Hi everyone–here are this week’s links.  I’m going to venture into new territory probably starting next week by offering up occasional book and movie reviews, but only if I feel that there’s some aspect of any given film or book that pertains to the study of media or design.  That said, enjoy!

• Thing-A-Day 2008
  I’m all for any activity that boosts creativity, no matter what the end result may be (well, perhaps there are some obvious exceptions, but let’s keep this positive).  That’s why I was pleased to find out about “Thing-A-Day,” wherein individuals are encouraged to create something every single day for the month of February and then document their efforts on a collaborative blog.  I won’t be participating this time around because of work and school obligations, but it’s a great idea nonetheless.
• Library of Congress photos on Flickr
  The Library of Congress recently started posting many of its archived photographs on Flickr, and Flickr users are encouraged to tag the photos to make them more searchable.  An excellent project that to me echoes the BBC’s decision that all of its productions should be freely available (though that project is stalled, or though it seems).
• Mapping data without context
  A new service called EveryBlock launched just a short while ago; its purpose is to display various types of data about your neighborhood so that you can have a better idea of what’s going on in your area.   Its minimalist style and understated color palette is engaging, at least to me, but good style does not good design make.  The problem, as Mark Schaver of the Louisville Courier-Journal points out, is that these data points are posted blindly with little context.  It’s raw data, plucked from the datasphere and plopped on a map.  Restaurant reviews sit next to crime reports, with no way to distinguish between any given “event” without clicking on each individual dot on the map.  I don’t know about you, but I’m far less interested in a building code violation than I am in whether or not it’s safe to live in this building.  EveryBlock is going to have to sharpen its focus to draw traffic in; otherwise, it’s going to just blend in amongst all the other data mapping sites that are out there.
• The Design Museum’s Design Library
  An excellent resource–Britain’s Design Museum has posted an online library of various designers and the objects that they are famous for.  Quite stunning to browse through when you need a little inspiration.

Believe it or not, there’s only one more full week of January left in 2008.  So here are four items from the Internet that caught my eye this week.

• You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice
  The Internet has done nothing but grow and grow and grow some more ever since it was established in 1993 or so, so it’s hardly surprising that it isn’t terribly difficult to find examples of designs being blatantly ripped off online.  This blog keeps track of online examples as well as examples of t-shirts, products and other items that have been more-or-less copied.  The takeaway here is simple–let good design inspire you, not do the work for you.
• Do-it-yourself design critique stickers
  The O’Reilly MAKE: blog recently published a sheet of do-it-yourself design “critique” stickers that eagle-eyed designers can print, cut out and slap on defective designs.  It’s not exactly the kindest thing out there, no, but sometimes design is truly bad and needs to be identified as such–and I don’t think readers of this blog are going to disagree with me!
• I am not a paper cup
  I really like it when designers of objects don’t just take cues from everyday items when they create new merchandise–it can be a lot of fun when you see a totally mundane-looking object that is somehow transformed into something new and novel.  This is one such item–a very standard paper coffee cup with lid turned into a reusable porcelain coffee carrier with a rubbery silicone lid.  Brilliant, if you ask me.
• Communication, shock value and the grotesque
  Well-known television chef Jamie Oliver recently released a program on the UK’s Channel 4 entitled “Eat to Save Your Life.”  In the show, he observes the autopsy of a 25-stone (that’s 350 pounds) man who “literally ate himself to death”–though I’m not quite sure what that means; I presume he died of congestive heart failure or something similar.  Jamie urges viewers “not to turn away because the fascinating insight into what our diets are doing to our insides could inspire you to change your eating habits in a positive way.”  I wonder, though, if the grotesque really can have such positive effects, or if it tends to repulse more viewers than it might inspire.

My regularly scheduled Four for Friday posts will resume next week; in the meantime, here’s something that I’ve been thinking about regarding the stickiness of what I like to call “throwaway” mediums.

Anyone who’s ever placed an order for anything even slightly more complex than a plain cup of coffee at Starbucks knows what an ordeal it can be to spit out a mouthful of incongruous words, especially if the person at the register doesn’t hear what you say. Woe unto the person whose regular order is a grande extra-hot half-caf nonfat sugar-free hazelnut latte. That’s a lot of words to get wrong, especially with one person repeating it to another, so it serves as nothing but a barrier to prevent someone from ordering a healthy beverage that isn’t laden with sugar and fat.

Starbucks has done something brilliant to remedy this problem by labeling sugar-free, nonfat beverages as “skinny.” This is a great idea, but the ways in which they are raising awareness of it are less than successful. Continue Reading »

Happy 2008 to all of you!  I’m back from a visit to North Carolina for Christmas to see my friends and family, and I’m ready to get right back into the swing of things, so here are a number of links that I found interesting from this, and the past several, weeks.

• Movable Type goes open source
  There have been mixed reactions to Six Apart’s announcement that the popular blogging software Movable Type would be going open source; many people expressed anger that the timing seemed “off,” while others seemed delighted.  If you already run a blog, you’ve probably pretty much settled on whatever platform it is that you use now, so what does it really mean?  Not much, really, aside from the fact that this is a positive precedent for the open source movement.  Six Apart is a relatively big gorilla when it comes to blogging and software to run it, and other companies would do well to follow their lead.
• Google introduces the “knol”
  Google announced a while ago that they were planning to introduce something that they called “knols,” which allegedly stands for a “unit of knowledge.”  Basically, Google is, at the moment, soliciting experts to write articles on various topics that will appear somewhere on relevant search result pages; eventually the expectation is that anyone will be welcome to write their own competing knols.  Some argue that Google is going too far and stepping on the toes of sites like Wikipedia.  I say that isn’t so, primarily because anyone who relies on a single source when doing research is leaving themselves academically vulnerable, especially when using sites like Wikipedia that try to (but do not always successfully) remain “neutral” and are therefore subject to changes that can often be very abrupt and startling.  It’s important to keep in mind that, as Robert McHenry (former editor of the Encyclopædia Brittanica) points out, using Wikipedia–and, by extension, many other online sources–is akin to using a public restroom.  “It may be obviously dirty, so that [a user] knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that [the user] may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.”
• What are we “teaching” photography students?
  An interesting essay from Black Star Rising on what, exactly, we’re teaching students who are taking photography courses.  Are we educating away whatever creativity they may have?  As someone who took three years of university-level courses on photography, I was blessed to learn from a very talented professor who left many of our assignments open-ended so that we could explore the medium largely on our own and seek out advice when we needed it–but according to the author of this post, I shouldn’t have learned at all and that my time would’ve been better spent writing essays.  I tend to disagree with the author, who seems to land squarely in the “editorial photography is the true photography” camp; he would be well served to read Susan Sontag’s On Photography, if he hasn’t already.
• The year in bad advertising
  Consumerist has compiled a short list of what it deems some of the worst advertising concepts of 2007, including the creepy CGI Orville Reddenbacher stand-in and Snickers’ stupid commercials of straight guys going berserk after they “accidentally” kiss each other.