Posts Tagged ‘design’
“Good design’s not about what medium you’re working in. It’s about thinking hard about what you want to do and what you have to work with before you start.”*…
From the team at Readymag, a project exploring the impact of women in design (and calling attention to the ongoing gender imbalance in the design industry). For example…
Susan Kare [pictured above] is famous for designing Apple’s Macintosh interface elements, icons and typefaces in the 1980s, as well as a number of other pixel-based graphics for early computers. She was one of the key figures in the PC usability revolution initiated by Steve Jobs at Apple. Kare is often referred to as “the woman who gave the Macintosh a smile,” for designing the original Happy Mac icon…
19 others at “Designing women,” from @readymag.
More on @SusanKare here.
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As we give credit where credit is due, we might recall that it was on this date in 1985 that the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, later DARPA) opened internet domains for registration. Symbolics Computer Corporation was the first out of the gate with Symbolics.com. The company used the website to sell specialized computers running the programming language Lisp. (Symbolics initially meant these machines to develop artificial intelligence but were a little ahead of their time; they later adapted them for other uses.)
“Personally, I would like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic nature, communicate everything I have to say visually”*…
Driving across America, one encounters a wide variety of cultures, landscapes, people, and animals. But the one consistent thing that will stay the same from Maine to California are the signs one passes on the highway. That’s because, as Jon Keegan explains, America’s roads and highways have a big, fat style guide…
First published in 1935, the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) “Manual on Uniform Traffic Control” (MUTCD), is a hefty tome consisting of close to 900 pages that contains the federal standards for all traffic safety signs, roadway markings and other “traffic control devices” that a driver on a road in the U.S. might encounter.
The MUTCD states that it “shall be recognized as the national standard for all traffic control devices installed on any street, highway, bikeway, or private road open to public travel”. Exact specifications for the font, size, spacing of letters, background colors, reflectivity, mounting location and orientation help ensure that traffic signs are consistently readable at a glance while driving anywhere in the U.S…
The remarkable– and enlightening– story: “The Style Guide for America’s Highways: The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices,” from @jonkeegan. TotH to @kottke.
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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As we read the signs, we might send elegantly-designed birthday greetings to Walter de Silva; he was born on this date in 1951. A car designer and automotive executive, he began as a designer at Fiat in 1972, then went on to lead design at Alfa Romeo, SEAT, Audi, and finally Volkswagen Group– where, in 2007, he became Chairman.
“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better”*…
Philip Ball unpacks the geometric rules that define eyes, honeycombs, and soap bubbles…
How do bees do it? The honeycombs in which they store their amber nectar are marvels of precision engineering, an array of prism-shaped cells with a perfectly hexagonal cross-section. The wax walls are made with a very precise thickness, the cells are gently tilted from the horizontal to prevent the viscous honey from running out, and the entire comb is aligned with the Earth’s magnetic field. Yet this structure is made without any blueprint or foresight, by many bees working simultaneously and somehow coordinating their efforts to avoid mismatched cells.
The ancient Greek philosopher Pappus of Alexandria thought that the bees must be endowed with “a certain geometrical forethought.” And who could have given them this wisdom, but God? According to William Kirby in 1852, bees are “Heaven-instructed mathematicians.” Charles Darwin wasn’t so sure, and he conducted experiments to establish whether bees are able to build perfect honeycombs using nothing but evolved and inherited instincts, as his theory of evolution would imply.
Why hexagons, though? It’s a simple matter of geometry. If you want to pack together cells that are identical in shape and size so that they fill all of a flat plane, only three regular shapes (with all sides and angles identical) will work: equilateral triangles, squares, and hexagons. Of these, hexagonal cells require the least total length of wall, compared with triangles or squares of the same area. So it makes sense that bees would choose hexagons, since making wax costs them energy, and they will want to use up as little as possible—just as builders might want to save on the cost of bricks. This was understood in the 18th century, and Darwin declared that the hexagonal honeycomb is “absolutely perfect in economizing labor and wax.”
Darwin thought that natural selection had endowed bees with instincts for making these wax chambers, which had the advantage of requiring less energy and time than those with other shapes. But even though bees do seem to possess specialized abilities to measure angles and wall thickness, not everyone agrees about how much they have to rely on them. That’s because making hexagonal arrays of cells is something that nature does anyway…
More at: “Why Nature Prefers Hexagons,” from @philipcball in @NautilusMag.
* Albert Einstein
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As we study structure, we might spare a thought for Agostino Bassi; he died on this date in 1856. An entomologist, he discovered that the muscardine disease of silkworms was caused by a very small parasitic organism, a fungus that would be named eventually Beauveria bassiana in his honor. The insight led him to argue that not only animal (insect), but also human diseases are caused by other living microorganisms (e.g., measles, syphilis, and the plague)– meaning that he preceded Louis Pasteur in the discovery that microorganisms can be the cause of disease (the germ theory of disease).
