a cutaway view of the Lilliputian world within the Moog's first portable synthesizer, the 1970 Minimoog.
Before the Minimoog, synthesizers were big, modular, room-filling machines that could only be used in a studio. The Minimoog, although bulky by the standards of today's svelter synths, was the first synthesizer that a musician could realistically use at home, arguably driving the Golden Age of electronic music by making it accessible. In its cheapest configurations, it cost less than five grand, and weighed less than 30 pounds, making it about as big as a carry-on suitcase.
Like Dorothy's last print envisioning the inside the original Macintosh, the studio's Minimoog poster is heavy on synth-culture references, and light on schematic accuracy. In Dorothy's imagination, the inside of a Minimoog is filled with tiny people, partying inside a 24-hour electronica club.
There are some great touches, if you squint close enough. There's Giorgio Moroder, playing the piano for Donna Summer; Daft Punk, DJ-ing a party full of Tron characters; a Berlin-era David Bowie and Iggy Pop jamming with Brian Eno; the Beastie Boys partying with the giant robot from their Intergalactic video; and Sun Ra, presiding over his Arkestra. (Space is the place!) There's even a little rhyming Clockwork Orange reference: because the film's score was performed on a Moog, it's filled with Droogs.
Inside Information: Minimoog is available as three-color litho print, and is available to buy directly from Dorothy for $40 here.
Unless the physical laws of the universe radically change, you'll never see a new color in your lifetime, no matter how hard Pantone tries to convince you otherwise. Almost as rare? The creation of new colorants, or physical materials which are used to impart colors in different materials.
New colorants can be worth hundreds of millions to the labs who discover them, as they open up countless new design and manufacturing opportunities. Creating them takes a lot of hard science—and a big dash of luck. Here are four new "colors" science has discovered in the last decade.
In the world of color science, the creation of new pigments is extremely rare. In fact, by and large, most of the pigments that help color our world are the same ones we've been using since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. That's why professor Mas Subramanian's discovery of a new kind of blue pigment back in 2009 was a big deal. His blue, called YInMn (short for ytrrium, indium, and manganese) blue, is the first new inorganic blue pigment to have been discovered since cobalt blue first entered manufacturing 200 years ago.
This new blue has many benefits over cobalt blue: Unlike cobalt, it's not poisonous, and it doesn't fade over time. In appearance, it has the dreamy, magical depth of lapis lazuli, and it can also endure oil, water, and sunlight better than other blues. That makes it a much better blue to use in everything from clothing to paints. And due to an infrared reflectivity that's higher than most paints, it has a lot of potential for being used in roofing, which could lead to big energy savings. The skyline of the future might be YInMn blue.
For years, one of the best yellow pigments you could find was called "pigment yellow 34" (or PY 34), a vibrantly orangey yellow that almost looks identical in its raw form to the fluorescent powdered cheese dust that comes with your box of mac and cheese. But try to sprinkle this stuff in your pasta, and you'd die—its technical name is lead chromate, and it's as toxic as it sounds. It also tended to darken over time, developing a gross green or yellowish tinge, like mustard that's allowed to crust over. Because of its toxicity, what once was a common pigment in many different settings can now only be used for industrial and professional applications: for example, yellow safety signs at a factory.
In 2010, Simon Boocock of the Shepherd Color Company came up with an alternative, which he called NTP (or Biobium Tin Pyrochlore) Yellow. Although it's slightly different from the original, this new pigment is a bright, clean yellow that doesn't fade and has excellent durability, again making it a better yellow for fabrics and paints, while also serving as a valuable "mixing" pigment to create other beautiful, durable colors. Today, NTP Yellow is protected by patent—and the Shepherd Color Company runs a brisk business selling it to manufacturers around the world.
Most of the colors we see in the world around us are the results of pigments, which are chemical compounds that can be added to a relatively colorless base (like paint, plastic, paper, or fabric) to shift the way light scatters off it, creating the appearance of a certain color. Vantablack, though, isn't a pigment. It's essentially a specially applied coating that mimics a black hole, gobbling up light and causing it to bounce around endlessly in a forest of vertical carbon nanotubes.
