If you're not into politics, the election season—with all of its uncertainties and unpleasantness—can seem interminable. So if you're a candidate, particularly one who isn't a bile-spuming human sweet potato, how do you keep voters engaged long enough to absorb your talking points? If you're Hillary Clinton, you borrow a few pages from Farmville's playbook, and task them with running their own virtual campaign office to get out the vote.
The Hillary 2016 app is a free download on iOS, with Android version forthcoming. It puts you in charge of a digital regional office for the Hillary 2016 campaign. You're tasked with turning it into a bustling campaign HQ by buying upgrades like new posters, office furniture, art, and more, by collecting starts—the game's in-app currency. But you don't pay real money for stars: you earn them by performing microtasks in the app, like syncing the 2016 Election Calendar to your own, or taking a quiz about the many, many, many falsehoods of Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump.
Right now, the Hillary 2016 app rewards stars for things like filling out quizzes, but there's nothing stopping the developers from letting players win stars from watching debates, tweeting links of support, signing petitions, and more. Exciting or not, it's a clever way to keep inactive voters involved—and it's easy to see how it lays a foundation for future features aimed at getting people involved on a more grassroots level. For example, one feature lets you find events to participate in on a local level, from phone banks to canvassing.
When it came to building the app, it wasn't just farmed out to the lowest bidder—the app's design team within Hillary For America has a pretty impressive mobile design pedigree behind it. According to the campaign, it included Stephanie Cheng, the senior product manager, who recently co-founded the game company Kooapps, and previously worked at DreamWorks Animation's app division. Meanwhile, senior product designer Denny McFadden led the design team at the large nonprofit charity: water. Other employees have experience at Etsy, Timehop, and Livestream.
The app's not going to be for everyone, and there's already some who are calling it joyless. I don't know, though. In an election year that could very well just be a vote away from the apocalypse, I found there to be something soothing about the pablum-like game mechanics of Hillary 2016. This year, I don't really want to play a partisan iOS game about U.S. politics that gets my blood boiling any more than it already is; I just want to fall into a zen-like state, collect my stars and upgrade my Hillary HQ to Aeron Chairs, because this election is fucking "exciting" enough.
Meanwhile, rumor has it that Donald Trump's own virtual campaign office app will be a re-skinned version of Five Nights at Freddie's. Okay, not really. But can you think of a more appropriate choice?
These days, video barely exists as a physical medium for most Americans. It streams in ultra high-quality through the air, like magic. For decades, though, video came encased in plastic rectangles called VHS tapes, which were played on one of the first classic consumer gadgets: the VCR.
The format was one with surprising longevity, but after nearly 40 years, Ars Technica reports that the last remaining VCR/VHS factory will close up shop. It's sad, because for those of us who grew up in the '80s and '90s, the VHS format was a gateway to a lifelong love of film, and just looking at many of the format's packaging designs at the Tumblr Vault of VHS —uncovered recently by Coudal Partners—are enough to immediately evoke powerful feelings of nostalgia.
Like most forms of nostalgia, a retrospective fondness of VHS has nothing to do with actual quality. Unlike vinyl, there's no argument to be made for the VHS format somehow having better quality or warmer sound than digital formats like Blu-Ray, or even HD streaming. Quality-wise, VHS was inferior to Betamax, the video cassette format that it beat as a standard. But the reason VHS beat Betamax is the same reason so many people have such fond memories of the format today: the tape format made it possible to record more than two hours of video, as long as you didn't mind sacrificing quality. Combine that with the piracy-friendly nature of VHS, which made copying a tape a snap, and it turned out that most VCR owners had an entertainment center stuffed with nine-hour tapes, filled with blurry, bootlegged Full House episodes and former Blockbuster rentals.
Not so surprisingly, then, a lot of the tape designs on Vault of VHS broadcast their tape's ability to record 6, 8, 9, even 12 hours of video, all at the highest quality. And it's amazing how many of these I remember from my own youth. When my parents bought our first VCR for Christmas in 1985, my Dad copied both Gremlins and Critters as a Christmas creature double feature for me on this Maxell GX-Silver tape. I wore out this Scotch 3M tape over the period of a couple of years, endlessly rewatching the original 1933 King Kong which I had taped off PBS. This is the tape I used to record my 4th grade amateur masterpiece, The Parrot Who Ate Petersberg, starring my family's red-lored Amazon parrot, Chris, rampaging through a to-scale Lego city on our dining room table. And when I hit puberty, I may very well have had my sexual awakening after a friend slipped me a bootleg Skinemax flick on this Fuji Pro120.
True, there are few—if any—practical reasons to mourn the death of VHS, but I'd bet I'm not the only one out there who would be surprised by the deep well of memories that are sparked by looking over these designs. Short of cassette mixtapes, is there any other retro format as irrationally loved?
The world is full of gods and demons, and it's the mission of French photographer Charles Fréger to capture them on film. In his latest series of photos, Yokainoshima, Fréger has turned his lens on the yokai of Japan—a class of spirits in Japanese folklore that are often adapted as costumes for local festivals.
Shot over a span of two years and five separate trips, Fréger's photos aim to capture the art and ethnography of Japan through the lens of its monsters. In the north of Japan, there are over 30 small festivals each year, usually clustered around the New Year, in which people from the local villages dress up in elaborate straw costumes to resemble yokai spirits.
According to Fréger, these yokai spirits are roughly equivalent to Krampus and other devils that appear around Christmas in Nordic European traditions. "These spirits are demons that come down from the mountains to deliver a message, usually about the dangers to the collective life of the community," he says. "They're supposed to scare the kids into behaving properly."
Fréger says that his work photographing Japanese spirits was a natural follow-up to his previous series, Wilder Mann, which explores the north-European masquerade tradition of dressing up as mythical monsters and savage beasts. The tendency to dress up as spirits of folklore, says Fréger, is one that unites almost every culture in the world.
"My work is a bit of an encyclopedia," Fréger says. "I'm not an ethnographer, but I take photographs of the traditions around the world because I feel connected to the customs. I feel as though my work explores the contrast between life and the city and these rural communities, which continue to keep the old traditions alive, even if most of us are not aware of it."
The mission of the popular file hosting and sharing platform Dropbox is to make it easy for people to work comfortably from anywhere. So when it came time to design its new deluxe San Francisco headquarters, Dropbox wanted the space to do the same thing. Now completed, it's an office that Dropbox likens to a city plaza: a mixture of public and semiprivate spaces that encourage workers to find their own personal bliss.
The new headquarters, which will combine all of Dropbox's San Francisco employees under the same roof for the first time, is a collaboration between New York's AvroKo (an architecture firm that has previously done design work for Boka and the Four Seasons) and the San Francisco architecture firm Rapt Studio. On the Dropbox side, the project was overseen by Glara Ahn, Dropbox's spaces design lead, as well as Claire Pederson, a designer on Dropbox's black ops project.
Lobby
According to Ahn, the project to build a new Dropbox headquarters started around three years ago. "Previously, the San Francisco office was split up between two buildings," Ahn says. "We wanted to merge these two halves into a coherent organism, in a space that was just like Dropbox the product: a combination of simplicity and function that was collaborative but still felt individualistic and human."
A tall order, but during the research phase, Dropbox realized that it wasn't going to get there with a one-size-fits-all design solution. "We asked all our employees to sketch out their hourly experience, and how they liked to work," Ahn says. From there, it became clear that employees not only liked a lot of variety in their work environments depending on what they were doing, they also liked being able to switch up their spaces depending on how they were feeling.
