http://www.whatisamericanpower.com/
This site askes everyone to look harder at their daily relationship to energy. We created it to help heighten awareness of the toll that energy production and consumption take on our economy, security, health, and natural resources. When we understand more about the realities of American power, we can make wiser choices about energy through conservation and civic action.
Great new website from Pentagram partners that attempts to show a portrait of communities living in the shadow of power plants. There are a few power plants near my house, but they are on a much smaller scale (and more disguised!) than the ones depicted here. The photography is excellent, and the idea for the website is good too. It tries to connect photos through a physical place through the use of a map. I lose my mental map of the images location when scrolling through them all, but they are compelling enough to give the location a backseat.
CS5 an Evolution of the Designers Toolbox
Amazingly well done walk through of the design process behind those Adobe icons we’ve come to know and love so much. Some of the new features of CS5 look pretty amazing, don’t know if I can afford the upgrade at this point tho…
I pretty much just keep forgetting to post this here. It’s old, but still a great reference.
http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2010/03/the_social_media_bubble.html
I’d like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn’t connecting us as much as we think it is. It’s largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.
During the subprime bubble, banks and brokers sold one another bad debt — debt that couldn’t be made good on. Today, “social” media is trading in low-quality connections — linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships.
This is a really great example of a graphic that calls you to action. Everyone that saw this couldn’t help but to try out what’s going on in the photo. Can YOU???
Alexa Meade is an installation artist based in the Washington, DC area. Her background in the world of political communications has fueled her intellectual interest in the tensions between perception and reality.
Alexa Meade’s innovative use of paint on the three dimensional surfaces of found objects, live models, and architectural spaces has been incorporated into a series of installations that create a perceptual shift in how we experience and interpret spatial relationships.
http://sloanreview.mit.edu/special-report/design-thinking/
This is more for personal reference, I’d like to go back and read some of these articles in the future. Since it’s coming from MIT Sloan, these topics are viewed through the lens of management, but the content still looks pretty interesting. Nice to see how other professions / fields can use the principals of design to achieve better results.
Design thinking — distinct from analytical thinking — has emerged as the premier organizational path not only to breakthrough innovation but, surprisingly, to high-performance collaboration, as well. “It’s not about the pretty,” says one design-thinking practitioner, “it’s about the productive.” In this special section of articles, interviews, illustrated cases and research findings, the Review explores how to put design thinking to work.
How to Become a Better Manager … By Thinking Like a Designer
Elegance By Design: The Art of Less
Usability for Evil
Designing Waits That Work
