Absolutely, positively need a beard now? Simply enjoy looking at photos of cute girls sporting fake beards? Yeah. There's an Etsy for that.

imadeyouabeard store on Etsy. Thanks, Christina!

And, yes, I am getting a little obsessed with the whacked-out wonder of Etsy. Why do you ask?

Gone are the fantasy illustrations of radioactive zombies and band logos composed of overlapping swords. After a generation of sprouting subgenres, the heavy metal field is littered with a diversity of styles that even the most hardy metalhead will have trouble encompassing. As Ian Christe, author of Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal and publisher of the metal-oriented press Bazillion Points says, "Heavy metal design is not a monolithic form at all. You have everything from junior high school kids in Iowa drawing skulls and pentagrams and band logos to Norwegian design houses making skulls and pentagrams and band logos. There are all levels of sophistication and intention--and execution."

Heavy metal design today comprises a vast field of images that no longer compulsively refer to adolescent power and provocation fantasies. The genre's pervading preoccupation with the occult yields far less goat and pentagram iconography--which became self-conscious clichés almost instantly anyway--than more ambiguously dark imagery. A few designers, some of the key musicians of the scene in their own right, have emerged to torque graphic conventions, and use strategies to indicate that metal, as a visual genre, is more multivalent and eloquent than mainstream design aficionados probably ever imagined.

(Download MP4 video or Watch on YouTube, or view with subtitles on Dotsub).

Institute for the Future teamed up with Sun Microsystems and Boing Boing Video to co-host the Digital Open, an online tech expo for teens 17 and under around the world.

We're publishing an 8-part series of videos profiling the winners. Today, meet 16 year old Harry Lee of Melbourne Australia. He talks with us about his "Sneaky Card" game concept, which explores social interactions between people. He was inspired by ARG and indie projects like "Bite Me," by Gamelab, and Jane McGonigal's Top Secret Dance-Off, both of which we've covered previously on Boing Boing.

"I love index cards," says Harry, "And I was thinking -- hmm, how can I incorporate them into a project?" So he designed and printed these game cards, and "spread the seeds of sneakiness and espionage" into the unsuspecting pockets, math books, binders and bags and jackets of his schoolmates.

I tracked most of the cards and found, with much satisfaction, that a majority of them had been passed down at least three times. The most successful story is of the card passed from student to student three times before ending up in a math teacher's jacket. The teacher found it and gave it to another math teacher, who inserted it into a student's corrected test before giving it back to him. The card passed hands once again before I lost track of it.

(Download MP4 video or Watch on YouTube, or view with subtitles on Dotsub).

Institute for the Future teamed up with Sun Microsystems and Boing Boing Video to co-host the Digital Open, an online tech expo for teens 17 and under around the world.

We're publishing an 8-part series of videos profiling the winners. Today, meet 15-year-old Ferran Rovira Bosca, of Spain. He created a concept for an "Eco Self-Sustaining House" -- architecture of the future that captures its own renewable energy, and operates off the grid. Ferran believes technology can help us come up with new ways of protecing the environment and saving money in our households at the same time. He says he learns a lot about what's possible in this realm from exploring sustainable technology websites online.

Here's more about his "Casa Ecologica Autosuficiente."

Read more about the youth competition in IFTF's press release announcing Digital Open winners.

I've blogged before about London's Junky Styling, a clothing boutique that features original one-of-a-kind clothes made from hacking together thrift-store finds, salvaged textiles, and whatever happens to be lying around. They made my favorite winter coat, my best suit jacket, and my wife's wedding dress (stitched together from Alice-blue men's work-shirts!).

I just received a review copy of Junky Styling: Wardrobe Surgery, a book written by Junky's co-founders, Annika Sanders and Kerry Seager. The first half of the book is given over to Junky's improbable history, a business started by two young women who knew so little about tailoring that they couldn't produce patterns for their clothes, which meant that each piece they finished was one-of-a-kind. They're naturals, though, and have thrived in the Truman Brewery off Brick Lane in East London. This section is lavishly illustrated with photos of their clothes over the years.

The second section is a detailed HOWTO for recreating several of their basic garments: a suit-sleeve scarf, a "shirt wrap halter top," a "fly top" and others, with copious notes about shopping for clothes to rescue and repurpose, instructions for unpicking seams, a glossary of textile types and strategies for working with each and so on.

Junky's tailors are makers, who dive in headfirst, make lots of mistakes quickly, learn and iterate and improve and surprise, and the book and clothes are infused with that heartening spirit. Makes me want to buy a sewing machine!