The finished Dropbox headquarters mixes public, semipublic, and private spaces, each catering to a different kind of employee mood. It looks almost like a warehouse of different classic film sets, where employees can choose the world they want to work in that day.
Library
Take the quiet productivity spaces. There are two of them. One, the Library, has a pink, airy, cultured aesthetic that Ahn says was inspired by the interiors of Italian opera houses, with sunlight-filled side nooks that encourage quiet one-on-one conversations, perhaps over a cappuccino. It's an open space that feels intimate—a far cry from the other space, called Deep Focus, which looks like it comes straight out of Stanley Kubrick's 2001, or other '60s sci-fi movies. Ahn describes it as a "moodier" space that would be a better choice for a lone programmer cranking away with his head down than the Library, which is designed to make people still feel as if they are taking part in a community, even when they are trying to meet a deadline.
Deep Focus
Other spaces evoke different moods. One of Dropbox's meeting rooms is covered in tiles of Danish porcelain, giving it a pristine, peaceful feeling. Another almost feels like a Japanese boardroom, complete with a wall-sized mural of falling water. There's a room that looks like the most bitchin' rec room the 1970s had to offer, a lounge that could pass for a living room, and a rooftop garden with an assortment of Northern California plants that lets workers check out a beautiful panorama of the San Francisco skyline. The smallest room, the Huddle room, is big enough for only two people; the biggest rooms, called Transformer Rooms, are unbookable, first-come-first-served spaces that can transform into any kind of room required, whether that's a conference area or a huge classroom.
Up to 1,500 different Dropbox employees will work from the new San Francisco office every day. Ultimately, Ahn hopes that the design of the headquarters caters to each and every one of them, in whole and in part. A lot of times, she says, office designs can forget about the people in favor of the statement, or the aesthetic, but it's important to keep in mind what design is ultimately about. "It's not about the things you fill a room with, whether that's marble, or antiques, or whatever," Ahn says. "It's about the human who is going to be there, and where they find their happiness."
For over 50 years, the Star Trek franchise has been exploring fonts that boldly go where no typographer has gone before. In an excellent article on the typography of the Final Frontier, Yves Peters has dissected many of the typography choices used by Star Trek over the years. It's a fascinated read—not least because it turns out that what we think of as Star Trek's primary typeface was actually incredibly subversive, at the time.
The original Star Trek logo used an all-caps, custom-designed alphabet, which had a style reminiscent of Constructivist fonts from Russia in the early 1900s. For a show released during the height of 1960s Cold War paranoia, using a Russian-inspired font to suggest the futurism of space travel was a daring, rebellious choice. It's one that made a lot of sense for Star Trek, though. Gene Roddenberry's show was always one that aimed to show the utopian side of the future, and how science and technology would ultimately help heal the political schisms on Earth.
In the Star Trek universe, the United States and the Soviet Union are eventually able to put aside their differences, and unite for the good of humanity; a Russian officer, Chekhov, even serves on the Federation flagship. The choice of a Russian Constructivism-style font for the Star Trek logo, while subversive, was just in keeping with the universe that Roddenberry had created. Sputnik and the space race weren't going to lead to eventual nuclear war, but rather the whole human race coming together.
Unfortunately, the first Star Trek logo was the last one to make an explicitly political statement with its font choice. The next typeface, used for the identity of the first six Star Trek movies, as well as both Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager"embodies many of the ideas people had about futuristic typography in the late '70s," writes Peters. It seems designed with the notion that the triangle was the shape of the future: check out those tiny little triangular serifs, or the way letter strokes intersect with curves with triangular cuts. But there's nothing subversive about it.
As for the Next Generation typeface, it's a slanted font, based on Aldo Novarese's "Stop," that looks just totally silly, in retrospect. In the future, apparently, all letters will have a big, unnecessary line running through them. By the time the franchise reached Enterprise, Star Trek had practically gone Helvetica with the adoption of a stock, boring, all-caps sans-serif font.
Produced by J.J. Abrams, the new Star Trek films, including this summer's Star Trek Beyond, don't have all that much going for them, either. You certainly can't call them subversive, except in the sense that they distill the wonder of the Star Trek universe down to yet another summer blockbuster action franchise.
But at least it's got the original logo going for it, featuring a typeface so rightfully iconic that, as Peters notes, the "poster for Star Trek Beyond [can] rely simply on the word 'Beyond,' without even having to mention Star Trek anywhere on the canvas." Now that's a successful typeface.
As some have declared chatbots to be the "next webpage," brands have scrambled to develop their own talkative bots, letting you do everything from order a pizza to rewrite your resume. The truth is, though, that a lot of these chatbots are actually quite stupid, and tend to have a hard time understanding natural human language. Sooner or later, users get frustrated bashing their heads up against the wall of a dim-witted bot's AI.
So how do you design around a chatbot's walnut-sized brain? If you're National Geographic Kids UK, you set your chatbot to the task of pretending to be a Tyrannosaurus rex, a Cretaceous-era apex predator that really had a walnut-sized brain (at least comparatively speaking).
She's called Tina the T. rex, and by making it fun to learn about dinosaurs, she suggests that educatioN—rather than advertising or shopping—might be the real calling of chatbots.
Like a lot of chatbots, Tina the T-Rex runs on Facebook Messenger. Chatting her up is easy. All you do is go to the Facebook page and hit "Message." When I did so, the toothy reptile messaged me back a few seconds later:
Hello, human! I'm Tina the T. rex. My friends at National Geographic Kids have brought me back from extinction to help you learn about my life. I'm still learning about your world, so I may not have all the answers. To get started, why not ask me about my appearance?
So I did, asking Tina what she looked like. Tina's response:
I was huge! I was longer than a bus and had a massive jaw to crush my dinner with. I stood on two legs and had two small arms with two claws on each. I think you'd have found me very scary!
I know that some dinosaurs are supposed to have feathers, so that was the next question I asked Tina: "Did you have feathers?" Her reply was pretty informative!
Humans still haven't found a fossil to crack the answer to that one. Some experts believe I was scaly like a crocodile. Other experts think I had feathers, but they wouldn't look anything like the ones you see on birds today.
And when I followed up by asking: "Well, if they didn't look like birds feathers, what did they look like?" Tina said:
I've been extinct for 66 million years, so there are a lot of things I don't know about, and that's one of them. But keep asking me questions and you can help me learn. Why not ask me how many bones I had?
So far, this is all Chatbot Design 101: Design a likable personality, admit when you don't know what a user is trying to ask, and try to lead them back to areas where your programming is robust.
But what I thought was really interesting about Tina the T. rex was how forgiving I was of her AI failures. At one point, after asking Tina what she ate ("You could be pretty tasty!" she told me), I went down a scatological path, asking Tina: "How big were your poops?" Tina didn't understand the questions, talking instead about the size of her brain. So I followed up with the question: "How big was your excrement?" Tina's reply:
Everyone poos and dinosaurs did too. We know that because experts have found plenty of coprolites all over the world—that's fossilized poo! How exactly did we go to the loo? Well, we may never have the true answer to that.
Not exactly the answer I was looking for, but I still found the exchange delightful, because of course, what I was doing was something very childish: trying to trick an AI to talk about poop. And while I might have been frustrated if, say, a Domino's chatbot didn't understand my order for a pepperoni pizza on the first try, I was quite happy to keep plugging along, rephrasing my question until Tina, the modest T. rex, finally gets it right.
