Rome wasn’t built in a day, but in cyberspace it might be.
Computer science researchers at the University of Washington and Cornell University are deploying a system that will blend teamwork and collaboration with powerful graphics algorithms to create three-dimensional renderings of buildings, neighborhoods and potentially even entire cities.
The new system, PhotoCity, grew from the original work of a Cornell computer scientist, Noah Snavely, who while working on his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Washington, developed a set of algorithms that generated three-dimensional models from unstructured collections of two-dimensional photos.
Donald A.Norman recently posted an essay to his web site http://www.jnd.org discussing technological innovation.
I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs. I reached this conclusion through examination of a range of product innovations, most especially looking at those major conceptual breakthroughs that have had huge impact upon society as well as the more common, mundane small, continual improvements. Call one conceptual breakthrough, the other incremental. Although we would prefer to believe that conceptual breakthroughs occur because of a detailed consideration of human needs, especially fundamental but unspoken hidden needs so beloved by the design research community, the fact is that it simply doesn’t happen.
Victor Margolin, Professor Emeritus of Design History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a lucid thinker and vivid critic, shared some critical thoughts with Ksenija Berk last winter, in this two-part interview. His overview of basic ideas in design thinking brought to light some thoughts that could foster positive change in society – and in design itself, which all too often forgets its chief goal: the wellbeing of all mankind.
Professor Margolin argues that design can’t introduce positive changes into any society if we fail to create a sustainable economy on a global scale. Sustainability is a fundamental value of life, not something that can be found solely in a product; it is a total way of living.
This is a short film (a fast paced preview of a larger effort) by MAYA Design created to put some perspective on the invisible but fast approaching challenges and opportunities in the pervasive computing age.
The Roma build their palaces just like the rest of us, one cinder block at a time…
TIMOSORA, ROMANIA - Like Saint Petersburg before she was operated on for her three-hundredth, the brie-colored streets and decaying facades have a dusty continuity. Against this backdrop, the Roma build their Disneyland.
Forced by the Communists to settle in the ’60s, they have embraced a style of permanent renovation. Their mansions, in primary colors, stick like fingers in the dead dictator’s eye. But this provokes nothing beyond tourists snapping photos and locals shaking their heads.
“How do you think they pay for them?” they ask me and then spit.
You’ll have heard how the city once ended in fire, and around these parts, it threatens to end in ice every few years or so. But once, not too long ago, Chicago flirted with ending in water, an entirely preventable man-made inundation that few saw but everybody felt – a two-billion-dollar sucker-punch tsunami that weighed in among the dozenmost costly floods in American history.
The groundwork for the Great Flood of 1992 was laid a century before, when the Illinois (later Chicago)Tunnel Company built a series of semi-official, semi-clandestine tunnels under almost every street downtown. The tunnels were only supposed to house telephone cables, but in a nice Pynchonian twist, the operators covertly decided to install a narrow-gauge railway for delivering freight, as well. The dirt hauled out of the tunnels filled in the lakefront and formed all the land now under Grant Park, the Field Museum, Soldier Field and McCormick Place. You’d think that amount of landfill ought to have tipped off more than a few officials that something besides phone cables was going in underground. More…
The engineer is holding his breath. Beside him, the project manager grimaces. A dozen Emerson employees, all in khaki pants and button-down shirts, are gathered — silent and expectant — around their teacher as he squints at their creations. Back in their real roles, making aerospace controls or medical machinery or marine valves at the $24.8 billion St. Louis-based manufacturer, these people are not often met with bewilderment. But then, they rarely bring raw ideas to consumers either.
Here, in the Pittsburgh offices of MAYA (”most advanced yet acceptable”) Design, a mashup of design firm and tech-research lab, these people are students. Given 30 minutes to imagine a TiVo-like car radio, they’ve built prototypes with construction paper, markers, and stickers. Chris Pacione, director of MAYA’s innovation boot camp, is playing an average consumer — and he can’t find the on button. “Some companies are not used to working across silos — design, marketing, engineering,” Pacione says later. “They still think design is something that happens at the end: ‘Should we paint it red? Or blue?’ They’ll have brilliant minds working on a project for two years before it hits shelves, and it’s not until then they know it’s deeply flawed.” More…
Marcia Lausen
Marcia Lausen is founder of the Chicago office of Studio/lab and Director of the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
As Director of the UIC School of Art and Design, Marcia administrative leadership for programs in Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Electronic Visualization, Moving Image, Photography, Studio Arts, and Art Education. As a Professor in the Graphic Design department Marcia teaches graduate and undergraduate students preparing for professional careers in design education, research, and practice. More…
The week, London is celebrating its annual London Design Festival - providing a platform for creative work and the exploration of over 200 design events and activities. Throughout the week, the public is invited to attend events, exhibits, and seminars - with special exhibits and openings hosted by the likes of the Design Museum, V&A Museum and Serpentine Gallery. News and updates are posted on the London Design Festival’s News page.
