IDEO worked with MIT Media Lab to put together some musings about the future in their new project Made in the Future. The thinking falls into five inspiring high level themes: 1. Meaning Economy 2. Outer Skills 3. Making Exchanges 4. Raw Systems 5. New Matter
In my opinion, the concepts themselves could be better, but the thinking behind them is incredibly interesting.
Yann Pineill & Nicolas Lefaucheux of parachutes.tv have created a simple by effective video to show off the Beauty of Mathematics. Its composition is three side by side motion graphics that show the raw math, a visualization of the math, and a video of the thing the math is describing.
"In almost every human culture, when an individual is prepared for burial or cremation, their body is dressed in a garment that will literally and symbolically become part of the body as it returns to the earth."
Why does the outfit we wear to the grave not have the same amount of thought put into it as a wedding dress? Pia Interlandi thinks that it should. She has been working on a project called Garments for the Grave which explores clothing made specifically to be worn to the grave. These clothes take into consideration the difficulties in dressing a body once it is stiff with rigor, the use of materials that will decompose along with the body, and the price appropriate for their use.
There is something quite lovely and respectful about clothing the dead in garments appropriate for the unique needs of the situation.
What can I say, I have a thing for robot artists. Iris and Scout of Bot and Dolly are some of the most talented robot performance artists I've come across. It is hard not to be drawn into their magic and inspired by the possibilities.
Their new Box demo video is incredible. It explores the synthesis of real and digital space by projection-mapping on moving surfaces. Amazing.
I want to grow up to be just like Oliver Jeffers...
The new OK Go Skyscrapers music video is so beautifully simple and elegant. A couple tango slowly across your screen, moving from one color to the next and then back again. There is something really mesmerizing about the intensity of the colors in combination with the slow, deliberate moves of the dancers. I can't stop watching...
Justin & Christine Gignac from Wants for Sale have partnered with Threadless and UNICEF to create Good Shirts. Good Shirts are Threadless t-shirts where 100% of your donation goes to UNICEF. The cost of each shirt directly corresponds to the cost of the donated item. For example, the Insecticide Treated Mosquito Nets shirt cost $18.37, and the Water Pump shirt cost $500.00. Learn more here.
Alex Holder and her boyfriend reenacted some classic Harlequin Romance Covers in this Mills & Boom photo shoot for an International Women's Day Exhibit. She bought the clothing from vintage shops and painted all the backdrops herself. The photos were taken by Oli Kellett, Alex's colleague and artistic partner (a partnership I'm totally obsessed with after reading this self description).
Do you think you could find the real Waldo in a sea of artist renditions? A Lot of Waldos.
This is the best TED talk I've listened to in a long time. Deb Roy's TED talk The birth of a word.
The VW's The Fun Theory is an effort built around the idea that you can use fun to change people's behaviors. They try to prove this theory through a contest where people submit their social behavioral experiments in fun. You would probably recognize some of the entries (such as the piano stairs).
In enjoyed the latest winner, The Speed Camera Lottery, by Kevin Richardson. This experiment tries to get drivers to obey the speed limit for fun, by turning a speed camera into a lottery machine. The speed camera takes pictures of people who speed, in order fine them, and pictures of people who follow the speed limit, in order to give them some of the money collected from the speeders in the form of a lottery. The results are pretty impressive.
This comically meta Infographic about Infographic, by designer Ivan Cash, is just adding to my infographic obsession.
One large billboard or movie poster becomes 100 lbs of plastic waste materials in a landfill after as little as a month on display. ReMakes trys to avoid this by upcylcing old billboards into one of a kind placemats. Each set of 4 placemats is made from the same billboard, to give them a matching color scheme. Scan the QR code in the bottom of each placemat to get a daily conservation fact.
Beautiful, unique placements, that do something good for the environment, and give you a topic of conversation for dinner - what more could you ask for.
Available in black or color for $15.99 through Abe's Market.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has a recent crowdsourced art project of their own. They asked their visitors to share their MoMA experiences through poems, drawings and messages. Responses range from "I love the coffee on the second floor" to "I want to save the world...". Explore the story collection yourself at I went to MOMA and...
Log & Squirrel is a super cute planter with training wheels. It is self watering (put the water into the bottom of the pot and it absorbs through an interior wall to the soil as needed). Plus, the squirrel disappears out of the hole to indicate that you need to add more water.
I am sitting alone in my office, literally laughing out loud at Help I Can't Sleep's Dream Recommender. Just when I thought Help's marketing couldn't get any more brilliant. Seriously, the balding, and the cow milking! Too funny. It makes me want to go to sleep immediately.
Another one to file under Damn-I-wish-I-had-thought-of-that.
If you are a fan of Learn Something Every Day (Dad!), you might want to add I Always Wondered to your bookmark list. A beautifully illustrated site where you can learn things like how plants know it is time to bloom, or why goat eyes look so weird.
I don't know if I should look at these images as art, an observational experiment, a gesture study, or just a little comic relief. Any way I look at it, it is both enlightening and entertaining.
Images care of Design Language.
Visual designer Kyle Tezak successfully summed up a series of blockbuster movies into four simple (and wonderfully executed) icons each. Not an easy task. Prints of The Four Icon Challenge are available for $16.
My favorite is The Big Lebowski. The thumb icon just makes me smile.