What works here is the fact that when you're interacting with a brand, you don't want to have to repeat yourself: You want them to do all the heavy lifting, and meet you 90% of the way, because you're the customer. Think about how quickly frustrated most people get when they call a customer service line, only to have a representative not immediately understand what they're asking about. Brand chatbots have the same problem: Our expectation is that they should be bending over backwards to figure out what we want, making their failures to do so all the more alienating.
In education, though, our expectations are different. No one feels like a teacher should do all the work: We all know that learning is a give-and-take process of listening, asking questions, experimenting, and rephrasing questions when we don't get the answers we're trying to find. Couple that with a kid's endless love of asking goofy questions, and their passion for dinosaurs in particular, and you'll understand why Tina the T. rex might be the first legitimately awesome chatbot. She's not necessarily more powerful or even better designed than other conversational interfaces, but by meeting kids in the metaphorical classroom to teach them about a subject they love, she succeeds where others fail, despite her limitations.
So maybe chatbots aren't the future of brands at all. Maybe they're the future of education. Certainly, if you've ever been bludgeoned by a child's incessant questioning, there's something about setting them down in front of a chatbot tied into Wikipedia that makes a lot of sense, in a way buying a dress from an AI over Facebook never will.
Recently, a lucky photographer got a once-in-a-lifetime shot: A bolt of lightning striking the Empire State Building. I happened to be with my godson at the time it happened, so I showed him the picture. His first question: Where did the lightning go?
Usually, this question would have left me stymied. But this time, I'd been coincidentally playing Tinybop's latest app, Skyscrapers. So I was able to quickly pull my iPhone out of my pocket and show my godson what happens when lightning strikes a skyscraper like the Empire State Building: The electricity grounds itself, running conductively down the building to disperse itself through the earth.
"Cool," my godson said, then pulled my iPhone from my hand and started learning all about how skyscraper toilets work.
The seventh title in Tinybop's "Explorer's Library" series of apps, which aims to teach kids about subjects ranging from anatomy to geology through experimentation, not exposition, Skyscrapers puts kids in charge of their own city skyline. First, you create your skyscraper by dragging floors into the building. Green floors are residential, while blue floors are offices—a detail which seems without consequence at first, until the app starts teaching you how elevators work.
In the real world, elevator design can be surprisingly complicated, as buildings try to get employees moving between floors without creating elevator bank traffic jams. But Skyscrapers does a pretty good job explaining the basic theories of elevator design, with a cutaway view that shows how certain elevators only go to certain floors. By tapping on people waiting for the elevator, kids can see how certain shafts only go to the lower or top half of the building or residential floors or office floors, and how there are special elevators that go to every floor, even if it's not one that is open to the public.
As you grow your building to a certain height—750 meters is the biggest skyscraper you can make, a little shorter than Burj Khalifa—the skyscraper automatically takes on new architecture to help support it. For example, in Skyscrapers, once your tower goes over a certain number of floors, the top six stories or so will always have a section devoted to a gigantic tuned mass damper, a 700-plus-ton sphere that is brought in via helicopter to allow the building to maintain its balance in case of earthquake.
Speaking of earthquakes, in Skyscrapers, you can simulate one. A specific tab in the interface allows kids to afflict their skyscrapers with different environmental stresses, including earthquakes, hurricanes, and lightning strikes. When you trigger an in-app earthquake, you can see the springs-with-damper base isolators working underground to keep the building from shaking to pieces. When a lightning bolt hits the skyscraper, you can see the path the electricity takes as it goes to ground; and when a big blast of wind comes along, Skyscrapers will show you exactly how much the building can sway from the zephyr.
It's a kids' app, so of course there's a dose of scatology, too. The plumbing section of the app shows kids how all the toilets in a skyscraper are connected, thanks to in-app demonstrations of their plumbing system by a series of triangular and rectangular high-rise visitors flushing down yellow and brown orbs, along with the stray goldfish and piece of toilet paper. In Skyscrapers, you can also simulate water leaks, fires, and power surges, showing how the normal day-to-day activities of a skyscraper get disrupted by these sorts of events. You can even get a sense of scale in Skyscrapers by seeing how many large objects—such as a whale, a dinosaur, or a giraffe—can fit in a building. How many elephants tall can you build your skyscraper?
Illustrated by Mike Ellis, an artist who works for Herman Miller and the New Yorker, Skyscrapers might not give kids an engineering degree's worth of knowledge about how high-rises function. But like most of Tinybop's apps, Skyscrapers still demonstrates how much you can teach kids about how the grown-up world works—by showing, not telling. You can download it now on the iOS App Store for $2.99.
What is a car? For people like me, it's a thing you rent occasionally for road trips, or to take your elderly mother to Home Depot. We don't really care about make or model, slightly prefer hybrids if we have to choose, and the only really critical feature we need is a working USB port. But for other people—non-lame-ohs, for lack of a better term—a car represents something more than a convenient conveyance. It is a thrilling mechanical extension of themselves, and just like you can train to run a marathon or deadlift a thousand pounds, any automobile can be given superpowers.
Published by Gestalten, The Drive: Custom Cars and Their Builders is a new book that takes a closer look at the jacked-out rides of the real-life fast and furious. It's a comprehensive bible of the international custom car scene throughout the years, featuring everything from '60s-era hot rods to state-of-the-art Japanese wire bodies. It's basically pure vehicular porn, mixed in with profiles of the men who feel compelled to tinker with their cars as a near religious pursuit.
The Drive is the sort of book Vin Diesel has on his coffee table. Each page is another sumptuous, tricked-out racer, plucked from the entire pantheon of dream cars. For every classic Lamborghini or custom-designed Ringbrothers Adrnln, there's a Cadillac Coupe "Sophia" or a Chevy Nomad station wagon, which has been lovingly restored and supercharged. Some of the mods on display are astonishing: Bulletproof Automotive's conversion of a BMW Z4 GT Continuum into a convertible without a windshield, Nigel Petrie's drifting Toyoya Hilux pickup truck, or Derek Jenkins' Manx Buggy, a matte black designer dune buggy that looks like it came out of a Porsche factory. And if you like your cars tattooed, there's a loving section devoted to custom paint jobs, including sparkly lowriders that look like Trapper Keepers, or old T-Model Roadsters that look like they were painted by the same guy who does the bumper cars at your local carnival.
The personalities who are driven to modify cars aren't necessarily all the Jesse James types you expect. On the more Burning Man side of things, there's Magnus Walker, an enormous grizzly man with dreadlocks and a huge beard who has been lusting after Porsches since he was 10, and now can barely squeeze into one. Other personalities include Jon Olsson, a clean-cut skier straight out of Better Off Dead who modified an Audi RS6 DTM to perform as well under snow as his skis; "Mad" Mike Whiddett, a professional race car drifter with a crazy streak; Chris Runge, a mild-mannered Minnesotan who likes building cars from scratch, and believes "if you can't build a seat, you can't build a car"; and more. What unites all of these guys is the belief that what you drive is more than just a vehicle. It's a medium for self-expression.
Containing 400 glossy color pages in a hardcover slip case, The Drive can be purchased directly from Gestalten for $69 by clicking here. If you have a need for speed, buckle up.
Look, I don't like to brag, but as a professional writer, I read a lot of books. Not tweets, or Facebook statuses, or Instagram captions, but honest to god booooooooooks: those thick fluttering tree accordions filled with print that people used to read before their attention spans were permanently curdled by the Internet, home of the "2 Minute Read." Which is why I would totally rub my quarter down to a dime, scratching the foil off this "100 Essential Novels" chart from Pop Chart Lab.
