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I want this. And I want a jetpack too. But mostly I want to know if the Autonobile, by design studio Mike and Maaike, is actually make-able, if it can be made to be safe and affordable. And if they can send me one as payment for posting it on this here inspiration feed.

Found here.

So it’s obvious that designers (and that’s design with a big D, the kind that includes strategy, words, idea-making, and need finding) influence behavior. That’s the job. Some call it User-Centered Design. Here’s an interesting piece about it from the folks at frog design. And here’s a little taste:

the role of design is not just ease of use but invisibility. In other words, the design should fit so well with user needs and expectations that it “dissolves into behavior.” The user is unaware of the choices the designer has made. In fact, the user should be unaware of the existence of the designer at all.

I know, it’s a little dry. But good stuff, nonetheless.

Here’s the link. And here’s a snippet:

Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers,and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But forthe first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, non-governmental organizations, and companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

Right?

If you’re looking for awesome representation, and to be counted among the awesomest of the awesomest, you might wanna check out the new creative agency, The Loud Cloud. Good browsing here too.

5D Conference : AREA/CODE - Kevin Slavin.

Harvard Business has this list strategy tips, titled Twitter’s Ten Rules for Radical Innovators. It makes sense that a mainstream rag would be focusing these ideas around Twitter, since Twitter owns the media right now. But there’s a lot of us out here who think Twitter’s already old news and will be gone (or drastically different) in the next couple years. So I’m sort of chafing at the focus of these ideas around Twitter because I believe that human-centric strategy and communication (which is really what these tips are) has always been the preferred approach. So yeah, it’s a good and obvious list and, happily, way tidier than anything I might have written.

1. Ideals beat strategies. What infuriates people most about Twitter is that it seems to have no plan, scheme, or angle. “Hey, Twitter” say the pundits: “don’t you know the business of business is to profit, by any means necessary?”

They’re as wrong as Dubya was about Iraq. The business of business is to create value — and that’s why Twitter’s not playing the tired, old game of value extraction. It is trying, instead, to create a more authentic kind of value — and to do that, you need ideals. Twitter pursues its ideals — democracy, peace, equity — with the quiet intensity of a true revolutionary.

2. Open beats closed. Anyone can use Twitter, make friends with anyone else on Twitter, and read anyone else’s Tweets, unless they’re locked. Here’s Oprah, for example. Openness is important because it unlocks 21st Century economics — the new economics of interdependence.

What are the new economies that Twitter unlocks? See the next three points.

3. Connection beats transaction. In the 20th Century, what was viral was mostly the flu. Today, Twitter is the master of viral economies. I got this awesome link from you got it from he got it from them. In the 21st Century, virality can make many different kinds of value activities significantly more efficient and productive. Today, viral economies pass links and messages from person to person. What will they pass tomorrow — cars, jobs, houses?

4. Simplicity beats complexity. Twitter has also mastered what I call economies of pain. Twitter’s bozo-proof: even Ashton Kutcher can use it. Apple, Google, now Twitter: all know that extreme simplicity is economically powerful because without it, network members never connect in the first place.

5. Neighborhoods beat networks. Twitter’s network effects don’t feel much like standard ones. I can subscribe to your feed, yet you don’t have to subscribe to mine — times millions. What’s going on here? Twitter realizes neighborhood effects, not just network effects: complex sets of intersecting, overlapping, mutually reinforcing network effects. Oprah’s followers are a neighborhood, and so are Ashton’s. You can benefit from joining many of these neighborhoods — not just one larger network.

6. Circuits beat channels. Twitter isn’t building a new media channel. It’s turning yesterday’s channel into a circuit. Oprah doesn’t broadcast to you: rather, the innovation is that you can talk to her, you can talk to your friends about her, she can talk to all of you, and anyone can talk to everyone. Twitter has dropped a neutron bomb of real-time feedback into the heart of media: yesterday’s inert, rigid channel becomes a flexible, ever-shifting, reconfigurable set of circuits instead. Efficiency is gained — and monopoly is vaporized — as demand coalesces around supply, and vice versa.