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”*…
Liam Grace-Flood on the near universal comedy of technological failure…
… I’ve always been more interested in the failed inventions that aren’t just paving stones on the road to success. The kind of attempts that are so bad that you have to wonder “are they serious?” – like a nose stylus (pictured above) for using your phone in the bath when your hands get wet.
There are many variations on the idea of ‘failed invention.’ Rube Goldberg machines are overly-complicated contraptions, designed to accomplish simple tasks. Kludges and jugaads are hacky devices assembled from what’s available – usually creating something much weirder than if you started from scratch. There’s a whole genre of life hack TikToks where creators, in the quest to create as much content as possible, don’t stop to ask if what they’re creating makes any sense at all. But I’d say the genre of bad invention with the most nuanced and interesting relationship to failure is Chindogu.
Chindogu is a Japanese word meaning “weird tool.” These (almost) useless inventions might address a challenge, but they also create bigger problems. Iconic Chindogu inventions include chopsticks with a fan attached for cooling hot food and a onesie with mop-like fringe, harnessing the untapped crawling power of your baby to clean the floor. While inventions like these are usually not practical for their intended purpose, they can still be charming, evocative, and funny, and give us something that successful inventions can’t. They offer a moment’s deviation from some prescribed path to success, a pause in the slog of value creation, to allow a moment’s worth of weird joy…
A warm and wonderful appraisal of the innovative spirit (that doubles as a last-minute Holiday gift list): “On Chindogu,” in @the_prepared.
(Image above: source)
* Thomas Edison
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As we celebrate snafus, we might send well-designed birthday greetings to someone who successfully connected products with users, Walter Dorwin Teague; he was born on this date in 1883. An industrial designer, architect, illustrator, graphic designer, writer, and entrepreneur, he is often called the “Dean of Industrial Design,” a field that he pioneered as a profession in the US, along with Norman Bel Geddes, Raymond Loewy, and Henry Dreyfuss. He is widely known for his exhibition designs during the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair (including the Ford Building), and for his iconic product and package designs, from Eastman Kodak’s Bantam Special to the steel-legged Steinway piano.
“The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night”*…
A graphic designer (and here) by day, Doyle has spent the last few years expanding his Hypertexts series. Grace Ebert explores…
Stephen Doyle describes his interconnected book sculptures as “miniature monuments, testaments to the power of language and metaphors of imagination.” Featuring angled scaffolding and interlocking constructions that appear to grow directly from the bound pages, the sprawling sculptural forms that comprise his Hypertexts series are unruly and enchanting reimaginings of how information is communicated.
The New York City-based artist lobs off parts of sentences, tethers phrases together with an unrelated word, and generally obscures the author’s intended meaning, producing arbitrary and striking connections within the text. Although the paper sculptures are tangible manifestations of language, Doyle tells Colossal that he originally envisioned the spliced works as satirical commentaries on digital diagramming. “I first started when ‘hypertext’ was a novel term of the internet: blue underlined text was a portal, linked to another document in the ether. Linking one text to another seemed rather DADA in intent, abstract, random, and capricious,” he says, explaining further:
I conjured sculptures in which the lines of text shook off the shackles of the page, leapt up, out of the book, and started conferring with their neighboring lines of text, creating an aerial network of language, turning text into synapse, circulation… I soon realized that these three-dimensional diagrams seemed to have a poetic power of their own, recontextualizing language and ideas into sculptural forms, inspired by the books themselves…
More at “Interlocking Lines of Text Spring from Stephen Doyle’s Poetic Book Sculptures,” @Colossal.
* Isabel Allende
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As we ponder prose, we might send birthday greetings to two writers whose words are ripe for Doyle’s enshrinement…
Dorothy Parker was born on this date in 1893. A poet, writer, critic, and satirist based in New York, she was best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles, routinely published in The New Yorker— and for her membership in the Algonquin Round Table.
“There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.”
Ray Bradbury was born on this date in 1920. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of modes, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction– but is best remembered for his speculative fiction, perhaps especially for his novel Fahrenheit 451 and his short-story collections The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. he New York Times called Bradbury “the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream.”
Summertime, 1950, I recognized [Christopher] Isherwood browsing in a Santa Monica bookstore. My book had just come out, so I grabbed a copy off the shelf, signed it and gave it to him. His face fell and my heart sank, but two days later he called and said, “Do you know what you’ve done?” I asked, “What?” And he simply told me to read his review in the Times. His rave turned my life around; the book immediately made the best-seller lists and has been in print ever since.
Bradbury, on his chance meeting with Christopher Isherwood just after publication of The Martian Chronicles which led to fame and acclaim outside of SF fandom
He was very kind in introducing me to various people he thought I should know, like Aldous Huxley, who had been my literary hero since Brave New World came out.
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