Industrial design with a political conscience.

Unplug Design’s mantra is:

Pull out the plug from the system and plug in the community.

(ASIDE: While I am a fan of electronics, hopefully soon we will realize Tesla’s wireless energy transfer on a large scale, and not rely on plugs to be “connected” any longer.)

The Dream Ball is packaging.

Specifically, a packaging design idea for famine relief supplies.

After the supplies are unpacked, the pre-perforated cardboard containers can be easily weaved into soccer balls!

Does not seem that tough to implement. And if a small percentage actually use the balls for recreation, it’s worth it, versus simply creating more packaging waste.

The Dream Ball will be showcased at the London Design Festival, occurring next week, as part of Designersblock.

Unplug Design (whose website is currently down for me) is based in Seoul, which becomes apparent when reading the English step-by-step instructions for Dream Ball construction.

I think the main point gets across, anyway.

Kudos.

[via Core77 and GreenMuze]

The room is only there for a year, July 2009-July 2010, and it was put in place by a crane.

Only 12 reservations are available each day, and only for a few moments as the clock ticks over to 10 am Paris time.

You don’t get to pick your menu, nor your accompanying beverages.

But Art Home Paris might well be the most awesome restaurant in the world right now.

Designed by minimalist architect Pascal Grasso, the temporary structure sits atop the Palais de Tokyo museum, with a sweeping view of downtown Paris and the Eiffel Tower.

The dining space is called Nomiya, after a restaurant in Japan, seats 12, and is encased in floor to ceiling glass on three sides.

Chef Gilles Stassart’s open kitchen is protected by a metal skein, perforated in patterns reminiscent of the Aurora Borealis.

Meticulously prepared and plated with an eye for spatial design, the food is reportedly excellent.

Most online reviews are for lunch, instead of dinner, though. Reservations for dinner are simply too hard to score.

Guests can see the whole kitchen, and are invited to ask questions of the chef while he is plating.

Tours of the space are offered daily, as are workshops with the culinary director.

A garden sits on the roof level slightly below the restaurant, providing herbs and vegetables for the kitchen.

Though English words, the name of the restaurant is cleverer than it first appears: in French it is pronounced “arôme” (aroma).

Beautiful & delicious.

[via Shola & dezeen]

Ben Fry is a master of computational information design — of visualizing data.

Humans are very visually oriented.

Organizing information into a well-designed schematic allows us to digest huge amounts of information, and can reveal otherwise unseen connections or structures.

This is a relatively new but exploding field. The New York Times has a great team who regularly create fantastic visualizations to accompany and elucidate articles, and even has a visualization lab, where users can access ready-made data sets and design and submit their own.

Here, Fry has created an interactive visualization of the changes between Charles Darwin’s six editions of On the Origin of the Species, his famous manifesto on the theory of evolution.

Starting from the first edition, changes are animated into existence, differentiated by color. By the end of the final edition, the resulting image looks almost like abstract art, in the vein of Mondrian.

But this is information design, and rolling over any part of the illegible multi-colored columns will highlight and enlarge the text, allowing the user to read through it, and view the actual changes.

The data is sourced from the Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, an impressive body of his publications, all digitized by Dr. John van Wyhe & team.

It’s an exciting time in data modeling, and in thought design.

[h/t @mkgold @clioweb @jcmeloni]

Seems I have to post the code below to claim my blog on Technorati? Hmmm.

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We shall see.

Meanwhile, check out this nicely designed single-serve coffee machine by WMF. I refuse to write a whole post about it on the basis that I’m sure it doesn’t make excellent coffee. But my coffee standards are very high, and it’s probably very handy.

[via Living with White, one of my new favorites]