7. Laziness beats business. Twitter hasn’t rushed to cram a “business model” down peoples’ throats. Instead of back-slapping each other after cutting deals, the Twitter guys are lazy. Why? They’re waiting to play, experiment, see what offers utility, creates value, and makes people truly better off. Business is too busy, most of the time, to care about any of that. Laziness says: “business models happen.”

8. Public beats private. Tweets are, by default, public. Not only can you message Oprah — but your messages to Oprah are public. Why is that important? Imagine, for a second, if banks had been run by Tweet instead of by executive suite: would Wall Street have been able to loot its depositors silly? Nope. Authentic value doesn’t hide in the shadows.

9. Messy beats clean. Hashtags and @s, Time notes, weren’t invented by Twitter - they were the result of people playing with Twitter. Twitter is messy — people can use it in uncontrolled ways — and that messiness means Twitter has better ideas faster than, for example, Facebook.

10. Good beats evil. To create a better kind of value, you’ve got to strive to be better. Authentic value doesn’t flow from evil — it flows from good. What’s evil about media? Saturation bomb ads, of course. And Twitter neither advertises nor accepts orthodox ads. Twitter, ultimately, is trying to conceive a better kind of advertising — and it can never do so if its already made a deal with the devil.

And there’s probably more. Right?

So TweetBuzzer, our little web app that tracks brand mentions on twitter is working properly again. Here’s what happened: We started by tracking 200 brands. But as you people started using it (we love that, btw) the number of brands we were tracking grew ridiculously fast, which slowed the whole application down and reduced the accuracy of the brand buzz count. But we’ve got it fixed now, and we’re tracking the buzz around almost 1000 brand names on twitter. Booyah! Enjoy and tell your friends.

Wow. This is mind-blowing.
The Teen and Transgender Comparative Study pairs photos of girls 12-14 with male-to-female transsexuals. It chronicles two people at the same stage in life—blossoming into womanhood—but through drastically different paths. Again: whoa.

thanks keith!

Chris Anderson’s got a great piece on Wired.com that actually adds research and deep thought to that ramble I posted a few weeks ago about small being better than big. I thought I was on to something. Here’s a taste:

What we have discovered over the past nine months are growing diseconomies of scale. Bigger firms are harder to run on cash flow alone, so they need more debt (oops!). Bigger companies have to place bigger bets but have less and less control over distribution and competition in an increasingly diverse marketplace. Those bets get riskier and the payoffs lower. And as Wall Street firms are learning, bigger companies are going to get more regulated, limiting their flexibility. The stars of finance are fleeing for smaller firms; it’s the only place they can imagine getting anything interesting done.

As venture capitalist Paul Graham put it, “It turns out the rule ‘large and disciplined organizations win’ needs to have a qualification appended: ‘at games that change slowly.’ No one knew till change reached a sufficient speed.”

The result is that the next new economy, the one rising from the ashes of this latest meltdown, will favor the small.

For you entrepreneurs out there, this got to be encouraging, right? It is for me.

So this is a poorly executed idea that points to all kinds of hypocrisy—since it’s an ad for Microsoft and all—but it’s trying to say something that lots of us have been saying for a while now: advertising doesn’t work if it’s not a real conversation. And also, advertising just kinda sucks, plain and simple.

Smart History may be the first well-designed and surprisingly usable straight-up educational site that I’ve seen. From the site:

We are dissatisfied with the large expensive art history textbook. We find that they are difficult for many students, contain too many images, and just are not particularly engaging. In addition, we find the web resources developed by publishers to be woefully uncreative.

Nice.

Quimby The Mouse

Another super creepy, quite beautiful, little story from the always amazing Chris Ware.

I’m loving the you tube music mashups lately. Here’s a collaborative one called in B flat, made by Science for Girls. It can be played in any sequence, and with all, some, or none. You’ll see what I mean.

