Here's my friend and neighbour Matt Webb (part of the Schulze and Webb design consultancy) addressing Copenhagen's Reboot conference on what the role of a designer was and is in the 21st century. It's a great Webbrant, thought-provoking, learned, wide-ranging, weird and great.

Reboot (via Warren Ellis)

One of the most important action point is the launch of "a debate on the technical and legal aspects of the 'right to silence of the chips', which has been referred to under different names by different authors and expresses the idea that individuals should be able to disconnect from their networked environment at any time."

This is one of the main actions of the plan in order to allow the usage of the RFID while respecting privacy and the protection of personal data, two fundamental rights of the EU.

Silence of the Chips (CafePress)

(via Beyond the Beyond)

It is exceedingly difficult to convey exactly how much we are spending o bailouts. Start talking trillions (versus mere billions) and you get puzzled looks from people. Humans have a hard time conceptualizing any number that large. I wanted a graphic way to clearly show how astonishingly ginormous the amounts involved were.

This Bailout Nation graphic shows the the total costs to the taxpayer of all the monies spent, lent, consumed, borrowed, printed, guaranteed, assumed or otherwise committed. It is nothing short of astonishing. In one short year the bailouts managed to spend far in excess of nearly every major one-time expenditure of the USA, including WW2, the moon shot, the New Deal, Iraq, Viet Nam and Korean wars -- COMBINED. 206 years versus 12 months.

Made from just eight major parts and weighing less than 25 pounds, the Diffrient World chair achieves Humanscale's signature weight-sensitive recline through an innovative new design that functions without a mechanism. Utilizing two frame components, the user's body weight, and the laws of physics, the Diffrient World chair's mech-free recline action automatically adjusts to the needs of each user, offering appropriate levels of resistance without unnecessary locks, dials or other manual controls.

Like its older sibling, the award-winning Liberty chair, the Diffrient World chair features Form-Sensing Mesh Technology that ensures perfect lumbar support for every user without the external, manually adjusted lumbar devices found on all other mesh chairs. Additionally, a mesh seat pan with a frameless front edge provides all-day comfort with soft support under the thighs.

Under this legislation, however, designers will need to consult with a lawyer throughout the design process to ensure that every new design created could not subjectively be found at a later date to be "closely and substantially similar" to one protected in the Copyright registry...

Further, young, up-and-coming designers would be susceptible to legal intimidation from designing anything new at all, as they would likely not have the resources to fight a legal challenge in court...

While the bill purports to keep all fashion designs that have existed in the past free and open for all to use, the legislation would allow the ability to copyright non-original design elements in the public domain if arranged in an original way.

Moreover, since there is no test for originality, the registry will begin to be populated with designs that from the public domain. Thus, a designer who draws upon inspiration from the public domain, can easily find himself/herself stuck in costly litigation.

It comes as no surprise that Indiana Democrat Pete Visclosky's favorite word to say in Congress is "Indiana." While staying out of the spotlight in Washington, he has been a champion for his Northwestern Indiana congressional district, bringing home millions of federal dollars to create jobs and win fans. Since the decline in manufacturing, new jobs have become essential for this Rult Belt region and Visclosky, from his position on the House Appropriations Committee, has sought to get as big a piece of the federal pie as he can for his constituents.

This hard work bringing home federal dollars has made Visclosky a national news name as his connection to a lobbying firm, the PMA Group, which represented many of the recipients of federal money earmarked by the congressman, has brought him under investigation by the FBI. In the past two weeks, Visclosky's offices and campaign committess have been subpoenaed and he has reliquished control of the Energy & Water Appropriations Subcommittee to Rep. Ed Pastor.

All of this is due to the connection between campaign contributions flowing from the PMA Group and their clients to Visclosky's campaigns and the millions of dollars in earmarks to PMA Group clients that Visclosky secured in his post on the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

After studying campaign contribution data for 1998-2008 (compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics) and earmark data for FY2008 and FY2009 (from both Taxpayers for Common Sense and Legistorm), the connection between those PMA Group clients that contributed money to Visclosky's campaigns and the earmarks they received is clearly evident. The visualization -- created by the Sunlight Foundation's terrific designer Kerry Mitchell -- shows how connected the earmarks are to the receipt of campaign contributions.