Created by NASA in 2011, Vantablack was developed as a material that could help absorb light and radiation before it could disrupt the sensors of deep space satellites. In appearance, it looks like the blackest black ever, as though light is literally disappearing into it. That's why it didn't take long for artists and designers outside of NASA to declare Vantablack the new black, despite the fact it's both insanely expensive and insanely difficult to apply. Right now, art world legend Anish Kapoor has exclusive rights to use the material in his work in the U.K., leading to a small-scale riot among British artists who probably couldn't afford to use it anyway.
Iridescence isn't really a color. It's all colors, and none of them, all at once. If you've ever seen a beetle's shell, a butterfly's wings, or a peacock's feathers, you're familiar with the color-shifting phenomenon that gives the natural world a sort of holographic shimmering effect. It's created by something called "structural coloration," which causes different colors to appear in an object when viewed from different angles, thanks to wave interference.
In 2011, researchers at the University of Sheffield's Department of Physics and Astronomy created a pigment-free polymer that mimicked natural iridescence. The effect was achieved by creating a highly ordered sandwich of different polymers, which causes an optical rainbow effect similar to an opal's when you look at it from different angles. The lead researcher, Andrew Parnell, called the results "wonderful and funky."
What will it be used for? Not fashion or car paint, sadly, but anti-counterfeiting measures on passports and currency. Not the most exciting use, surely—but perhaps one of the most marketable.
Never stopping in its quest to make the world searchable, Google has just unveiled a new app that makes it as easy to find the opening times of your local museum as it is to figure out who painted that bright purple Impressionist masterpiece you saw five years ago at the Louvre.
It's called Google Arts & Culture, and it's a tool for discovering art "from more than a thousand museums across 70 countries,"Google writes on its blog. More than just an online display of art, though, it encourages viewers to parse the works and gather insight into the visual culture we rarely encounter outside the rarified world of brick-and-mortar museums.
For instance, you can browse all of Van Gogh's paintings chronologically to see how much more vibrant his work became over time. Or you can sort Monet's paintings by color for a glimpse at his nuanced use of gray.
You can also read daily stories about subjects such as stolen Nazi artworks or Bruegel's Tower of Babel. The articles are plucked from the web pages of over 1,000 partner museums around the world, and strained through Google's algorithms so that the presentation is crisp, clean, and full of beautiful, full-bleed images.
Another killer feature of Arts & Culture is the ability to use Google's Street View functionality to actually go into museums and see a painting or statue where it really exists, all without leaving your phone or computer. So you can see how museums have displayed the Mona Lisa, or Monet's Waterlilies, in real-life, giving them a sense of scale and physicality that usually eludes viewers who are looking at art online. It even comes with Google Cardboard support.
For art lovers, Arts & Culture is the kind of site you can spend hours browsing, discovering and rediscovering famous artists, institutions, and masterpieces, all without ever leaving your couch.
Google Arts & Culture is available to browse online, or download on iOS or Android for free.
I know—I'm one of those writers who is always trying to scapegoat my tools for my own failures of productivity and creativity. But in my 10-plus years as a professional writer, and a decade before that as an amateur, I've only ever found one magic tool that makes my writing easier and more polished. It's called Scrivener, a word processing app for Mac and Windows designed with writers in mind.
Today, after years of testing, that magic writing tool is finally coming to iPhone and iPad. And whether you're a dabbler in fiction or a full-time pro journalist, it's worth being excited about.
Most writing apps treat a short story or novel no differently than it would treat a simple document like a letter or a shopping list—a contiguous and linear stream of sentences that are written down in order of occurrence. But ask any author, and this just isn't the way they write. A sci-fi novelist fleshes out certain scenes and characters long before they're introduced in the text. A PhD candidate working on their thesis has critical sections finalized months before the introduction is even written. A short story might just start as a potpourri of random sentence fragments and images that inspire the writer. To put it simply, writing apps are designed around writing and editing, but not the creative process of writing and editing.
What made Scrivener such a revelation was that it was a writing app designed around the way writers actually work. That's because Keith Blount, the developer of Scrivener, wasn't actually a programmer when he started his app. He was an aspiring novelist with degrees in History, Medieval Literature, and Teaching, who learned coding just to make Scrivener possible. Blount understood that writing anything complicated wasn't about just laying one sentence down after another. Rather, a difficult writing project was like keeping a shoebox full of treasures: beautiful sentences, images that inspire you, researched facts and figures, character biographies, and more. Scrivener was designed to be the shoebox that helped you collect those treasures, polish them into pearls, and then curate them into an exhibit which other people could enjoy.
