Brands today exist in multiple mediums, defined by multiple voices. The media brands inhabit is iterative, with no beginning, no end, and little permanency. In that context, adherence to a big idea and endless repetition of centralized, fixed rules can make a brand seem unresponsive and out of step with its audience. But without repetition, how does a brand create consistency? And without consistency, how does a brand maintain value?
Finally, someone has given us a serious artistic study of a most serious artistic subject for our time: boredom on Twitter. Ivan Sharko, a Toronto designer, has managed to take 140-word kvetches about things like school, church, and, inching further along the meta continuum here, Twitter itself, and turn them into portraits, a sort of aestheticized banality that, we guess, makes them the Campbell's soup cans of our day.
Bad design usually hides in plain sight. Take auditorium seating: cushioned, fold-down seats that offer just enough leg room to be bearable but not enough space for another person to squeeze past. Really, the only real innovation in movie-theater-style seating in the last century or so has been the addition of cup holders. A new design by Ziba finally fixes all that.
China is where perfectly good architects go to do perfectly bizarre architecture. Which might help explain the horrifying aesthetic of the Shanghai studio of Taranta Creations.China is where perfectly good architects go to do perfectly bizarre architecture. Which might help explain the horrifying aesthetic of the Shanghai studio of Taranta Creations, a small firm with Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and Chinese architects.
Despite the premium placed on real estate in our overcrowded cities, one space remains woefully underutilized: the roof. And we're not just talking about installing green roofs and urban farms but finding creative ways to spruce up the stretches of tar and concrete that top off our skylines. The Danish firm Julien de Smedt (JDS) Architects? rooftop shows what can be done with a little imagination: A rolling playground atop a turn-of-the-century building in Copenhagen's multiethnic district of Nørrebro.
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I'll bet you scoffed at this headline before clicking it. And I'll bet you've thought about the debate it mentions almost too many times to count. But seriously: Which way should you hang the toilet paper in the dispenser?
Researchers expend lots of energy (and money) hunting for environmentally gentle alternatives to plastic. But as Studio Formafantasma shows, the alternatives are already out there and they have been for centuries: You'll find them in resin, in animal blood, and even in insect poop. In short, the best source of plastic is nature itself.
The objects were designed as if the oil-based era never took place.
The last time I wrote about Steelcase's media:scape telepresence product, I ended up emailing my colleagues at FastCo HQ to see if they wanted to go in on one together.
Having a bona fide land line in the house is a prudent fail-safe against the plagues of the smartphone age: signal drop-outs, dead batteries, fetish objects with faulty engineering. But they're expensive and ugly to have around the house.
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