7 Factors That Led to Crisis (Thanks, Barry!)

If so much of our personal history is getting compressed into data, and digital imaging, cloud computing, and streaming media have become an integral part of daily experience, being sensitive to the physical presence of these devices is an important responsibility. Creating distinctive, engaging objects that help people manage and understand the nature of data--an imperceptible property that is at once fragmented, modular and flowing--is a new and challenging opportunity. Data-management devices such as routers, hard drives and modems--previously relegated to back corners and spaces under desks--are now front and center, featuring prominently in people's living rooms, desktops and front pockets. Once the exclusive domain of the cable guy and corporate IT manager, they are now mainstream products that moms and dads will buy to place front and center in a living room, veritable shrines to the data that is contained within or flowing through them. Once designed to look benign, apologetic and clumsily invisible, they are now becoming sculptural pieces that warrant a strong presence in the domestic landscape. Though it may often seem like the industrial designer's job is to create a "black box" around circuit boards, the ability to take the complex nature of data and translate it into meaningful form is more important than ever before. More than mere shells for electronic components, they play a totemic role in the home and act as the threshold for rich, emotionally-laden content and timely personal communication.

stamen and petals at ICFF 2009 (via Craft)

The backrest and headrest are screwed together by a pair of aluminum supports. This unit is suspended on the seat via two connection points in the armrests. The armrests are screwed to shock mounts on the interior of the backrest shell, allowing the backrest and headrest to flex when the chair is in use. This is part of the chair's unusual design, as well as one of its biggest flaws. The rubber washers are solidly glued to the plywood shells, but have been known to tear free when excessive weight is applied, or when the rubber becomes old and brittle.

Other creative uses of materials include the seat cushions - which eschew standard stapled or nailed upholstery. Instead the cushions are sewn with a zipper around the outer edge that connects them to a stiff plastic backing. The backing affixes to the plywood shells with a series of hidden clips and rings. This design, along with the hidden shock mounts in the armrest allow the outside veneer of the chair to be unmarred by screws or bolts. The chair has a low seat which is permanently fixed at a recline. The seat of the chair swivels on a cast aluminum base, with glides that are threaded so that the chair may remain level.

...When it was first made Ray Eames remarked in a letter to Charles that the chair looked "comfortable and un-designy" (sic). Charles's vision was for a chair with "the warm, receptive look of a well-used first baseman's mitt.

Section 122 of the Truth in Lending Act (U.S.C. 1632) is amended by adding at the end the following new subsection:

"(d) Minimum type-size and font requirement for credit card applications and disclosures. -All written information, provisions, and terms in or on any application, solicitation, contract, or agreement for any credit card account under an open end consumer credit plan, and all written information included in or on any disclosure required under this chapter with respect to any such account, shall appear-

"(1) in not less than 12-point type; and

"(2) in any font other than a font which the Board has designated, in regulations under this section, as a font that inhibits readability.".

With the release of its Neutraface Slab family of fonts, House Industries is selling a number of products, including a set of alphabet blocks, totes, T-shirts, mousepads, posters, and this handsome boomerang chair.

8th Internet Identity Workshop (via Making Light)

Suspended at 6m over the products depot, placed in front of the design department, the bastard Bowl is too important not to find a location inside the new headquarter of a company founded by skateboarders. It is the pride, attraction and ‘dream that comes true’ for Comvert partners, employees, friends and team-riders. The idea of placing this 200 m² bowl on top of the products depot came from the need of saving space and from the desire of establishing a visual and spatial relation with the design department. The bastard Bowl is composed by glue laminated wooden element and steel curved beams, it has been designed by Comvert partners together with the engineer practice Atelier-LC and is a unique case in Italy.

There are products I wish I'd designed because I like them and then people would think I'd done them and like me more. This list is massive. Off the top of my head: I wish I'd directed and conceived the perfume commercial where a guy on a helicopter kisses a woman at the top of the Eiffel Tower, and a Channel commercial with Little Red Riding Hood shooshing the wolf. I'd like to have been the first to take the photomontages Hockney produced in the 60s. I wish I'd written The Filth by Grant Morrison. I wish I'd conceived and made Super Mario Galaxy. I love the table-top skirmish game called Necromunda in the Warhammer universe, although I only played it once, because the social negotiation of the rules that always happens around the game, are embedded back into the rules. I think Formula 1 television coverage is visually completely remarkable. I have no idea what is going on, but it's so good I can watch it just for the optics. It's like injecting Photoshop filters straight into your eyeballs.

Hugh Hayden's FUNature Tennis Ball Chair (Thanks, Jill!)

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

If you've never given much thought to all the cool things you could do with an abandoned silo, well...you didn't grow up in Kansas, did you? Personally, I had a great plan for a scuba-through aquarium (with whales!) that really could have gotten off the ground if someone had ponied up the seed money back when I was 5.