It's an approach that has massively paid off. In the last 10 years, Scrivener has sold over 50 million copies. To put that in perspective, that's more than the original Super Mario Bros. sold. Which is why Scrivener coming to iOS is a huge deal. But bringing Scrivener to iOS wasn't easy.
"The biggest design challenge was taking something as big and flexible as Scrivener and trying to distill it into something much smaller and simple," Blount says. "Our desktop version is very powerful with a lot of features, and obviously we couldn't cram all of those into an iPad, let alone an iPhone. iOS has a much simpler interface, with no customizable toolbar icons or menus where features can be tucked away, so I had to think about what really needed to in there so that it was still Scrivener."
To put this in perspective, a brief overview of Scrivener's features on Windows and macOS include reorganizing the structure of any document by rearranging virtual index cards on a cork board, editing multiple documents at once, saving snapshots of chapters or sections and comparing them back to the end of time, creating hyperlinks between different parts of the text document, and exporting a manuscript in over a dozen different formats, ranging from PDFs to webpages to Kindle eBooks. And that's without talking about bells and whistles like Scrivener's surprisingly comprehensive built-in character name generator (ones earmarked for future use: Marinella Hawks, Alessandra Luscombe, and Giovanne Herewad), its ability to set word count targets on documents, and its robust ability to add comments and notes to any part of a document's text.
Not all of these features came along for the ride for the iOS version, because there's simply no space for them in a mobile touch UI. But a surprising number of them did. The core idea behind Scrivener is that every piece of writing is like a big box of jigsaw pieces, only some of which make up a finished puzzle. Some pieces won't fit, some will be for a different puzzle, some will be end pieces, and some will be harder to place in the middle. Scrivener is a tool that lets you organize that chaotic box, and finally finish the puzzle. So Scrivener for iOS might not have a character name generator, or document versioning, but everything that lets you put your puzzle together is still there. The features that were left behind are nice-haves, but not necessarily critical to the writing process, and a lot of them can be supplemented by downloading other iOS apps, or just loading up Scrivener when you're back at your PC.
Another design principle of Scrivener for iOS was that unlike some mobile office apps, the iPhone version shouldn't be a second-class citizen to the iPad version. "I wanted [Scrivener] to feel tailored for each device," says Blount. "So, if you're tapping away on an iPhone with no keyboard, there's an extended row of buttons to give quick access to common commands. If you have an external keyboard, there's extensive support for keyboard shortcuts. If you're on an iPad, you can view two documents alongside one another. If you're on an iPad Pro, you can use multitasking mode to view other apps, too."
On my iPad mini with an attached Bluetooth keyboard, editing one of my short stories was a joy, but what really surprised me was how useful I found the iPhone version. When I write fiction, a lot of my ideas come to me when I'm out, when I can't really do any writing. Consequently, many of these ideas end up getting lost. With the iPhone version, though, I can just pull out my phone, open up Scrivener, and put that idea where it belongs. I even found myself editing a manuscript idly at a bar the other night. You might not write a novel from scratch using Scrivener for iPhone—though stranger things have happened—but as a companion app to the iPad and desktop version, it's blissfully useful.
Earlier, I called Scrivener a magic writing tool, but that almost feels like understating it. In terms of sheer power, it's more like a magical writing weapon. In that sense, while the desktop version of Scrivener might be an Excalibur or Mjölnir, the iOS version is like Sting—smaller, but scarcely less powerful. You can buy it today for $20 directly from the App Store.
Mario Klingemann is the Machine Learning Artist in Residence at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris (the same arm of Google behind the new Louvre-busting museum app). But when he's not tinkering with neural networks to figure out how they can be leveraged against Google's database of several million scanned cultural artifacts, Klingemann's training them on human faces... and posting the unsettling results online.