The poster features 100 literary classics, with covers partly obscured by gold foil. Since the point is to scratch that foil off as you read the books, there's going to be some easy wins here. Pop Chart Lab is no bunch of fools: They know they need to play to the back rows, as well as the balconies.
For instance, Lord of the Flies by William Golding? Every kid has to read that in freshman English class. Same goes for Bronte's Wuthering Heights, George Orwell's 1984, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, and Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Likewise, I'm sure you read On the Road at some point to get into someone's pants, snoozed your way through the John Ford adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath to make your way through a college essay, and picked up and subsequently abandoned David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest the same month you first moved off-campus.
But there are also less conventional picks like Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson, At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and more.
Go to Pop Chart Lab's website and purchase the 100 Essential Novels Scratch-Off Chart for $35.
Now that both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions are behind us, the New York Timeshas released a series of visualizations that compare the tone and content of the nominees' respective speeches. At a glimpse, they reveal Clinton's sunny optimism—and the paranoid darkness that permeates Trump's rhetoric.
The Times' first, and arguably most powerful, visualization highlights passages of each nominee's speech that talk about America. Positive sentiments about the U.S. are highlighted green ("We have the most tolerant and generous young people we've ever had"—Hillary Clinton), and negative things are highlighted red ("The irresponsible rhetoric of our president, who has used the pulpit of the presidency to divide us by race and color, has made America a more dangerous environment than frankly I have ever seen and anybody in this room has ever watched or seen."—Donald Trump.)
To be fair, Trump is trying to push the Democrats out of the White House, and he's not going to do that by talking about what a great job they're doing. But as the Times visualization makes clear, the content of his speech was so negative, entire pages of his speech are marked entirely in red. Comparatively, he only had three positive things to say about America his speech, two of which appear to have been entirely rhetorical: "How great are our police? And how great is Cleveland?" Pretty much the entire content of the speech was just pure negativity.
Not that that surprises anyone. More surprising is what the Times' visualizations show the two candidates' speeches (and those of their running mates) had in common. Roughly speaking, both Mike Pence and Tim Kaine spent about the same amount of time in their speeches praising their running mates. Clinton and Trump also devoted about the same amount of time in their speeches to attacking each other—as did Pence and Kaine.
Every designer can use quality feedback on a new idea, especially early in the conceptualizing phase. But what's the best way to get that feedback? Now in beta on iOS, Hatchli is a new app that's like Tinder for ideas. You post an image of your design idea or concept, and the community swipes left and right depending on whether they like it, commenting with more specific feedback if the mood strikes.
I thought Hatchli sounded promising, so I applied for the beta and played around with it. Here are four typical examples of the kind of designs Hatchli wanted my feedback on during my testing.
Edison bulbs? Copper pipe? Brass fittings? Oh sweetie. Etsy called. There's a maker in Minnesota who wants their business from 2014 back. Swiped left.
Stylish wipes (or, I guess, wijpes) for adult metrosexuals who want to surreptitiously freshen their crevices. These already exist under the frankly disgusting brand name "Dude Wipes," although I suspect those might be marketed more toward dedicated onanists. Either way, hard pass.
"Coffee shops are great spaces to work in . . . but what happens when it's 12:30 p.m., you've been working for a couple hours, and you get hungry? It's not worth it to leave, get food, and come back, but the pastries served at shops are terrible? After waiting 30 minutes, you finally surrender and get a pastry, which isn't filling at all. That's why there should be all-you-can-eat Internet cafes! Have meetings, work alone—all while eating."
I'll just say that I love the intangible link between the so-called problem (Internet coffee shops don't have good pastries) and the solution (coworking spaces should literally come with a la carte troughs slopping over with ranch-dipped bacon and deep-fried cheesy puffs). Extra points for the strange insistence that all-you-can-eat working should be done alone. Swiped left so hard—if only because, as a telecommuter, I fear this is where I could eventually end up.
A back-of-the-napkin scribble from some would-be Hatchli entrepreneur, the Laundo Ease promises to help you "never forget to switch your laundry over." How? Your guess is as good as mine: This drawing is literally all the information you're given on how this is supposed to work. If I had to guess, I'd say this is a stacked washer-and-dryer with a trap drawer between units, so that when the washing cycle is done, the laundry falls down to the dryer unit, which then automatically turns on. Not a bad idea, but something tells me the USPTO isn't going to accept this ludicrous drawing as a technical illustration.
In Tinder terms, all these "designs" would be the equivalent of the bro with the goatee and the backwards baseball cap lifting up his shirt to show off his abs in his selfie: goofuses who nearly defy parody.
But honestly, even the best ideas on Hatchli aren't much better than this. Almost grudgingly, here were a few ideas I swiped right on: a doorbell you could play a tune on like a piano, an augmented reality Pac-Man game that you play sort of like Pokémon Go, an app that would let anxious travelers practice using foreign airport and train station kiosks ahead of time, and so on. But all of these projects were united in a lack of detail on how they would actually work, or how they could become real products. They were just ideas—and ideas are a dime a dozen. You can't even say these are good designs, because design isn't just an idea. It's a method for execution, something Hatchli doesn't really let anyone supply.
The most frustrating thing about Hatchli, though, is when you see a truly great idea on the service, and can't do anything to act on it, or find out more. For example, the treatment of hip dysplasia in infants, which affects about three children out of every thousand, requires them to have their entire lower body bound in a cast for as long as six months—making it very hard for parents to stay mobile. Hatchli posted a great idea for the SafeSling: a sling for parents to carry around kids who have hip dysplasia. But if you wanted to learn more about the project or support it somehow? There's just no way to do so, outside of trying to Google it yourself. (Here's a link to the original design, by Caterina Rizzoni.)
So really, Hatchli isn't like Tinder at all. The nearest analog I can think of is HotOrNot, back when it was just about ranking people based on their selfies: a meaningless affirmation engine that never gets anyone laid, and feels dissatisfying and superficial all around. For the people behind these ideas, that might be enough encouragement to pursue their projects (or dissuade them from sinking time into something that's universally panned). But for the app to become something meaningful, it'll need buy-in from both idea generators and would-be consumers. The app is still in beta so there's plenty of room for the developers to add features. Because an ideas platform that's truly useful? That's hot.
A bird in flight is a hypnotic sight, but the whorling, eddying patterns its wings take just don't freeze-frame well. Using a 19th century technique, though, Spanish photographer Xavi Bou has figured out a way to take pictures of migrating birds while retaining the fluid sense of motion that gives them all their mystery, poetry, and grace.
In Ornitographies, Bou takes pictures of birds in a way that visualizes the patterns they make over time. "I always wanted to know what the shape of [a bird's flight] would look like in the sky if our perception of time was different," he says. His first attempt at doing so was essentially to use a long exposure to compress many seconds' worth of motion into a single frame, but all Bou got for his trouble was a blur.
To solve the problem, Bou turned to chronophotography, a pre-cinema photography technique that combines multiple successive images in a row to study movement. A famous example of chronophotography is Eadweard Muybridge's Horse in Motion, which proved that for a moment, a galloping horse's four hooves are off the ground at the same time. The technique is still in use in the nascent field of photo visualization today.