With a recent architectural design contest to revamp a couple of former sewage treatment plan silos into cultural landmarks, the Amsterdam City Council seems to be going for something a bit more practical than my old grain silo dreams. The ArchiCentral blog has some great renderings of the entry by NL Architects, which includes a "Cultural Silo" (with theaters, gallery space, and a restaurant), and a "Climbing Silo" (with a 40-meter/131-foot-high artificial cave for rock-wall climbing enthusiasts...of which, apparently, Amsterdam has many).

BTW: The headline here, a quote from the NL Architects spokesman, roughly translates from architect-speak into English as, "This project is going to be kick-ass!"

What would you do with a retired silo? I still think the aquarium idea would be "abstract mysterious" as all hell.

I invented a desk in which the books I had to study were arranged in order at the beginning of each term. I also made a bed which set me on my feet every morning at the hour determined on, and in dark winter mornings just as the bed set me on the floor it lighted a lamp. Then, after the minutes allowed for dressing had elapsed, a click was heard and the first book to be studied was pushed up from a rack below the top of the desk, thrown open, and allowed to remain there the number of minutes required. Then the machinery closed the book and allowed it to drop back into its stall, then moved the rack forward and threw up the next in order, and so on, all the day being divided according to the times of recitation, and time required and allotted to each study.

Chul An Kwak at Seoul Design Week 2007 (via Neatorama)

Illuminati (Thanks, Arash and Kelly!)

Media packaging mashups

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

"Taliesin is really a great example of the later Prairie style. It's where the architecture school is, during the summer session anyway, because Olgivanna, Frankie's third wife...or maybe his fourth, I can't remember, liked to have everybody down at Taliesin West in Arizona in the winter. The students build their own shelters out in the desert and everybody is supposed to learn how to play an instrument."

"Uh, huh. That's neat."

"He built Taliesin for his second wife, who he stole from a client. Of course, she ended up being killed by that ax murderer."

"Wait. What?"

This is pretty much verbatim from a conversation I had with my husband (then boyfriend) on one of our early dates. Get into a relationship with a second-year architecture student, and it's pretty much expected that you'll end up hearing a LOT about Frank Lloyd Wright--his design philosophy, his work history, even some little gossipy snippets about his rather sketchy dating life. But the ax murder thing? That, I was not expecting.

True story, though.
Wright did, in fact, run off to Europe with his client's wife, Martha "Mamah" Borthwick Cheney, in 1909, leaving her husband and his wife (and six children) behind. It was the sort of thing polite Victorian society was willing to overlook in an artist, but not in a neighbor. When Wright and the de-Cheneyfied Borthwick returned to the states, they left Wright's old digs in Chicago behind and moved to rural Wisconsin, near Wright's maternal family. There, they lived happily in sin (Wright's ex not being willing to grant a divorce) in a house that Wright meant to embody everything that was good about his architectural style.

The idyll ended in 1914. Wright was off at work and Borthwick was dining with her two children from her previous marriage and several of the Taliesin staff. As they ate, another staff member named Julian Carleton locked them in, poured kerosene around the house and lit a match. When the diners managed to bust their way out, Carleton hacked them to death with an ax. Of the nine who sat down to eat, only two survived. Borthwick and her children were killed. The whole thing turned into a media sensation. "Murderer of Seven: Sets Fire to Country Home of Frank Lloyd Wright Near Spring Green," declared one newspaper. The Wisconsin State Journal, on the other hand, went for something a bit more Rupert Murdoch-esque (and also inaccurate), with the headline "Insane Negro Kills Five in Frank Lloyd Wright's 'Love Bungalow'".

To this day, no one has a clear idea of what drove Carleton to grisly murder. Wright had apparently threatened to fire him at some point before the murders, but there doesn't seem to have been any hints of what was to come. Even his wife, who also worked for the Wrights, had no idea of what he'd been planning. And Carleton himself wasn't talking. Although captured alive by authorities after the murders, Carleton had drunk acid and died a few days later in jail.

No Eye-Contact Glasses (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Muji has opened a US mail-order store. Muji is a Japanese chain that makes extremely high-quality stationery, clothes, furnishings, and other stuff, all with a very clean line and none of it with any sort of label. I use tons of Muji stationery, our DVDs are organized in Muji DVD boxes, and three of my favorite shirts are Muji shirts. The baby's room has a Muji CD player in it. Our house is filled with useful Muji tools. It's all long-wearing, reasonably priced, and extremely polished.

That said, my experience with their UK web-store has been pretty awful. Slow delivery, awkward packaging, and a decidedly second-rate website all make me more apt to walk down to Covent Garden and shop in person at my nearest Muji than to go online. But if the web-store were all that there were, I certainly wouldn't turn my nose up at it. Unfortunately, the US range seems pretty limited -- again, it's better than nothing!