Trained on a database of over 20,000 faces organized by rough category (age, gender, pose, etc), Klingemann experiments use a convolutional neural network similar to Deep Dream. Except instead of just recursively reinterpreting the same picture with trippy results, Klingemann's face maker generates ghoulish visages entirely from scratch, according to how computers interpret faces. And how do computers interpret faces? If Klingemann's results are anything to go on, like Son of Sam going through Facebook on mescaline.
While these noseless, zipper-mouthed melt demons might suggest otherwise, it turns out that Klingemann's neural network actually looks for the same things human brains do when trying to identify faces, focusing primarily on the eyes and mouth. Klingemann's neural network also looks for the gradient of the skin, and has some remedial hair detection capabilities, judging from the different skin colors and hair smears boasted by his Deep Dream Cenobites.
So why is Klingemann messing with this nightmare fodder? "My ultimate goal is to create a machine that can produce 'art' entirely autonomously," he says. "But I'm definitely not there yet, so right now, I'm in the phase where I build tools that produce serendipitous visuals that are different or 'new' in some way."
While few people would argue that these neural network's vision of human faces are pretty, Klingemann says he is pleased with them. Other researchers, he points out, have successfully used neural networks to create relatively realistic faces from scratch, using different data sets and types of code. But photorealism doesn't really equal art, which is what Klingemann eventually wants to train neural networks to produce.
"My goal is not to create realistic portraits, but rather abstract versions of faces," he tells me. "What I like about them is that they seem to come right out of the uncanny valley. They're just all somehow on the edge."
Depending on whom you ask, Slack has either revolutionized the way workers communicate or created just another distraction in today's always-on lifestyle. How do you make sure your team is using Slack efficiently, and in a way that helps your company reach its goals—not just siloed in private chat channels all day, sharing cat GIFs?
Moovel, the urban mobility startup, struggled with this same question, so it teamed up with Benedikt Groß—creator of the accidental Google Earth typeface, Aerial Bold, and this alt-universe Tube map—to create #teamchatviz, a Slack app that visualizes your team's Slack data in real time.
Moovel has about 110 employees in Germany, and 110 employees in the U.S., all of whom have been using Slack for over a year to communicate on a daily basis. Although it's is now owned by Daimler AG, the German megacorp, Moovel is still run like a startup at heart, says Eileen Mandir, head of product and the Moovel lab. "It's a typical problem a lot of startups face as they get bigger: how do you stay agile at scale?" she says. To Moovel, staying agile means getting its teams to constantly cross-pollinate, which is why all of its Slack channels are public. The thinking is that individuals should be communicating with people besides their own teams, so that good ideas can become great ideas.
That's nice in theory, but was that actually happening? Moovel rejected just looking at spreadsheets of data, deeming them unsuitable for representing the complex way people interact across teams and hierarchy levels. "It would be like using Excel to visualize a swarm," says Mandir. They created #teamchatviz as a way of visualizing that swarm.
"The data ended up showing which channels and topics delivered on our goal for interdisciplinary, company-wide collaboration, and which teams in the company we needed to make a better effort connecting to the whole," says Mandir. In particular, Mandir says that while their product, development, and design teams were really good at collaborating, Moovel's marketing, sales, and business development teams tended to be more siloed. Moovel is now working to improve this by making sure there are designated representatives from each team involved in every new project from the outset.
While #teamchatviz can't give any insight into the performance of a team, or private messages, it can give helpful overviews of how people are communicating, both among themselves and within the company at large. The Channel Heartbeat tab of #teamchatviz lets you see what the most active teams in your Slack are, while People Land visualizes employees in arbitrary groups based upon the people they communicate with most on Slack, regardless of team.
Similarly, Channel Land groups Slack channels according to how many members they share; Messages and Reactions calls out the most influential messages on any given date, arranged by comments and reactions. Frequent Speakers is a sort of leaderboard, showing who the most influential (and just plain noisiest) Slack team members are. Finally, the Emoji timeline can be used to identify the most popular emoji both channel- and company-wide, and can even be used as a sort of high-level tool to see how teams are doing: for example, a team that uses a lot of angry face emoji might be overworked.
The interface feels like an extension of Slack's web-based UI, even adopting much of its typography and color choices. Likewise, the different visualizations are almost broken out like Slack channels, so if you've ever used Slack, you'll be right at home. And while there's an argument to be made that #teamchatviz could be just another distraction—well, that's in-keeping with the spirit of Slack itself, which doesn't shirk from fun and frivolous features like emoji and built-in Giphy support.