Like Horse in Motion, Bou's Ornitographies show the ripple-like beat of a bird's wings, both flying singly or in a flock. Unlike Muybridge's famous work, though, Bou uses Photoshop to stitch a hundred moments in time into a single image of a bird's flight. When a bird is flying alone, chronophotography turns each bird into a severed Möbius strip of its own hypnotically beating wings. When in migration with others, Bou's subjects resemble not so much birds in flight as shadow storms and hurricanes, streaking across the horizon.
Bou says that his lifelong love of birds was something instilled in him by his grandfather, during long walks on the delta of the Llobregat River outside of Barcelona, an area famous for its birdwatching. He tells me that what he likes most about birds is their diversity. It astonishes Bou, he says, that you can find birds almost everywhere on earth, with very specific adaptations made to that place.
"It's a beautiful example of how complex nature is," Bou says. "By documenting flight patterns, I hope to show the hidden beauty that can appear in nature when we try to look at it from a different point of view."
Without a doubt, Pokémon Go is the smash hit of the summer, and for good reason: As half-formed as the gameplay is, there's something truly thrilling about pointing your phone at the world around you and seeing a Caterpee crawling across your girlfriend's hair, a Ghastly standing behind your dog, or a Pikachu sitting on a park bench.
Still, these augmented reality illusions are crude. That Caterpee won't ever change your girlfriend's hairstyle, and the Ghastly won't pull your dog's tail—yet. But a new technique from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab could make augmented reality apps like Pokémon Go more interactive, by allowing what's happened virtually to appear to affect what's happening in the real world.
It's called interactive dynamic video (IDV) by its creator, PhD student Abe Davis, who is publishing his dissertation on the research this month. Davis wisely decided to apply IDV to the wildly popular app—showing how the technology can make Pokémon which appear to alter the world around them.
In most forms of augmented reality, if you want to make a "real" object move, you need to turn it into a 3D model. The problem is that creating a 3D model of an object from a 2D video, while certainly not impossible, is something that's usually beyond the computational power of our smartphones.
Instead, Davis came at the problem from a different tack. His approach looks for tiny vibrations in as little as five seconds of videos to calculate the different frequencies with which an object can move in real life: the way a cable might swing, how a bobblehead wobbles, or how a branch might bounce in the wind. The technique provides a computationally cheap way to move those objects in a realistic way in video.
Beyond allowing Pokémon to realistically bounce through the real world, IDV has more practical uses. In other augmented reality apps, it could allow people to manipulate "real" objects in natural-feeling ways. But IDV could even be useful in filmmaking: for example, movies in which CGI and real-world characters interact could use IDV as a way to get more realistic results without blowing out the budget.
IDV could even save lives, according to Davis, who imagines his algorithm having real-world applications, too. For example, it could be possible to diagnose old buildings or bridges in need of replacement by taking video recordings of them, then inserting them into simulations of extreme weather events like hurricanes or earthquakes. "The ability to put real-world objects into virtual models is valuable for not just the obvious entertainment applications, but also for being able to test the stress in a safe virtual environment, in a way that doesn't harm the real-world counterpart," Davis says in the press release. And hey, if that bridge can handle a hurricane, a Charizard is probably a piece of cake.
You can read Davis' dissertation on Interactive Dynamic Video here.
Should smartphones have wheels? That question seems stupid at first—and maybe 10th—blush. But Takefumi Hiraki and Koya Narumi of the University of Japan have shown that wheels on phones can actually be quite useful, turning your smartphone into a little robot helper.
To be presented at the annual ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium in October, Hiraki and Narumi's Phone on Wheels prototype ensconces a stock Galaxy Nexus smartphone in a 3D-printed case, which comes with a pair of mounted wheels on the side. Thanks to an embedded motor, these wheels can be controlled by the phone when it's properly installed in the case, essentially allowing the device to operate like a self-controlled RC car.
Some of Hiaraki and Narumi's ideas on what you would use a Phone on Wheels for are pretty typical. For example, they imagine a smartphone that can sense your hand and runs away when you try to snooze your alarm—a higher-tech version of a Clocky Alarm Clock. But other ideas are more ingenious. For example, Hiraki and Narumi have programmed their prototype to run to them across a table when they have an incoming phone call or message, then slide silently away when the user is done looking at it, to prevent further distractions. They also imagine the wheels to be usable as input, so that you could, say, measure a wall or a piece of furniture, just by using the Phone on Wheels as a tape measure.
In an email to me, Hiraki also says they imagine a wheeled phone as being useful to people with mobility issues, like the handicapped and elderly. If they leave their phone in another room, it can come find them. By that token, people who have misplaced their phones within their homes could have it literally come to them, instead of trying to track it down by having a roommate or partner call them. And an autonomous phone, like a Roomba, is also one that you never need to remember to charge: It can run to a docking station and charge itself.
So maybe the question isn't "should phones have wheels?" so much as it is "why don't phones already have wheels?"
Do you have the design chops to overhaul the NYC subway system? It's harder than it looks.
New Yorkers frustrated by the high fares, cramped commutes, and long walking distances to the nearest stop have long loved indulging in the city-wide pastime of playing armchair design critic to the MTA. But is it possible to design a more efficient New York subway system? Like SimCity for subways, Brand New Subway is a new web game that lets you give it a shot—and it just might give you a newfound appreciation for the efficiency of the MTA.
Based upon an accurate map of New York City, the goal of Brand New Subway is to design your own subway line. You do so by putting icons representing existing MTA lines onto the map, with the computer automatically connecting stations into lines by calculating the optimal path between them. Crossovers can also be manually assigned, so that multiple lines form a citywide network.
Where things get interesting is that when you drop a station on the map, Brand New Subway automatically pulls in local data from a variety of sources, including information about population, jobs, transportation demand, taxes, and so on. It then calculates how successful your subway is based on a couple of metrics: how many people it can move on an average weekday, and the cost of a single-ride MetroCard for the network.
It turns out that it's actually very easy to design a subway network with a relatively low MetroCard price, but that can't actually move many people. Likewise, it's surprisingly simple to build a network that moves tens of millions, if your system charges $6 or more per ride—a price that is inflated by factors such as the price of building a station in a certain neighborhood, the difficulty of constructing tunnels, staffing requirements, and more.
Just like in the real world, building a great subway system is a balancing act between cost and network volume. Brand New Subway makes it easy to see how well your subway achieves this balancing act with handy letter grades, ranging from A+ to F.
So how does the real-life New York Subway rank, when graded within Brand New Subway?
Sorry, public transit belly-achers: It turns out that the MTA is actually doing a pretty bang-up job. As the NYC subway stands today, it gets a B grade from Brand New Subway, thanks to its ability to move an average of 5.65 million people per weekday on a $2.75 single-ride MetroCard fare. And while the upcoming closure of the L train will almost certainly be a nightmare, the good news is that once it's done, the MTA will be in even better shape. By 2025, Brand New Subway projects that NYC will be able to move 6.13 million people per weekday, on average, on a $2.76 single-ride MetroCard fare, earning the whole network an A-.
Brand New Subway was created for the Power Broker Game Design competition, a contest that asks designers for the best playable, interactive app based on the themes of Robert Caro's biography of NYC's legendary urban city planner Robert Moses. Moses, of course, did not design the MTA. In fact, he was a rather famous opponent of public transit, having built as many as 13 expressways across New York City. But in the sense that Brand New Subway shows the ramifications that transit design can have on neighborhoods, the app's focus on subways makes sense.
The designer, Jason Wright, says that he hopes the game will bring attention to the issue of bottoms-up vs. top-down design, by targeting players who actually ride the subway every day—and show them how they could improve the network in their own neighborhoods.
