How many silly inventions does it take to come up with a winner?

The 20th century in the US saw a burgeoning industrial design atmosphere. From automated dishwashers and automobiles to rockets and computers, our society was fundamentally changed by these lasting engineering designs.

But quite a few others were suggested that didn’t make the cut. Looking back now, they seem silly, even absurd. But they were much more in keeping with their time.

What will our future counterparts laugh at? Segways? “Smokeless” cigarettes? Swiffers? Will they seem as foolish as some of these?

Some of my favorites from the Life Magazine piece follow. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rosetta Project and the Long Now Foundation are building an archive of all documented human languages.

Founded in 2000 — or 02000, as they like to write, the project published their first edition Rosetta Disk in 2008.

The disk holds 1500 languages from around the world.

Made of double-sided micro-etched nickel, the disk is a visual archive, not a digital one. Not format-dependent; all one needs to read the disk is magnification. Like microfiche, but with much more density.

One side of the disk is a guide to the main archive on the reverse. It is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in 8 major languages:

Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.

The message is printed in concentric spirals, both maximizing the number of people who will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the disk, as well as implying how to use it – magnify to see more.

Read the rest of this entry »

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]

Kudos to Marjorie Amrom!

Last December the Philadelphia Streets Dept. ripped up the sidewalk corners in much of the Wash West/Society Hill area, one block at a time.

New signal boxes were erected and cast into the concrete, in anticipation of an (ongoing?) $12 million project to deploy digitized traffic signals throughout the city.

Because of a Federal DHS mandate to include future surveillance equipment along with the lighting equipment, the new signal boxes are huge, probably 3-4 times the size of the previous, pole-mounted ones.

As the Inquirer’s Inga Saffron points out with her usual acumen, these empty boxes look like huge brown refrigerators, and are an urban design nightmare in our neighborhoods of rowhouses.

On her blog she highlighted a few of the more egregiously placed metal monoliths, and noted that the flat sides were an empty slate almost begging for graffiti.

A prime example was this one, smack up against the historic house owned by Marjorie Amrom.

It appears that Amrom’s gone and had an artist paint a very attractive and colorful trompe l’oeil, or mini mural, all over the offending box.

Can we get the Mural Arts Program to commission a project to paint the rest?

UPDATE: Inga Saffron wrote another follow-up post, highlighting this box. She mentions that it might be “going a little too far” to paint all of the signal boxes like this. And a commenter points out that getting neighborhoods to agree on a design might “take as long as fixing the city budget.”

I still think it’s worth a try.

I previously mentioned the Philadelphia Sketch Club, founded in 1860 by some famous Philadelphia artists on Camac Avenue (that of the wooden cobblestones).

Don’t think I ever read the historical sign that is currently posted in the Avenue, though. These signs, erected by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission since 1946, are studies in idea condensation.

Way before Twitter, the designers for these signs did a pretty great job compressing history, philosophy, biography and more into signs that measure approximately 1ft x 2ft and hold less than 250 characters.

This one holds a gem of a sentence. One that deserves more publicity than it’s small alleyway allows.

Artists found that social interaction enhanced the creation and appreciation of art.

Still does. Still does. Still going strong.

More on LEGOs: Jan Vormann is a German artist who “patches” holes and decay in buildings with Lego bricks!

This makes for wonderfully interesting juxtapositions of the brightly colored plastic rectangles with the old, graying, non-uniform stones and cement of old structures.

Jan has created this artwork — which, in true German-language style, he calls “dispatchwork” — to several cities, including Tel Aviv, Israel, Bocchignano, Italy and Berlin, Germany.

The work has a very different feel in each of the locales, and all are intriguing.

In Berlin, most of the patchwork was done on bullet holes and destruction left-over from World War II. In Italy, near Rome, I imagine the decay was simply from age. In Israel, the artist was specifically invited to “repair” some old walls by the curators of Darom Gallery in Tel Aviv.

It would be fun to revisit the sites in 50 years and see the relative effects of time on the newer plastic vs. the old stone.

UPDATE: Where could we do this in Philly?

[Via Wired and Twittter]

“Weniger, aber besser.” 

If I had gone to school for design, no doubt I  would have come across this famous quote from Dieter Rams, one of the most influential industrial designers of modern society. Alas,  it has taken me this long to discover his wonderfully succinct description of what is also my own design philosphy: ”Less, but better.”

Dieter Rams, as head of design at Braun from the early 60’s into the 90’s, created many of the iconic products of that era, including the record player, radio, calculator and juicer designs we are all completely familiar with today.

Johnathan Ive, designer at Apple, is a big Dieter Rams fan, and it has been pointed out that many of Apple’s products, from their computers to iPods, draw from and are very similar to Rams’ Braun objects. The calculator in the iPhone is almost a replica of the his famous Braun calculator. Read the rest of this entry »

Supposedly unique in the USA, Camac Street between Walnut and Locust is paved with wooden cobblestones.

Single-lane Camac street is also known as “Avenue of the Artists”.  Historically it was home to many important artist clubs and organizations, such as the Philadelphia Sketch Club, started in 1860 and led by Thomas Eakins.

It is surmised that the street was paved with wood instead of the traditional stones or granite belgian blocks to help mute the sounds of the horses’ hooves as traffic passed by the artist gatherings.

These square blocks of wood were re-discovered in the late 1980’s during a street resurfacing project, and the city decided to repave this one section with wooden replicas of the originals.

The wooden blocks are currently being replaced, which needs to happen every several years, as they begin to disintegrate and rot. Wooden block streets are attractive, but not enitrely practical.

It should be pointed out, however, that asphalt also requires replacement or resurfacing relatively often.

Though there don’t seem to be other preserved or refurbished streets like this in this country, wooden cobblestones can be found in historical sites around the world, from Prague to Havana.

“Man has invaded space — not in airplanes which would fall to pieces with age before Earth’s near neighbors were visited, but with thoughts which travel faster and work more miracles even than the light of the sun.”

From a 1918 encylopedia of sorts, for children, this beautiful poster does a great job of illustrating the concept of the relative enormity of space. There is a lot of information here, presented in a very accessible design.

The spaceships themseles are whimsical but not entirely unlikely creations, amalgams of several different types of ships and planes, which seem to be leaping into space directly out of the ocean and into a map of our solar system.

The notes and captions around the sides of the drawing help paint the picture of the scale of this map (though using a now-common speed of around 120 mph — 2 miles per minute) with references to well-known historical happenings.

Still a useful teaching tool. Good design withstands the test of time.

Originally scanned in by Azrael Brown, much commented on here, and brought to my attention by John Nack.