An open-source project, #teamchatviz is freely available for any Slack team to integrate. According to Mandir, she hopes that other companies will not only add new functionality to the app, but will be able to use #teamchatviz to gain better insight into how Slack is actually working within their organization. If you're interested in trying it out, you can explore an interactive demo of #teamchatviz here.
Although it might not be as recognizable south of Windsor, the classic CBC "Gem" logo has the same funky 1970s cachet in Canada as the vintage PBS logo in the States.
It was originally designed by Burton Kramer, a Yale-trained Canadian-American graphic designer, as part of a broader identity for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1974. Now, following the unlikely trend of republishing vintage standards manuals, a group of design-loving Canadians are trying to bring Kramer's 1974 CBC Graphic Standards Manual to Kickstarter.
After seeing the revival work being done down South bringing the classic MTA and NASA standards manuals back to print, Canadian graphic designer and art director Adrian Jean wondered how his country's own design heritage could be celebrated and shared in the same way.
He settled upon the CBC Graphic Standards Manual because he felt it was one that was similarly iconic, both culturally and artistically. In the patriotic words of Arlene Gehmacher, curator of Canadian Art and Graphic design at the Royal Ontario Museum: "The CBC manual epitomizes the concept of integrated design. It set the standard for Canadian corporate identity programmes and has become a part of our national heritage."
The original manual contained over 200 pages, describing the way in which the CBC's "Gem" identity should be used, and in what context. Like most standards manuals, it provided a number of variants of the CBC's logo and other identifying assets, as well as guidance on typography, spacing, merchandising, and more. It also apparently contains some pretty funky pages, detailing how the CBC Logo would look on the side of a bright blue sports car, Batmobile-style.
Although Kramer's identity is no longer used by the CBC, this is easily a standards manual that deserves a place on any design lover's bookshelf, alongside Massimo Vignelli's work for the MTA, Paul Rand's work for IBM, Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar's work for Mobil and Pan Am, and Richard Danne and Bruce Blackburn's work for NASA. For its part, the CBC seems game to opening up the rights to Kramer's Standards Manual so that members of the public can purchase a copy. It wants to gauge interest first, though, which is why they're currently asking for people to sign an online petition, saying they'll buy a copy if and when it goes on sale.
The designers at Philips Lighting, maker of the multi-colored Hue smart bulbs among other glowing and shining products, know that there's a link between productivity, happiness, and workplace lighting. So when it came to updating their vintage corporate headquarters in Eindhoven, they wanted to practice what they preached. Philips teamed up with Lava Architects and Beersnielsen to cover the building's stark, lifeless atrium with a canopy of beautiful opaque panels, spreading light like sunshine scattering between leaves.
When the Philips Lighting headquarters was originally built in the 1950s, it was made up of a number of separate buildings, surrounding a large outdoor courtyard. At some point, the company decided to consolidate these buildings into one mega-structure by covering the courtyard with an enormous, 115,000 square foot ceiling, which let in sunlight through a scattering of skylights. But for a lighting company like Philips, the result was dreary—and it was an acoustic nightmare.
"When we started discussing how to redesign our headquarters back in 2011, we came pretty quickly to the idea that we had to break up this space [for both lighting and acoustic reasons]," explains Pierre-Yves Panis, chief designer at Philips Lighting. But the designers found that prospect exciting. The covered atrium, Panis says, was "literally a blank piece of paper" that they could use to demonstrate everything they knew about the importance of great lighting in an office workspace... especially the notion that more naturalistic lighting can help amp up creativity and collaboration, thanks to the way cortisol levels drop under artificial or poor lighting conditions.
One important design consideration of the canopy was that it needed to "have a life of its own," says Panis. In other words, it needed to improve the atrium's natural lighting, even when the power was turned off. To create this effect, Philips combined of over 1,500 separate panels, overlaying them slightly upon one another like leaves in a forest canopy. These actually aren't lights at all: They instead serve to diffuse a smaller bank of LED lights, as well as let natural light peek through the skylights above. It creates a leaf-like ripple effect, thanks to the fact that each panel is backed by an irregular reflective pyramid, which bends and bounces the light around in interesting ways.