Junky Styling: Wardrobe Surgery (Amazon US)

Junky Styling: Wardrobe Surgery (Amazon UK)

The store demanded 1,200 sq m of commercial area where only 750 were available.

The initial idea of the client to install a second floor within the church was rejected by the designers, because this would completely destroy the spatial qualities of the church. The solution was found in the creation of a monumental walk-in bookcase spanning several floors and situated a-symmetrically in the church. In doing so the left side of the church remained empty while on the other side customers are lead upstairs in the three- storey ‘Bookflat.’

The ground floor gives room to several different book displays, information desks, magazine-stands and cash registers, all made of standard sheet materials in different colours and surfaces.

Ant Army (via Crib Candy)

London design firm Berg (formerly Schulz and Webb) is working on a series of provocative videos exploring "designerly applications for RFID." The first one is this lovely Rube Goldberg machine running on RFID: "With RFID it's proximity that matters, and actual contact isn't necessary. Much of Timo's work in the Touch project addresses the fictions and speculations in the technology. Here we play with the problems of invisibility and the magic of being close."

Nearness

The fine folks at Flux will show the animated short "Logorama" in their screening lineup at the Hammer museum tonight.

The entire universe of this film, even the characters within (a talking "Pringles" man, and a villainous Ronald McDonald), even the city of Los Angeles itself -- are all composed of repurposed corporate logo art, all of which is used without permission.

If you're in LA, you really must head over there tonight. There's a great post (with video clips) about the making of Logorama over at Creativity Online.

Jonathan Wells of Flux tells us,

The short was created by directors within H5, a French graphic studio renowned for its CD front covers (Superdiscount, Air, Demon...) and artistic direction (Dior, Cartier, YSL...). Members François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain directed many music videos (Alex Gopher, Massive Attack, Goldfrapp, Röyksopp...), and are regularly invited to exhibitions for their artistic talents (2007 Nuit Blanche, Beaubourg, MoMA). Logorama is their first short film, and premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival where it won the Kodak Short Film Discovery Prize at the 48th Critics' Week. The short was *four* years in the making, and features a voice cameo by filmmaker David Fincher as the Pringles man.

English designer Chris Chapman wanted to make planting vegetables and herbs at home less work with his roll-out vegetable mats. The design aims to make home food production as simple as possible and easy to maintain for busy individuals and families. The design features a mat pre-treated with fertilizer on its underside and a series of seed pouches which slowly biodegrade over time.

Pratt Students Design For One Dollar

Allan Chochinov of Core77 let me know about this fun and useful online survival guide for designers called HACK2WORK: Essential Tips for the Design Professional.

Filled with hundreds of tips, tricks, lifehacks and advice for practicing designers, the feature covers everything from office supplies to office snacks, from essential books to essential software, and from intellectual property and design research to conferences, working with the press, and creative hiring.

Here's a partial list of some of the items you'll find:

+ How to Make Your Client's Logo Bigger Without Making Their Logo Bigger, by Michael Bierut

+ Why Does the Firm Own Everything I Do? Intellectual Property & You, by Katy Frankel

+ How to Get Invited to Speak at a Design Conference, by Alissa Walker

+ Check Please: How to Learn About Your Clients From Their Table Manners, by Liz Danzico

+ On Being T-Shaped, by Tim Brown

+ 19 Books Every Design Professional Should Own, by Andy Polaine

+ The Definitive DIY Guide for Professional Designers, by Christy Canida

+ Core77's Guide to Unconventional Office Plants, by Lisa Smith

+ 5 Keys to Successful Design Research, by Steve Portigal

+ How to Pitch Me, by Linda Tischler

The Hierarchy Of Digital Distractions: levels of digital activity, visualized. (by David McCandless, via Scott Beale)

Penguin Books (Thanks, Spencer!)

Here's what I did:

(1) sawed off the tip of the watering can with a hacksaw.

(2) cut off two of the legs of the base tripod (couldn't cut them all off because the wire runs through one of them and I didn't want to risk damaging the rubber shielding).

(3) Pushed the fiber optic spray portion of the lamp through the spout, hiding the tripod inside the can.

IKEA Catalog anno 1965 (via Kottke)

At a recent Ignite show, designer Jeff Veen gave an entertaining talk on iPhone copycats as a kind of cargo cult.

Ignite Show: Jeff Veen on Great Designers

But advertising and upselling are not promising ways to support what Jacobson, et al, confidently call a "craigslist killer." Advertising on classifieds puts the newspaper in direct competition with its users, and creates an environment in which the classifieds are swamped by blatant, cheesy come-ons from paid advertisers trying to distract buyers. The image below is the from the apartments-for-rent page at the Bakersfield Californian, one of the papers that has tried this approach. What you see here is nearly the entire visible section of the page on a reasonably large laptop screen.