Preparations for the Shanghai World Expo 2010 are heating up and many countries are getting in on the action by designing structures for the space. We couldn’t help but be dazzled by the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion by Atelier Feichang Jianzhu, but we were even more impressed to learn that the fascinating building is composed of thousands of plastic tubes made from used CD cases! Read on to find out what other green features the pavilion is incorporating besides the extensive use of recycled materials.
The impressive exterior structure is composed of hundreds of polycarbonate transparent recycled plastic tubes formed into a grid-like matrix. Recycled from used CD cases, the polycarbonate tubes will be able to be recycled again at the end of the building’s life. Multi-colored LED lights will be built into the exterior structure and be computer controlled to change the appearance of the exterior on a whim or based on a computer program. More…
LED light bulbs, with their minuscule energy consumption and 20-year life expectancy, have grabbed the consumer’s imagination.
But an even newer technology is intriguing the world’s lighting designers: OLEDs, or organic light-emitting diodes, create long-lasting, highly efficient illumination in a wide range of colors, just like their inorganic LED cousins. But unlike LEDs, which provide points of light like standard incandescent bulbs, OLEDs create uniform, diffuse light across ultrathin sheets of material that eventually can even be made to be flexible. More…
Copenhagen Design Week explores design that matters — ideas, concepts, products and services that will come to play an important role in your professional and personal life. In 2009, Copenhagen Design Week explores social and environmental design and innovation. Each element of the program explores the positive power of design, inspiring businesses and individuals.
Copenhagen Design Week is an initiative from the Danish Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs. Directed by Danish Design Centre, Copenhagen Design Week provides a rich mix of tradeshows, exhibitions, experiences, discussions and networking. More…
Danish design consultancy Index: recently announced the winners of the 2009 Index:Award, an international design competition that highlights the scale of the problems we face globally, while rewarding design work that points the way towards intelligent solutions. The prize is 100,000 euros per winner in five categories: “Body“, “Home“, “Work“, “Play” and “Community“. This year’s prizes have been chosen from more than 700 entries, all of which had to meet the theme: Design to Improve Life. More…
New online presentations have been uploaded to the Common Ground YouTube Website. See the Design Conference presentations here. To subscribe, please click here.
“With the United States economy spiraling down the drain, there’s been a renewed interest in the New Deal projects of the 1930s and 1940s as potential models of how to once again make big government good government.
Among the various campaigns of that period, several involved the cultural sphere and resulted in a dramatic change in the nature of the arts in this country. Patronage largesse from nobility or the church has historically fueled the production of fine art, with the subject and medium tailored to suit the donor. The deliberately public nature of WPA was a grand experiment, not just in putting artists to work, but in the democratization of the arts themselves. Fine artists worked alongside communities all over the country, reimaging the iconography of the egalitarian principles that this country believes it was founded upon. The process was participatory and inclusive, the results free to the public.”
As books make the leap from cellulose and ink to electronic pages, some editors worry that too much is being lost in translation. Typography, layout, illustrations and carefully thought-out covers are all being reduced to a uniform, black-on-gray template that looks the same whether you’re reading Pride and Prejudice, Twilight or the Federalist Papers.
“There’s a dearth of typographic expression in e-books today,” says Pablo Defendini, digital producer for Tor.com, the online arm of science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor Books. “Right now it’s just about taking a digital file and pushing it on to a e-book reader without much consideration for layout and flow of text.”
With the popularity of the Kindle and other e-book readers, electronic book sales in the United States have doubled every quarter. Though still a very small percentage of the overall book industry, sales of e-books touched $15.5 million in the first quarter of the year, up from $3.2 million the same quarter a year ago. By contrast, the printed book market sales in North America alone was nearly $14 billion in 2008. More…
From John Markoff in the New York Times:
Donald A.Norman recently posted an essay to his web site http://www.jnd.org discussing technological innovation.