After years of apprehension, we're finally getting a look at the finished architecture of the Rio games.
With a price tag that's already set records by being $1.6 billion over-budget, mass outbreaks of the Zika virus, and water-sport venues that are allegedly teeming with human excrement, the Rio 2016 Olympic Games are already looking like the biggest planning disaster in IOC history—and this, just two years after Sochi.
But it's not all bad. As part of the $12 billion budget attached to the Olympic Games, Rio has built 11 new sports facilities, ranging from a whitewater water park and a bitchin' BMX stadium to a massive new tennis center and a trio of multi-use sports arenas. And unlike past Olympic games, most of these structures will be permanently integrated into Rio's urban fabric, giving Brazilian athletes, students, and the general public places to swim and play for years to come.
Ahead of today's torch-lighting ceremony, here are the 11 new stadiums, parks, and venues you'll be getting to know over the course of this year's Summer Olympic and Paralympic games.
Located in Rio's Barra de Tijuca district, just southeast of the City Center, the Carioca Arenas were designed by the Arqhos Consultoria e Projetos. They're fairly typical general-use arenas: the first arena seats 16,000 people and will host the Olympic basketball games, as well as the Paralympics wheelchair basketball and wheelchair rugby matches. With 10,000 seats, Arena 2 will host the Olympic Wrestling and Judo matches, as well as Paralympics boccia, a bocce-like sport. The third arena can also seat 10,000, and will host fencing and taekwondo tournaments during the Olympics, as well as judo in the Paralympics. All of the Carioca Arenas are pretty by-the-numbers affairs—which is perhaps why they've avoided issues during construction. After the Olympics, Rio intends to turn the Carioca Arenas into permanent training centers for various sports.
One of Rio 2016's temporary structures, the Olympics Aquatic Stadium, will host the swimming and water polo events in both this year's Olympics and Paralympics games. The IOC boasts that the building is a "model of sustainability," featuring a natural ventilation system to keep the building cool with a minimum of air conditioning.
The outside of the building will be wrapped in 66 painted panels, from Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão, which are anti-UV treated to further keep the temperature inside the building down. It features two pools, and thanks to a special filtration system, the water will reportedly require up to 25% less chemical treatment to keep clean over the course of the games than similar pools. Built for a price of $38 million, the venue will be dismantled after the games and the material will be used to help construct two public swimming pools elsewhere in Rio: one with a capacity for 6,000 swimmers, and the other with a 3,000-person capacity.
Designed by Vigliecca & Associados with consulting from Elite Trax, the Olympic BMX Centre is one of the simpler new venues at Rio 2016: little more than a set of bleachers with 7,500 seats, as well as a 400 meter-long rolling dirt bike track with a succession of big jumps and sharp terms straight out of Rad. After the Olympics, the BMX Centre will be maintained for public use.
Probably the venue most ahead of schedule—a year ago, it was already 98% completed—the Olympic Golf Course is located close to the Barra Olympic Park. For golf fans, this course is particularly important, since it will be the first course to host an Olympic golf tournament in over a century. Featuring individual 72-hole events for both men and women, the Olympic Golf Course was designed by Rua Aquitetos, with consulting from Hanse Golf Course Design—the famous golf course design firm headed up by Gil Hanse, who beat out Jack Nicklaus as the course architect. It can seat 15,000 spectators, and after the Olympics, will continue to serve as a public golf venue, with the goal of promoting the sport in Brazil and South America. But the course isn't free from issues: reports suggest it may be overrun with sloths, crocodiles, and rodents. Fore!
Technically not an entirely new venue, the Olympic Hockey Center was previously used as a hockey field for the 2007 Pan American Games. But that hardly counts: Then it was little more than an old soccer field, where as it's seen a total overhaul for the 2016 Olympics. Overseen by Vigliecca & Associados, the new Hockey Center features two separate pitches, one with 7,800 seats, and the other with 4,100 seats, both featuring a blue-and-green sea of artificial turf. After the Olympic Games, the Hockey Center will become the permanent home of the Brazilian national field hockey team.
Designed by Blac Aquitetura, the Olympic Tennis Center is built on the former site of the Nelson Piquet International Autodrome, a famous Formula One race course used in the Grand Prix on 10 different occasions. The center consists of one major tennis stadium located in the colosseum-like Centre Court, which has capacity for 10,000 spectators. There are also 15 smaller courts nearby, with seating for between 5,000 spectators and 3,000 spectators apiece. After the games, it will be part of the Olympic Training Center—a permanent venue for the training of future Brazilian sports stars.
One of the cooler Olympic venues, the Olympic Whitewater Stadium is a kayaking and canoeing venue that, as its name suggests, tries to emulate the rolling rapids of a whitewater river. Featuring a variety of locks and sliding canals for kayakers to slalom through, the artificial reservoir can hold up to 25,000 cubic meters of water, and was designed by Vigliecca & Associados, with consulting from Whitewater Parks International. After the Olympics, all the crazy obstacles will be removed—and it will be turned into a permanent public pool.
Another Vigliecca & Associados joint, the Youth Arena is where the basketball and fencing events will happen, as well as the Paralympics Wheelchair Fencing event. Capable of seating 5,800 spectators, it's a fairly stark design, mostly notable because of its convertible design that will allow the sports space to be rapidly converted for temporary exhibitions. The structure is designed to be easy to light and ventilate naturally after the games are completed.
[All Images (unless otherwise noted): via Rio 2016]
Related Video: Are the Olympics still a good idea?
More than 100 designers have come out in support of Apple—and their brief should be on every design school syllabus.
After years of arguments, the Samsung v. Apple case has finally reached the U.S. Supreme Court. At stake is hundreds of millions of dollars awarded to Apple by lower courts over Samsung's alleged theft of the iPhone's patented design features. Now, over 100 designers and educators have filed an amicus brief, coming out in support of Apple's stance that Samsung should be forced to give up all of its profits from iPhone-infringing designs.
An amicus brief is a document—one of many such briefs filed in every Supreme Court case—that presents relevant information to the Justices, who may not be experts in the given subject. So far, 18 of these briefs have been filed in the Samsung v. Apple case, with some coming out in support of Apple, some of Samsung, and some for neither party.
The new brief, filed last week, is a veritable who's who of designers and design-thinkers, signed by the likes of Dieter Rams, Norman Foster, Robert Brunner, Alexander Wang, Paula Scher, Jasper Morrison, and many more. Even for those already informed about the importance of design to business, it's an entertaining read. But for those who are new to the subject, it could very well serve as a syllabus for Industrial Design 101.
In the brief, the designers walk through a few major historical comparisons to the Samsung v. Apple case. The first is to Coca-Cola: When Coke first started being sold in bottles, it had a very simple bottle design that anyone could copy—resulting in lost sales. In 1915, frustrated by copycats, they launched a national design competition for a new bottle so distinguished that "a person can recognize [it] when he feels it in the dark . . . so shaped that, even if broken, a person could tell at a glance what it was." The winning design by Earl R. Dean and Alexander Samuelson that drew inspiration from the shape of a cocoa pod, which became so iconic that it's inseparable from the brand as it is perceived today. Ninety-nine percent of all Coca-Cola drinkers swear it tastes better coming from the bottle, showing how design influences your overall perception of a product, even when that perception isn't visual.
The point the group is trying to make here is that the iPhone's look influences every other aspect of it, from its features to performance to the UI/UX. Samsung selling a smartphone that looks like an iPhone is just as dishonest as Pepsi selling their soft drinks in Coca-Cola bottles.