And that's just when the canopy is turned off. When it's illuminated, 500 Philips Ecophon Soundlight Comfort panels kick in, algorithmically blinking on and off according to parameters like the time of day, the season of the year, and how many people are in the building. No more than 60% of the panels are ever illuminated at a given time, which gives the light patterns a soothing and whimsical dancing effect, which is further enhanced by 50 Philips Selecon RAMA LED fixtures that are placed in the middle of the space, creating a golden light that resembles sunshine sparkling on water at sundown.
Asked how he would describe sitting under the Canopy to people who'd never seen it, Panis says: "There's this impression of constant movement that never makes you uncomfortable," he says. "The light has a natural ebb and flow, like the tide coming in and out. But what's beautiful about it is it's not really like anything else. It's difficult to describe in words, because when you see it, it describes itself."
International design firm Ideo popularized the designer brainstorming session: Just lock a team of creatives up in a conference room with some Sharpies and multi-colored Post-its, and don't let them leave until a brilliant idea strikes. But this brainstorming method doesn't work well when your team is spread around the globe. Now Mural, an alumni of Ideo's startup-in-residence program, is trying to bring what goes on inside Ideo's conference rooms to the cloud.
The core idea of Ideo's brainstorming sessions is to externalize everything. Like a paint gun fight, you want to spatter the whiteboard with as much color as possible, filling stickies with ideas, random thoughts, doodles, inspirations, slogans, questions, and more. The refinement comes later, organizing the ideas, figuring out which ones to pursue, and refining them. The end point of a brainstorming session is totally arbitrary: it might be when there are 30 ideas on the wall, or it might be when there are 3,000. It's a messy process that is inherently physical, involving lots of jumping up, feverish scribbling, and even yelling.
Mural brings this practice online, allowing team members to brainstorm from anywhere. It's used by companies and organizations ranging from IBM to Stanford's business school. Each Mural project is an unbounded whiteboard that can grow and shrink to any size, depending on how much it contains. As usual, brainstorming is done by flinging stickies at this whiteboard, but the stickies don't have to be just text or a drawing. They can also be web links, file documents, YouTube videos, MP3, PDFs, photos, and so on. Once a stickie is on a Mural, it can be edited, rearranged, customized with different colors and text, moved elsewhere on the board, or commented on. Any number of team members can join a Mural, and work on it at the same time, whether they're working together in an office, or dialing in from halfway around the world through their iPhones or iPads. Mural runs on Microsoft's giant 84-inch Surface Hub interactive touchscreen, so you could theoretically replace your conference room whiteboard with one running the software.
According to Mural cofounder and CEO Mariano Suarez-Battan, one of the things he wanted to accomplish with Mural was to re-create the "magic that happens" in real-world brainstorming sessions. At his last company, the Argentinian social gaming company Three Melons, Suarez-Battan would often brainstorm ideas with whiteboards and stickies when coming up with new game characters of types. When online social gaming platform Playdom acquired his company (four months before being acquired by Disney itself), Suarez-Battan found himself trying to get his new corporate overlords involved on brainstorming sessions. But he couldn't just take a photo of Three Melons's brainstorms and present them to Playdom as part of a slide deck. "The medium changed how these ideas were evaluated," he says. "Instead of getting them involved, we were being judged by the roughness of our ideas."
Those familiar with Ideo-style brainstorming know that this sort of third-party judgment is totally antithetical to the process. But what else could be expected? Brainstorming works because everyone is in it together from the beginning. A team of executives 1,000 miles away can't just jump into a brainstorm mid-stream, unless they can somehow take part in it from where they are. Suarez-Battan had his eureka moment, and when he left Three Melons, he started Mural to make it a reality. Trying to get Mural off the ground, the new company hooked up with Ideo almost by accident, but Suarez-Battan said the collaboration made perfect sense: "After all, they were our ideal client."
Today, an alumni of Ideo's startup-in-residence program, Mural has over 35,000 monthly registered users. More than half of those users come from IBM, Mural's biggest customer, with other clients including Suarez-Battan's ex-bosses at Disney, Steelcase, and educational institutions like the California College of Arts and Stanford Graduate School of Business. With pricing starting at $300 a year for a team of five members, it fits squarely in the camp of enterprise-facing products.