But if you really want to see a mess, go visit the nation's greatest apartment-hunting site, the first likely choice of anybody searching for a rental or a roommate. On this site, contrary to every principle of usability and common sense, you can't easily browse pictures of the apartments for rent. Customer support? Visit the help desk if you enjoy being insulted. How much market share does this housing site have? In many cities, a huge percentage. It isn't worth trying to compare its traffic to competitors', because at this scale there are no competitors.

Each of these sites, of course, is merely one of the many sections of craigslist, which dominates the market in facilitating face-to-face transactions, whether people are connecting to buy and sell, give something away, rent an apartment, or have some sex. With more than 47 million unique users every month in the US alone--nearly a fifth of the nation's adult population--it is the most important community site going and yet the most underdeveloped. Think of any Web feature that has become popular in the past 10 years: Chances are craigslist has considered it and rejected it. If you try to build a third-party application designed to make craigslist work better, the management will almost certainly throw up technical roadblocks to shut you down.

C-3PO
Can't fully extend his arms; has a bunch of exposed wiring in his abs; walks and runs as if he has the droid equivalent of arthritis. And you say, well, he was put together by an eight-year-old. Yes, but a trip to the nearest Radio Shack would fix that. Also, I'm still waiting to hear the rationale for making a protocol droid a shrieking coward, aside from George Lucas rummaging through a box of offensive stereotypes (which he'd later return to while building Jar-Jar Binks) and picking out the "mincing gay man" module.

Lightsabers
Yes, I know, I want one too. But I tell you what: I want one with a hand guard. Otherwise every lightsaber battle would consist of sabers clashing and then their owners sliding as quickly as possible down the shaft to lop off their opponent's fingers. You say: Lightsabers can slice through anything but another lightsaber, so what are you going to make a hand guard out of? I say: Dude, if you have the technology to make a lightsaber, you have the technology to make a light hand guard.

This added material doesn't appear to serve any other purpose-the components don;t generate much heat and there's no noise to dampen. My conclusion is that while the components on the PCB (other than the connectors) where not all that tall, the connectors were. So this drove the final thickness of the product. I guess when you're spending $100 on a piece of video kit, you probably want it to feel somewhat solid in your hands. So this is a cheap way to add some "heft" to the product.

Mobile dining (via Crib Candy)

I can see one of Charlie's characters riding this thing, but only if he gets to make fun of the overblown marketing copy on the site.

Confederate Motor Company (Thanks, Sam!)

The best general advice I can give a first-time poster constructor is to describe the circumstances in which a poster will eventually be viewed: a hot, congested room filled with people who are there primarily to socialize, not to look at posters. Because poster sessions are often concurrent with the "wine and beer" mixer, chaos is further increased by hundreds of uninhibited graduate students staggering around hitting on each other. It's not a pretty sight.

And it gets worse: meeting organizers will invariably sandwich your poster between two posters that are infinitely more entertaining, such as "Teaching house cats to perform cold fusion" and "Mating preferences in extraordinarily adorable red pandas." In such a situation, your poster must be interesting and visually slick if you hope to attract viewers.

(Image: Poster Session, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from Nucho's Flickr stream)

AP: Protect, Point, Pay

Scream is a new aluminum chair from Bannavis Andrew Sribyatta of PIE Studio, an eco-friendly furniture design firm. Made with the same method as their prize-winning Steel Tongue chair, the piece is constructed by hand-weaving an aluminum skin over a stainless steel frame. According to PIE, " The inspiration derives from a screaming mouth exposing the Uvula. The Uvula moves down and touches the floor as one sits on the chair."

Jeffrey sez, "We just finished making this fancy table for Penny Arcade. It's full of crazy teak and resin inlay, all sustainable woods, and get this: the moon center bit glows in the dark. We made it that way as a surprise, and didn't tell them about it prior! You can see it in the 'making of' video that's at the end of the blog post. To make it even better, it costs the same as a normal boring 'mid-level' large conference table from an office furniture store. Take that, Ikea and DWR.com!"

Penny Arcade themed conference table (Thanks, Jeffrey!)

The borough of Wandsworth has the highest number of CCTV cameras in London, with just under four cameras per 1,000 people. Its total number of cameras - 1,113 - is more than the police departments of Boston [USA], Johannesburg and Dublin City Council combined.

Best Made Axe (via Cribcandy)

Ink Calendar by Oscar Diaz (via Cribcandy)

How The Average U.S. Consumer Spends Their Paycheck (via Sociological Images)

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.