On Design in the Twenty-first Century Like most owners of a new restaurant, I buy glasses by the dozen, the cheaper the better. I do not own a restaurant but I live with a girlfriend who accidentally shatters one or two every week. “I’m just clumsy,” she explains. She graduated [...]
Tag Archives: design century
Stop Designing Solutions
Designers today face a task of immense proportions: creating for a world destructing under the weight of our precedent. We try to learn from our missteps, correct our mistakes, only to find ourselves repeating history. We need a paradigm shift, not more careful design. We must start designing for awareness. We [...]
Not-so Safe Connect
The New School university requires [tries to require] Wi-Fi users to download Safe Connect to control wireless Internet access. Students and faculty are concerned that this software can gather users’ private information and transmit it freely as its private makers (Impulse Point) see fit. We are supposed to comply on [...]
the coming insurrection
Notes from The Invisible Committee, The coming Insurrection. We should question systems for resolutions produced by the culprit behind cause of a catastrophe. Framing our growing troubles as environmental or natural is deceptive. They are people troubles. The famine of 1876 can be framed as the result of a global [...]
shift from product to service
When you shift from selling a product to selling the service it provides you can avoid the impulse for planned obsolescence (iphone) and instead design and aim for longevity & adaptability. If you manufacture and lease a tool, your expertise is channeled toward a more sustainable outcome.
So-called Developed Economies are Terribly Inefficient
Only 1 percent of material flows in the US economy ends up in, and is still being used within, products six months after their sale. Hawken and his colleagues reckon that so-called developed economies are less than 10 percent as efficient as the laws of physics allow. – John Thacka, [...]
Artifice is our Context
Notes from Design for this Century lecture with Clive Dilnot September 1st, 2011 Artifice is our context. The defining characteristic of this century is the full integration of articificial in our lives, from 1) technology, to our 2) rendering of natural as artificial, added to the 3) symbolic realm of [...]