Muji USA

Tetris Furniture (via Neatorama)

Blood Bath Mat

Blood Bath Shower Curtain

(via Street Anatomy)

Retro Chandler editions from Hamish Hamilton

So they're holding a contest to design a Hugo logo. You have to use the rocket-ship, and you get $500, a ticket to the Worldcon and a signed Neil Gaiman book if you win. Judges are Neil Gaiman (3 time Hugo Award-winning author), Chip Kidd (graphic designer, author, editor), Geri Sullivan (SF Fan and graphic designer pro) and Irene Gallo (art-director for Tor).

Hugo Awards Logo Contest Official Rules (via Tor)

(Click images for enlargement)

Last week, I visited the Soho store of the design firm Droog and spotted these vibrobots and other hand-made toys on display there. I don't know how much they cost (the tags said "pricing on request" and I forgot to ask), but considering how expensive everything else was in the store, these toys probably sell for at least $1000 each.

Kozo3 lamps (via Dvice)

Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger

Jamie O'Shea, for ten years editor of the genre-defining visionary arts magazine, Juxtapoz, probably the largest circulated art monthly in the world --I mean, hey, they sell it at Whole Foods-- is now an internationally known creative director and the editor of a new online blog called SuperTouch. SuperTouch is great --kind of a nice hybrid of PAPER magazine style party pics/gossip and the artistic fare seen in O'Shea's former mag, a cool mix.

I was happy to see a post there about my pal Cheryl Dunn's "Spit and Peanut Shells: American Pictures" show at The Country Club gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio. Cheryl's wicked cool and her website is one of my favorite artist's sites. If you are in Cincinnati, check her show out.

And finally, this is redneck sushi:

Crayon Rings (via Geisha Asobi)

Don't keep calm and carry on. (via Warren Ellis)

Georgia Max Coffee chose to redesign the toilets of a number of key ski resorts in Japan. The cubicles were fully wrapped on all sides, so that the person caught short would have a ski jumper’s view when they were sitting on the loo. The person could look down at their skis (simply printed on the floor of the cubicle) and see the steep ski jump slope ahead of them. The toilet paper holder carried the only brand messaging in the cubicle, reading: “Seriously kick-ass intensely sweet for the real coffee super zinging unstoppable Max! Taste-explosion!”

Not Your Grandma’s Rocking Chair

One Page Wonders: Captain A-OK Fights Blug-Glub-Glub (Thanks, Pablo!)

Flow armchair by AK-LH (via Cribcandy)

"Our goal for the initial start up phase of the project is to come up with a design that, like the ISO container, can navigate the many different scenarios -- Haiti, Dominica, Jamaica etc. -- in the Caribbean, and at the same time be "open" enough to take root and adapt so that families can take ownership of the dwelling to meet their needs but within their means," says Hecker.

The history of the 20th Century has often been compared to a chess game: a struggle of opposing political systems, ideologies, brands, and artistic movements. Every figure in our monumental chess set alludes to a particular historical icon, beginning with the sinking Titanic and ending with the scarred towers of the World Trade Center.

Space Shuttle, Coca-Cola, Unabomber Cabin, VW Beetle - are all there. Essentially, the set is a collection of 32 different sculptures on board, which the game continuously re-combines in a new composition.

The wooden chess pieces, hand-carved in Indonesia per Boym’s exact specifications, are set on a monumental 4 X 4-foot chess board which also serves as a box for the chess. The set is made in edition of 8. Price is available upon request from info@boym.com

Tabouret en carton Leseratte (via Cribcandy)

Pandora (via Cribcandy)

I love these -- like an Oblique Strategies deck for humane design.

Method Cards - Case Studies - IDEO

PDF: Ideo Method Cards (Thanks, Avi!)

WHISPERING: Traditionally, whispered dialogue is indicated by a balloon with a dashed stroke. More recently accepted options are a balloon and dialogue in a muted tone (grayed-out), or with a lowercase font in conjunction with small dialogue/big balloon. Italics are a possibility as well.

An absolutely gorgeous ray gun pen by the appropriately named ACME Writing Tools, available mid-February for $130. The barrel separates from the brightly colored, Marvin Martian base as a retractable roller ball. I only wish the handle / stand were less cartoonishly abstract.

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Matchboxes from the Subcontinent (via Core77)

Artisan and furniture, product, and interior designer Rob Southcott is showcasing Community at IDS Prototype. A dresser made from “locally produced reclaimed lumber species assembled together in an abstract configuration,” Community embodies Southcott’s belief in diversity. Like a wooden mosaic, the furniture unites interesting and individually distinct pieces to make a statement about both harmony and humanity