The second historical comparison the designers bring up is General Motors versus Ford. The original Model T, introduced by Henry Ford in 1908, was a boxy, unattractive vehicle that "came in any color, as long as it's black," yet still managed to sell 15 million units. In 1926, however, General Motors unveiled the first Chevrolet, a strikingly designed car that was noted, unlike the Model T, for its vivid use of color. This vehicle eventually led to general Motors establishing a special design department within the company, the "Art & Colours" department to study how "the appearance and style" of a vehicle contributed to its sales.
In other words, General Motors' investment in design allowed it to overthrow a powerful incumbent on the market, just like Apple—a company with no phone-making experience—was able to overthrow Samsung, an established player in the smartphone market, by investing heavily in design.
Samsung's position on this matter, shared by many of the tech companies that have filed another amicus brief in its favor, is that it's absurd to ask a company to divest total profits for one infringing aspect of a design patent. For example, it asks whether Jaguar should have to give Porsche all of its profits on a car, just because it violated the patent on the cup holder. Apple, and by extension, the designers who filed in support of Apple in this brief, argue that this position is disingenuous: No one would mistake a Jaguar for a Porsche based on its cup holder, whereas Samsung's theft of Apple design was so blatant, it extended right down to the icons used in Samsung's operating system.
In a sense, this battle pits the tech community against the design community, with tech companies terrified of a precedent that would cost them all of their profits if they happened to overlook a design patent collecting dust in a filing cabinet somewhere.
Anyway, all of these historical arguments and historical analogies are old hat to those who have studied industrial design. But the point of an amicus brief is to supply a Cliffs Notes on a complicated subject, so that the court can accurately judge the case. In this, the design professionals' brief is remarkably effective. Ignoring the Samsung v. Apple angle, you could easily give this brief to anyone as a quick primer on the history of industrial design, and have them walk away with a decent footing on the subject.
By changing the meaning of a universal symbol, Apple's attempt to take a stand on gun control could have the opposite effect.
Last week, Apple made a small but significant update to the emoji set used in upcoming iOS 10 and macOS Sierra software updates. The company changed the handgun emoji, first added to the Unicode Standard in 2010, to a plastic squirt gun. Although yet to be confirmed by Apple itself, the change was seemingly made in response to a year-long campaign by gun control nonprofit New Yorkers Against Gun Violence (NYAGV) to get Apple to remove the gun emoji and "take a stand for stricter gun accessibility in America."
It was an odd move. Because of the way emoji works— each emoji is essentially a sticker that an operating system slaps on top of an otherwise unreadable UTF-16 character code—changing the pistol emoji to a water gun emoji retroactively censors the ideas of millions of people, many of whom—ironically—were using the pistol emoji to take a stand against serious social issues like relaxed gun control and police shootings. If Apple is serious about influencing the debate around gun control, there are smarter ways to effect change. Here's why.
First things first. Emoji aren't just an arbitrary collection of cartoon stickers on your smartphone. They reflect an industry standard, set by a group called the Unicode Consortium. This group defines what UTF-16 character code is assigned to which emoji. Because emoji are applied on a software platform level, every software maker's emoji look a bit different from each other. Even so, it's important for the meaning of an emoji to be the same across operating systems, so that a heart symbol sent from an iPhone doesn't display like a swastika on an Android phone. That's why the Unicode Standard suggests, in general terms, what every emoji should convey. Companies like Apple that join the Unicode Consortium therefore agree to not change the meaning of an emoji upon a whim: For emoji to work universally across both operating systems and language barriers, it's important that their designs adhere to what's laid out in the Standard.
So when we discuss Apple changing the design of the pistol emoji, we first need to ask ourselves what the Unicode Standard says it should look like. Is a water pistol a valid interpretation of the Consortium's guidance on what a pistol emoji should look like?
According to the Unicode Standard, the document that defines what an emoji should look like across all software and devices, the pistol emoji is meant to be a handgun or a revolver—specifically, one that can be used as a weapon, not a toy. Emojipedia, a resource put together by Unicode Emoji Subcommittee member Jeremy Burge, meanwhile, describes the emoji as a "a gun emoji, more precisely a pistol. A weapon that has potential to cause great harm. This type of firearm is commonly held by police officers." (Emphasis added).
The pistol emoji is often used in that context by Black Lives Matter supporters and others protesting police shootings, and—yes—on both sides of the gun control debate. (You can see a real-time tracker of all the tweets using the pistol emoji here.)
With the release of iOS 10 and macOS Sierra, Apple will essentially retcon the meaning of any tweet, every email, every Facebook status update that has ever used the pistol emoji on hundreds of millions of devices. Where the pistol emoji was once a symbol of death, murder, and oppression, it will be turned into something silly and frivolous, a child's plaything that could never harm anyone. Consider, for example, this string of symbols:
Right now, these three emoji covey the message of a police officer shooting an unarmed black man. After Apple changes the pistol design, anyone who has ever used that sequence will instead be talking about a police picnic water gun fight.
Or this:
"Say no to guns" now becomes "say no to Super Soakers."
When NYAGV originally pushed Apple to get rid of the gun emoji, they did so because they wanted Apple to send a message to Congress to enact mandatory background checks. "We ask that you stand with the American people and remove the gun emoji from all your products as a symbolic gesture to limit gun accessibility," they wrote in an open letter. "We understand taking the emoji out will not end gun violence, but this act will show Congress that gun-owning and non-owning Americans have come together to demand required background checks for ALL gun sales."
Even at the time, it was a rather bizarre request that didn't understand how emoji actually get created—software makers are not free to simply remove them, at least if they want to remain part of the Unicode Consortium. But it seems clear that Apple has at least taken the spirit of the request to heart, complying with it as much as it is capable of doing. They're sending a symbolic message about gun control through emoji. The problem, though, is that messing with the way that people communicate with one another isn't symbolic. It's deeply literal. Apple changing the pistol emoji to something less lethal screams: "We can all live in a world without guns!" But we don't live in a world without guns. So Apple's design change actually has the opposite effect of what it intended: it makes it less possible for people to express themselves about gun control, whether for or against it.
Compare this, now, to Microsoft's pivot in the opposite direction. As part of the Windows Anniversary Update released two weeks ago, Microsoft is also changing its emoji design. But while Windows used to boast a sci-fi ray gun for a pistol emoji—again, explicitly against the instructions for such a symbol used in the Unicode Standards—Microsoft will now use a realistic drawing of a police pistol, essentially bringing Windows back in line with the standard. What's most notable to me about the new Windows pistol emoji is its thick outline, almost as if Microsoft wanted to draw attention to the stark brutality of such a weapon, instead of whitewash it away. It's the equivalent of putting the word gun in bold, emphasizing the weapon's deadly nature. Microsoft's change of heart acknowledges that a gun is deadly serious. And it deserves to be talked about.
Some might argue that emoji aren't the proper medium for exploring serious social issues, like gun control. That's a classist position that ignores emoji's ability to express concepts universally across language barriers. People do take emoji seriously. Companies like Apple and Google know this and have made moves to create more diverse characters as a result.
Which is why Apple's move here is so head-scratching. The company has effectively changed the meaning of one of the most popular symbols on earth to mean the opposite of what it used to mean. And because of the way emoji work, that change doesn't just affect the use of that symbol in the future, but also the past. George Orwell could never have imagined a world in which emoji are as popular as they are, but he did write a book about one in which the meaning of words could be universally rewritten at the whim of powerful institutions. It was called 1984, and while it would be silly to say this issue is Big Brother serious, it does reveal a problem with the emoji standard as we know it: Companies shouldn't be able to rewrite our thoughts, just by changing a sticker.
