The Hereros of Namibia added Victorian fashion into their traditional costume under German influence in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Photographer Jim Naughten explains how he became fascinated with this community.

London-based Jim Naughten is an award-winning photographer who has earned recognition from the Association of Photographers, D&AD, and the National Portrait Gallery, among others. Many exhibitions have showcased Naughten’s work, including galleries in the U.S., Switzerland, and Italy. Photographs from his first series “Re-enactors”—featuring costumed re-enactors of the First and Second World Wars—appeared in a solo exhibition in the Imperial War Museum.

“Conflict and Costume” is on view at New York City’s Klompching Gallery through May 4, 2013. The series also appears in Naughten’s book Conflict and Costume: The Herero Tribe of Namibia, recently published by Merrell.You first encountered Namibia as a recent college graduate. What were you doing there? Did you interact with the Herero people then?
Jim Naughten:

A friend and I decided to buy motorbikes and ride across Southern Africa after college. I took my old film camera not quite knowing what I would find to photograph and more or less stumbled into Namibia and across the Hereros during that trip. I was spellbound. I was not expecting to see deserts, ghost towns, Bavarian architecture, First World War relics, or tribes wearing Victorian-era dresses. I felt as if I was on a Wild West movie set where they had ordered all the wrong people and props. I photographed both the Herero and Himba people on that trip, but always had it in the back of my mind to return and make a more accomplished body of work on the Herero.

TMN: How did you scout models for these portraits?

JN: I hired a Herero guide, and we traveled all over Namibia together, visiting and staying in Herero villages, and as guests at weddings, funerals, ceremonies, and gatherings. Whenever I spotted someone who looked photogenic—more or less everyone!—we would stop and ask if I could take some pictures, paying cash or giving coffee, maize, and sugar to chiefs and elders.

TMN:What was most challenging about setting up the shoots?

JN: The whole process was quite physical: camping every day, cleaning and charging equipment, driving thousands of miles off road. And that’s before taking any pictures. We had a few close shaves with snakes and scorpions and had to avoid the occasional elephant. Over a period of four months it can be a little draining, but overall it was a wonderful and highly rewarding experience to spend so much time immersed in someone else’s culture. Read More

I’m as guilty of saying it as anyone else--mantras like “the best interface is no interface at all”--that attempt to explain why I find Microsoft’s recently proposed vision of the future so abhorrent.

But Timo Arnall, creative director at Berg (makers of brilliant, tangible electronics like Little Printer and these Google concepts), wants to correct our poor design vocabulary. In a pretty fantastic open letter, he argues that while we all want to escape the screen, “invisible” and “seamless” design aren’t the end game. Here’s one of my favorite bits:

    Invisible design propagates the myth that technology will ‘disappear’ or ‘just get out of the way’ rather than addressing the qualities of interface technologies that can make them difficult or delightful.

    Intentionally hiding the phenomena and materiality of interfaces, smoothing over the natural edges, seams and transitions that constitute all technical systems, entails a loss of understanding and agency for both designers and users of computing. Lack of understanding leads to uncertainty and folk-theories that hinder our ability to use technical systems, and clouds the critique of technological developments.

    As systems increasingly record our personal activity and data, invisibility is exactly the wrong model. Read More...

Image Courtsey of elasticspace.com

Instead of a peer-reviewed publication, the endpoint of this measurement is demand creation: a product that people will want to use.

This piece is from PopTech Editions III--Made to Measure: The new science of impact, which explores the evolving techniques to accurately gauge the real impact of initiatives and programs designed to do social good. Visit PopTech for more interviews, essays, and videos with leading thinkers on this subject.

The Kakuma Refugee Camp sits in a hot, dusty, and remote region in the far northwest of Kenya. Over the past 20 years this camp has been a semi-permanent home to refugees from Somalia, Sudan, and Ethiopia. With recent waves of arrivals and few refugees leaving, the camp population has swelled to 100,000. There are now more inhabitants per square kilometer in Kakuma than in Bangkok or Mexico City. Micronutrient deficiencies and anemia are a major public health concern at Kakuma, particularly among young children, pregnant women, and nursing mothers. Worldwide, iron deficiency contributes to 20% of all maternal deaths.

To tackle the micronutrient deficiencies at the Kakuma Refugee Camp, the World Food Programme in partnership with the Swiss company DSM launched a program in 2008 that aimed to provide all individuals six months or older with daily access to a micronutrient powder called MixMe.

MixMe is one of several micronutrient powders available on the international market, generically called “sprinkles” after the trade name of a leading product. Sprinkles is a powdered mix of vitamins and minerals packaged in a sachet, like the single-use shampoo packets popularized in India in the 1980s. The idea is for people to sprinkle this powder into food. Sprinkles are usually designed to have minimal effect on the taste, color, and smell of food. The MixMe sachet contained iron and 15 other vitamins and minerals. Read More...

“Do you know this man? Do you know who he is?” Julian Niccolini, the irrepressible co-owner and the host of the Four Seasons said one late January evening. Standing beside a corner banquette in the Grill Room — the prime power seat in a restaurant that, fully 54 years after Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson designed it, has yielded none of its luster to time — Mr. Niccolini put his hand on the shoulder of a shy, smallish man with a lantern jaw, a John Glenn crew cut and a suit that looked as though the laundry had shrunk it with him inside.