Mural certainly isn't the only workplace collaboration tool on the planet. Tools such as Slack and Trello similarly allow teams to brainstorm, no matter where they are, and have more brand equity. To Suarez-Battan, Mural distinguishes itself by capturing the chaotic physicality of brainstorming. Slack, Trello, and other apps are ultimately about trying to clean up the chaos of collaboration; Mural embraces it. When brainstorming works best, teams are literally spattering the walls with their ideas. Mural just wants to digitize that wall.
Although the amenities available at the world's hotel rooms vary wildly, you're usually guaranteed four walls, a roof, and a bathroom. Not so at this open-air hotel room located in the Swiss Alps. The Null Stern encourages guests to sleep in an exposed bed above the Swiss town of Graubünden, enjoying a panoramic view of the mountains while you doze off to the twinkle of the stars shining overhead.
Made up of just a single "room" containing a double bed, a tile floor, two end tables, and two lamps, the Null Stern is the work of the concept artists Frank and Patrick Riklin, identical twin Swiss concept artists who came up with the idea of opening hotels in unexpected spaces in 2008. Then, it was a claustrophobic nuclear bunker, but with the latest iteration of the concept, the Riklins have gone in the opposite direction, creating a hotel without any property or structure, bringing new meaning to the act of "sightseeing." And this is just the first outdoor room. The Riklins says they aim to expand the idea to other outdoor hotels around the country.
At around $250 dollars a night, a stay at the Null Hotel might seem a little overpriced, considering it's not exactly "all mod cons," and is in the middle of nowhere. Still, the price of staying at the Null Hotel includes a valet, who will see guests to their room at night, and bring them breakfast in bed the next morning.
You can book a stay at the Null Stern hotel here. It seems like a lovely experience, at least for a night. Instead of going back to your hotel and watching TV, you watch the sunset! Instead of taking a shower into the morning, you roll around in the morning dew! Instead of having a bathroom en suite, you walk downhill!
And at least for now, it remains relatively easy to book, although you'd better have alternative accommodations in your back pocket: the Riklins reserve the right to cancel a reservation at any time due to poor weather.
Ever since Edward Snowden went into hiding after leaking details of the NSA's global surveillance apparatus in 2013, he has gone without a smartphone—for fear that he could be tracked and even executed. For Snowden, that's not a problem that's likely to go away anytime soon. Now, the famous crypto expert is looking to stop others from being snooped on through their smartphones: specifically, journalists.
With the help of renowned hardware hacker Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, the two have designed a device called the Introspection Engine: a new kind of smartphone case that will let reporters know when their smartphones are under surveillance.
As first reported by Wired, the kind of surveillance Snowden and Huang are worried about isn't just some G-man snooping in on a reporter's phone calls. It's the potentially fatal kind of surveillance: the kind where a foreign government uses a reporter's phone as a tracking device for a cruise missile or a kill squad. It's simply too easy for a government to compromise your smartphone with malware remotely, then hijack the device's radios to shine a big metaphorical beacon in the sky, saying "come and get me" to anyone listening.
If the state wants to track you based on your smartphone, it might seem like a smarter move to go—like Snowden—without one. But for journalists who require their phones to stay in touch with their editors and sources, as well as take photos, that's not necessarily an option. Nor is putting your smartphone into Airplane Mode—which isn't effective anyway, because malware can spoof your smartphone's radios being off, even as they're secretly working. As for popping your smartphone into a radio-blanking Faraday bag? Well, that's only good so long as you don't need to use it for work. "Journalists need to take pictures in the field; they need to have their phones on," explains Huang.
Enter the Introspection Engine, half-case and half-internal modification for an iPhone 6. To install it, Huang and Snowden imagine that you would first either modify—or more likely, pay an expert to modify—your smartphone by directly tapping into its radios through the iPhone's SIM card slot. This direct feed of the radio signals would then become accessible via a flexible circuit board added by the mod, which would snake out from the SIM slot and connect to the Introspection Engine battery case. The case gives the phone extended battery life, but more importantly, it contains an oscilloscope—a device for observing signal voltages—that directly detects when the device's radios are transmitting. If your Introspection Engine case starts buzzing when your phone is off, or when you're in AirPlane mode, guess what? You've been compromised.
