Soviet design: not quite an oxymoron
Foreign Policy magazine has a great slideshow of Soviet design. Long thought of as cheap and ugly, Soviet-era manufactured goods have only recently come under the glow of retro-chic nostalgia. The most interesting one by far is the one above, the vertushka telephone. You’ll notice its lack of a rotary dial– not a bug, but a feature. If you owned a vertushka, it meant that you didn’t need to call anyone– people called you. It’s a great illustration how the lack of a feature becomes a cultural signifier. Apple has used this enforced, almost gratuitous minimalism to great effect. And doesn’t that vertrushka look a bit like an iPod classic?
Web pages before the internet
This article in the Boston Globe really underscores how much the things we think of as innovative really have much deeper roots than we realize: for decades, the front window of the Boston Globe building served as a kind of web page.
The brilliance of the absurdly simple
The design world is full of schemes for distributing clever gadgets to the very poor people of the developing world: the hand-cranked flashlight, the solar oven, the $100 laptop, and so forth. Most of them, however well-intentioned, contain a grain of hubris on the part of their creators, that being a well-off knowledge worker in a rich country supposedly imbues them with superior design and problem-solving abilities that impose on them some sort of “white man’s burden”, and a kind of liberal guilt that must be assuaged by creating clever gadgets for the supposedly less astute.
Watch the video– it’s the antidote to all of that, the rare good idea whose brilliance is its absolute simplicity. How to make a skylight out of recycled soda bottle and a scrap of corrugated tin.
Before email
This is the post office of Post Office Bay on the island of Floreana in the Galapagos. It has been claimed that this assemblage of junk represents the oldest continuously operating post office in the world. When in the Galapagos last Janurary, I stopped here to take these photos. I did, in fact, send a postcard with it and it worked perfectly.
Chart Wars
Alex Lundry gives the five-minute version of How To Lie With Charts & Graphs. Succint and to the point. Click through to see it properly sized.
Food Pairing with Flash
Food Pairing, www.foodpairing.com, as the name of a website is pretty much explanatory– which foods go with which others? This may seem like a matter of personal taste, but according to the proprietors, there’s sound science behind it. There’s also a nifty Flash interface.
Osama bin Laden, graphed
The New York Times provides a novel hybrid of poll and infographic to track reader responses to the death of Osama bin Laden. It’s lovely to behold, and elegant in its simplicity.
Users plot their own feelings according to two axes: whether they think the news event is significant, and whether they regard it positively and negatively. Users then add a short comment to elaborate on their (now literal) position. Subsequent readers can simply mouse over the mosaic to get a wide variety of comments.
What I’ve liked most about this today is watching the pattern unfold over the course of the day: I saw it first early this morning when there were relatively few posts, with no discernible trend, then later around early evening New York time it looked like this:
WeatherSpark
Flowing Data spotlights a really sophisticated Flash/Flex application called WeatherSpark, that is chock full of geeky info-design goodness. It consists of a large Google map overlayed with geographical weather station information, paired with graphical representation of the nearest geographical station’s weather over time. There’s a lot to look at– it’s a little overwhelming, and if you’re just looking for today’s forecast you’ll either be overwhelmed by the busy-ness of the interface, or, like me, sucked into the little pleasures of poking around a very rich interface, and forget all about the forecast.
“You’re my only hope, Obi-Wan…”
That’s what popped into my head the moment I saw this really unique next-generation 3D technology prototype. It uses multiple LED projectors at multiple angles to create a three-dimension avatar that exists in real space, just like the on in the original Star Wars.
Time Zones
A really excellent interactive by the BBC on a subject that I find curiously interesting: time zones. The design and execution here are really outstanding, mostly because the main visual metaphor– the spinning globe– is perfectly suited to the subject at hand. Not only is the spinning globe a lot more visually appealing than a flat map with a bunch of stripes on it, the act of “spinning” the globe itself illustrates time zones in a manner that provides some insight to just how odd they are. Linking the spinning action to popup labels is just brilliant.