“This man is a king,” Mr. Niccolini said, referring to Thom Browne, one of the most celebrated fashion designers few Americans had ever heard of up until a week earlier.

It was then that Michelle Obama selected from an array of specially commissioned designer offerings a subtly checkered, navy silk coat and dress by Mr. Browne to wear to her husband’s inauguration. And in that lightning-strike moment it seemed as if Mr. Browne — an award winning but largely cult figure — had after more than a decade vaulted from influential semi-obscurity into the limelight and the American mainstream. “I wanted it to be this distinct American style that people around the world could look to,” Mr. Browne said of Mrs. Obama’s dress. Duly humbled by the historic freight of the moment, Mr. Browne added, “What I thought was really great was that the leader of the country and his wife just looked so cool.”

Cool is a word Mr. Browne uses a lot and is as good a term as any to define his aesthetic. His preferred form of cool is McLuhan-esque, emotionless, its iconography period-specific. Read More...

Image Courtsey of Danny Ghitis for The New York Times

More and more, research is piling up to explain what we already knew: People love beautiful things.

Why are credit cards, televisions, books, and iPods shaped the same way? They all form a “golden rectangle”--a phenomenon we’ve recognized for millennia. But why are we so obsessed with these rectangles in our media? In 2009, Duke University researchers discovered a practical explanation. Humans can process information inside these rectangles, like text in a paragraph, very efficiently. In this case, we’re drawn to a lighter cognitive load. We like books because they actually look easy to read.

It’s just one of many examples given by Lance Hosey from The New York Times in a recent column. Through a series of research vignettes, he presents beautiful design as an evolutionary imperative beyond this caveman ideal of needing sharper rocks to better kill mastodons. I especially enjoyed this explanation of why we may love Jackson Pollock: Read More...

Image Courtsey of Colin Smith

Not the most functional calendar, nor the most efficient reference for conversions, but certainly one of the more beautiful examples of either you’re likely to find.

Calendars come in all sorts of forms, from the purely functional apps on our smartphones to the propped-up desktop ones that are mostly just a means of delivering a new Far Side joke every day. The Units of Measure Calendar Poster, as its name suggests, isn’t the most straightforward one to categorize. Or even one that’s easy to recognize as a calendar at all.

It’s supposed to be hung, for one thing--not like the folded calendars you stick to the side of your refrigerator, but mounted on the wall, like a poster. It doesn’t leave any room for you to jot down appointments, though it does include all 365 days, which you can notch off one by one. Mostly, it’s just an exquisite graphical compilation of 12 different units of measurement, a tightly packed collection of diagrams and conversion tables and other neat looking things of the sort. Read More...

News: architect and designer Michael Graves has been appointed by US president Barack Obama to a key administration post and says he will "provide national leadership on accessible design".

Graves, who has used a wheelchair for ten years, will take on a role at the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board, also known as the Access Board, the federal agency that deals with accessibility for people with disabilities.

"When I became paralysed, I realized that as an architect and designer, and then a patient, I had a unique perspective," said Graves. "As a result, I became passionate about using this perspective to improve healthcare and accessibility through design projects. Now, as a member of the Access Board, I expect to provide national leadership on accessible design, and hope I can contribute on a grand scale." Read More...

Graphic designer David Pearson has censored the cover of George Orwell's classic novel 1984 as part of his series of redesigned books for publisher Penguin.

Referencing the novel's themes of totalitarianism and censorship, David Pearson debossed the title and author and covered them with black foiling.

Penguin's Great Orwell series also includes Down and Out in Paris and London, whose cover by Pearson frames a Vorticist-style screenprint of the two cities by Paul Catherall.

Homage to Catalonia, an account of Orwell's experiences during the Spanish Civil War, features a repeated cubist line drawing of a soldier.

Animal Farm's cover is dominated by bold, cartoonish lettering in the style of an old movie poster, while Politics and the English Language uses a new font, Caslon Great Primer Rounded, which is inspired by a typeface created by Caslon & Catherwood in 1821. Read More...

With his new collection, "Form Follows Function," Jongmin Kim provides an addictively interactive demostration of what beauty and interactivity HTML5 is capable of helping to create.

It’s impossible to know just what to expect when clicking on a tab that reads "Universe Panorama." You just do it because, well, of course you do it. In this instance, within Jongmin Kim’s web-based funhouse, what you see is the surprisingly mucus-like, star-flecked tendrils of the celestial heavens. It’s a beautiful mess, and with a flick of a cursor, you can watch it all spin around in great circular depth--as though your computer was a portal to a physical world far beyond the borders of your screen.

We’re in the early stages of exploring digital experiences made possible by HTML5. On the edge of this exploration is designer Kim, whose new project gives the technology’s capabilities a workout. Form Follows Function is a series of 20 interactive experiences (as of January 16th, only 13 of which are available) that are as addictive as they are illuminating.

"Web interaction was developed with Adobe Flash for the last 12 years, but now many people are using HTML5 because of how it works with tablet and mobile devices," Kim says. "I think the technology (whether Flash or HTML5) is not so important, though. Technology always changes so fast; the important thing is design and interaction." Read more...