at the cooper hewitt’s lackluster ‘design for the other 90%‘ exhibit i was puzzled by the ‘day labor station:’ a well-intentioned shelter for immigrant day laborers who – at least in california – seek day labor by standing around home supply stores waiting for an unscrupulous contractor to pick them up. the solution – for […]
Category Archives: conviviality
carpenter shelter
Also posted in architecture, fabrication, marketing, possessed products
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patronizing design
apple fans seem to enjoy design that limits choices, requires new skills and costs a lot. but my problem with apple isn’t just because they are unabashedly unfriendly to the environment. the most significant things you can do to reduce environmental impact are to allow for easy upgrades, repair and to encourage long product life […]
Also posted in marketing, product design
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digital dwelling
i visited moishe safdie’s habitat yesterday, a 40-year-old futurist masterpiece that was a lot more exciting to walk through than a lot of crazy buildings. this dated vision of the future is still inhabited, in fact renovated, and it makes the point that you can design for customization in architecture: you’ll hardly notice all of […]
Also posted in architecture, customization
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collaborative creation
i found peter b. meyer’s episodes of collective invention inspiring because he shows that in cases where technology has no clear application, sharing ideas is more valuable than keeping them secret. he bases this conclusion on some pretty weighty case studies: the invention of desktop computers, the spread of the bessemer steel process, and the […]
Also posted in blogogracy, futurecraft, marketing, open objects, product design
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shared limbs
although few attempts at ‘open design‘ have endured, openprosthetics.org seems to be working. it is a forum for sharing prosthetic designs, and it is motivated in large part by amputees and their families who are seeking better, cheaper, and more functional alternatives to traditional prosthetics. take a look at the prosthetic fishing rod (above) for […]
Also posted in blogogracy, futurecraft, livingbreathing, open objects, product design
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by a long sea and a long land carriage
the supply chain of a laptop computer Were we to examine, in the same manner, all the different parts of his dress and household furniture, the coarse linen shirt which he wears next his skin, the shoes which cover his feet, the bed which he lies on, and all the different parts which compose it, […]
Also posted in possessed products, product design, visualization
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virtual policy
my favorite video at this year’s siggraph animation festival (the compendium of the special effect industry’s efforts over the last year) only one piece struck me as pure art: U2 and green day’s music video “the saints are coming,” featuring an alternate reality where the US troops in iraq were redeployed to new orleans to […]
Also posted in blogogracy, visualization
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