In a sense, this is all theoretical. You can't buy an Introspection Engine at this point, nor have Huang and Snowden even created a prototype. Yet Huang says he's confident this will work, based upon the fact that oscilloscopes can accurately detect transmissions from any smartphone radio.
Instead, the two are releasing a paper about their idea now to get the crypto community's feedback on the Introspection Engine's design before they prototype it. After that, they will release an open-source reference design, and eventually hope to figure out a way to sell modified smartphones and Introspection Engines to anyone who wants one. And since bringing in third parties are vectors for further compromise, the two have designed the Introspection Engine to make sure that it can be verified as working correctly by individuals with limited technical strength, either by following an online tutorial or by simply switching the device out of Airplane Mode with the Introspection Engine on, and seeing if it sends an alert.
What isn't theoretical is that journalists are being killed by governments, on purpose, using the very techniques the duo are trying to thwart. "Frontline journalists are state-level adversaries," says Huang, referencing the death of Marie Colvin, an American journalist who may have been murdered in a targeted bombing by the Syrian government by hacking her smartphone. Nor is she the only one, believe Snowden and Huang. Because they risk their lives reporting from conflicted regions, and because they give voice to the voiceless, journalists are frequently targeted by regimes who want them silenced. For these sorts of governments, it's well worth the million or so dollars it costs to purchase a zero-day exploit (or an exploit that is still unknown and un-patched by device makers) from the black market, and figure out a way to have it remotely installed on journalists' phones—so the next time those reporters come through their neck of the woods, they know it.
Plus, designing for journalists in mind has another practical benefit, argues Huang. "The challenge of designing any security system is understanding the threat model, and who the target is. A lot of systems go off the rails because the scope keeps creeping up," Huang says. In the case of journalists, "we have a really clear idea of who we're trying to help, and who we're up against."
They envision a day in which newsrooms help protect their reporters by distributing Introspection Engine-ready smartphones to all their staff, before they hit the field—although obviously, the real dream would be a future in which they didn't have to.
Dutch designer Richard Vijgen has long been fascinated by the unseen structure of the Internet. His last app, Architecture of Sound, let people discover the Wi-Fi signals, overhead satellites, GPS units, and other radio waves that surround them.
His new app, though, goes in the other direction. Called White Spots, it's like a compass for finding the end of the Internet. And it may be a lot closer than you think.
Like Architecture of Radio, White Spots starts by loading up an augmented reality perspective that shows how connected you currently are in the world, and what mobile radio waves are surrounding you. Point your smartphone around, and the app highlights which carrier's cell tower is directly in front of you, with a distance in meters displayed beneath.
Chances are, you're positively surrounded by these towers. But by tapping "Get Me Out Of Here" at the bottom of the screen, White Spots shows the reality: most of the world is still unconnected. Within the app, these unconnected areas are visualized as the titular white spots. Most of the planet's white spots are in the ocean, but there's still enough lapses in coverage on land that if you want to, falling off the map of the Internet is just a short drive away. Heck, White Spots will even plot out a route directly there.
"We don't normally think of the Internet as something spatial, but in reality, of course, it is," Vijgen tells me. "We hope the app gives a new perspective on connectivity, by showing that connectivity is also a geographic phenomenon . . . in general, the more remote a place is, the more expensive it is to install the network infrastructure. When the people who live there cannot return that investment (by paying for data) the infrastructure will not be installed."
Although Vijgen developed all the technology behind the app, he actually teamed up with documentary filmmaker Bregtje van der Haak and photographer Jacqueline Hassink to make White Spots a multimedia experience. There are more than 30 original stories embedded in the app, which focus on individuals living in "white spots" either by choice or by chance, including artists who are creating Internet-free zones, and activists trying to install network infrastructure in Africa.
"These white sports are a kind of 'uncharted territory' of the 21st century, a kind of terra incognita," Vijgen says. "The people who live there don't produce data, we can't Google them and they are not part of a worldview that is increasingly mediated by the Internet. In a sense these white spots are our blind spots."
You can download White Spots for iOS and Android here.