If Apple really wants to bring the truly senseless number of firearm deaths in this country to an end, it should bring back the pistol emoji as it previously existed, then use its considerable political clout and cash pile to lobby Congress or donate to gun control groups. The debate over gun control isn't going to be won by giving people one less way to talk about it.
Kill Box puts you in the role of a drone pilot. Then, when you've completed your mission, it makes you the target.
I am a Pakistani child, running through a colorful vegetable patch on a bright summer day. The sky above me is impossibly blue. Through the rows of leafy fronds, I can see the village elders walk to the mosque, chatting and gesturing with their sunburned hands. Then, from the sky, I hear a siren-like whistling. I stop, looking to the elders, only to see them sprinting down the road towards the mosque in a panic. Confused, I hold my hand up to shade my eyes against the sun, and look into the sky. The whistling grows louder, keening in volume and pitch, until it deafens me and blackens the world. Then I am obliterated, destroyed by the incoming missile of an unmanned drone, piloted by a faceless operator a world away.
My heart pounds in my chest as I—the real I, sitting behind my computer monitor—look at the silent black kill screen. Seconds pass, then '80s-style terminal type begins rattling up the screen. "USAF CREECH AIRBASE 432D NEV 36.35'32" 115.40'00" JO9NV0399," it reads, before continuing to rattle off coordinates. Then the black screen blinks back to life, and I am looking at wobbly video footage, seemingly taken from overhead, of grainy monochrome blobs walking around a small village. One, set apart from the others, runs frantically down the rows of a field. The computer asks me to aim my crosshairs at this blob, and target it. "PRESS ENTER TO FIRE MISSILE," it tells me, asking me to kill myself.
And now I am a Pakistani child again, running through a vegetable patch.
The game I am playing is Kill Box, an online game and interactive installation that explores the nature of drone warfare. Created by Scotland-based game developer collective Biome, in collaboration with the U.S.-based artist and activist Joseph DeLappe, Kill Box puts players in the role of both a drone pilot and a drone target.
Kill Box is neither meant to victimize those killed in drone attacks, nor demonize their operators. According to Biome co-founder Tom De Majo, it's instead about exploring the intersection of power versus freedom. When you play as a drone operator, Kill Box gives you absolute power, but almost no freedom. In a clever subversion of the tutorials of most video games, Kill Box's drone operators have no choice but to follow simple but precise instructions on how to to move their camera, zoom in, assign targets, and eventually fire the missile—all of which eventually ends in a massacre. Your view, and your perspective, is totally fixed. Comparatively, when you play a Pakistani villager in Kill Box, you have total freedom to run through the world, exploring fields, meeting your fellow villagers, and discovering your world. Ultimately, though, none of this freedom translates to power. As a cruise missile lobbed at you from half a world away obliterates you, you are totally powerless.
What's fascinating about this contrast between power and freedom is that it makes it possible to empathize with both sides. Dying as a villager in Kill Box is undeniably tragic, but so is being a drone operator, who is ultimately little more than a cog with a conscience in an incomprehensible military apparatus, a lethal automaton. This, says De Majo, was important to Biome, which wanted to call attention to the real-life plight of drone pilots. "They experience an almost digital form PTSD, but because they never enter the combat zone, the military doesn't recognize it," he says. "It's fucked up. After every mission, they have to zoom in, and count their confirmed kills. It puts them face-to-face with the consequences of their actions, in a way no other soldier has ever had to do in the history of warfare." (This is another part of the drone pilot experience Biome recreates by subverting a common video game mechanic: in Kill Box, drone pilots enter their own high score.)
Kill Box uses an abstract art style for its graphics, which De Majo says was based upon data visualizations of drone kills, in which each death is represented as a circular blob. Likewise, in Kill Box, players either target or kill these moving dots. "When we looked at the data behind drone attacks, human deaths were almost always represented by dots," De Majo says. "For our game, we had a real yearning to bring those dots back to life, giving humanity back to the raw data." This abstract art style also allows players to divorce themselves from their preconceptions of life in a Pakistani village. By embracing a geometric graphic approach instead of a photorealistic one, "we create an environment that is universal and playful, so players can invest their own ideas or experiences into it."
Although Kill Box can be played online by downloading it here, De Majo says it is best experienced as an installation, where two players face opposite each other: one as drone pilot, the other as villager. Although the players might not realize there is a connection between the two different-looking games at first, it's always discovered in the end. "At the moment of impact, whoever is playing the villager will look up over his screen at the other player, and look for some sort of acknowledgement that there's a connection between them," he says. After all, no matter how much distance separates two people across the world, being killed by someone else is a profoundly intimate thing.
Kill Box will be officially presented at NEoN digital arts festival in November as an installation piece. You can find more information here.
AIGA asked the graphic design legend to review every Olympic logo since 1924. They don't fare well.
There have been more than 100 years of Olympic logos at this point, and the truth is, most of them are sad as fuck. So it's entertaining to watch noted logo designer and cranky design curmudgeon Milton Glaser—creator of the "I Love NY" and Brooklyn Brewery logos, and, more ignominiously, the gaudy gold-plated identity of Trump Vodka—review the past century of Olympic graphic design over at AIGA's Eye on Design.
Spoiler: Most are not viewed favorably.
Let's get the bad out of the way first. Glaser's least favorite logos are that of the 1924 Paris Summer Olympics and the Berlin Summer Olympics in 1936. The former logo appears to represent an oared Viking ship, and doesn't even contain the Olympic rings. Glaser rates it a mere 20 of 100. He writes: "Bad beginning, the elements are unrelated visually and the imagery is confusing. The surprinted lettering is unreadable." The Berlin Summer Olympics logo defies easy description. It resembles a garishly inept line drawing of a bell embossed with a Nazi S.S. Eagle; Glaser calls it "strange and lacking focus."
Another early Olympic logo Glaser dislikes is that of the Lake Placid Winter Olympics in 1932. Seemingly depicting an alpine skier plummeting into a U.S.A.-shaped gorge, Glaser rates it a 30 out of 100, calling particular attention to the typography, which he calls "peculiar and unpleasant." He similarly dislikes the typography on the logo of the London Summer Olympics in 1948, which he describes with just one word: sad. It gets a 37 out of 100.
Not that Glaser dislikes all Olympic logos. He calls out the Tokyo Summer Olympics logo from 1964, with its gold typography and rising sun motif, as the best Olympics logo, ranking a 92 out of 100. (Personally, I think it's simple, clichéd, and dull.) He also loves the 1960 logo of the Squaw Valley Winter Olympics—my personal favorite—giving it an 80 out of 100. "The star form is distinctive and unusual. It contains the rings effectively and plays well against the circle of typography. It has a fresh look to it."
As for the Olympic logos of the present and near future, Glaser likes Rio 2016's logo a lot: He rates it an 85 out of 100. "A presentation that looks fresh and contemporary. The athletes joining hands at the top are executed in a way that works well with the other elements. It feels like something new." Unfortunately, the logo for the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang doesn't fare nearly as well. Glaser describes it as fragmented, and says "the complexity . . . of the mark makes understanding unlikely." It gets a 60. Glaser abstains from ranking the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics logo because of the surrounding controversy, only noting that it raises "some fascinating questions" about graphical arts plagiarism.