Junior Jacquet makes amazing sculpture out of cardboard. And if that’s his thing, then it stands to reason that at some point he’s gotta make stuff out of toilet paper rolls. Check out more here.

Whoa! Just watch.

Seems like someone, somewhere, is always having that old (and super annoying) conversation about the meaning of design. I had it again a few nights ago. In this particular conversation, I was arguing that design is simply the process of creating stuff that works. The other person in the conversation was bugged by my insistence on using an industry word—my industry word—to describe the making of the first formalized occurrence of public education system. It ignored other frames of reference, she said. It came from only one point of view, she said. She was right. I kept trying to bring the definition of design out of my industry and into the bigger world. I even offered up other words: creation! making! building! Yay and sound the trumpets!

Problem is, that’s not what design is to most people. To people outside our industry design is not the solution to just about every problem. It’s media specific. It’s web content, strategy, and design. It’s communication strategy and brand design. It’s print and motion pieces.

Now, we’d argue that design is a way of using creativity to achieve a certain kind of meaning. We’d shout that it’s a way of making things that work or a way of making things work better. And I’d argue that we’d be right. But it’s also a way for us creative types to make ourselves and each other feel like we’re doing something big and important in the world. It’s a way for us to scream and whine and scratch our way into the global dialogue. It’s a circle jerk of enormous proportions.

We want so bad to be released from the groups we’ve put ourselves in that we’ve become determined to change the definition of the thing that has defined us for so long. I mean really: if someone’s going to change the definition of design, shouldn’t it be us?

But do you really want to change the definition of what you do? Aren’t you proud of the things you’ve made? The web pieces and the print pieces and the brand strategies and the motion pieces and other stuff? Aren’t you tired of shouting to the world how important your creativity is to it? How about we just continue to make cool stuff that works, or that makes people happy, or that changes someone’s mind? And how about we stop shouting, and let the world describe to itself what it is we do? Sure seems like more fun.

So usually, when our book, Written on the City, gets good reviews, I don’t post ‘em. It’s not that I’m not super damn proud of the piece. I am. It just feels weird to talk about it. But this weekend, my father, who taught art at San Quentin prison for a while, got a two letters from an inmate friend who’s been on death row for 22 years. The letters thanked my dad for sending our book. I’ve transcribed the letters below and you can see them here and here.

Letter one:

Dear Richard,

Thank you so much for the copy of Josh’s book. I received it today. Absolutely Brilliant! He has done some fine work. Very thought-provoking. It’s…saying everything. The media is both primitive and profound—bold and declarative. It’s so fucking real! It’s important.

My deepest thanks, Richard! Please convey my congrats to Josh! For truly impactful sharing. He’s revealed the high art of the street howl. Fucking brilliant. He absolutely gets “it” and he has given “it” optimal exhibition.

Really busy tonight, so I’ll keep it short. I’ll write again soon.

Best in love, always,
Guy

Letter two sent the following day, presumably after he’d had more time to get into it:

Dear Richard,

Josh’s book is HUGE and important art. Amazing. This is one of the most profound encounters with art that I’ve ever had. Beyond…Awesome!

Where did he obtain such keen insight into the human (yearning) soul?! He must have been raised by hippies or wolves or actual human beings or something! ; ) Josh truly gets it. He has crossed the Jordan in artistic exploration. “Be strong and courageous for you shall give this people possession of the land which I swore to their fathers to give them” (Joshua 1:6)

You have to be bursting with pride and admiration. Great work, this book! Thanks again for sending it to me, Richard!

Know I’m well and I’ll be in touch soon.

Best always,
Guy

Of course, lotsa people made this book what it is. Axel of course. And Dana Steffe, who’s now at the web studio, Cuban Council–and Jonny Waldman, who now lives on a boat. And a ton of other people. Thanks again, guys. You touched someone’s heart with your work.