I'm papa large/ Big shot on the east coast.


  • Steven Johnson illustrates "half serious products and predictions". He's also got an entire book of this stuff available for free on Google Books (What the World Needs Now: A Resource Book for Daydreamers, Frustrated Inventors, Cranks, Efficiency Experts, Utopians, Gadgeteers, Tinkerers, and Just About Anybody Else.). I love exploring and illustrating absurdities- I've got a sketchbook full of them.

  • In fact, my latest creative side project (do I really need another?!) is using cartoons and illustration in semi-ridiculous concept visualizations. I'll be posting them along with "Lunchbreath" over on Core77. In fact I just posted some illustrated "reportage" from NYC Design Week and the International Contemporary Furniture Fair today.

    ICFF/NYC Design Week 2009

  • Olivier Kugler's illustration work is really brilliant. Aesthetically, it’s gorgeous stuff—authentic, loose, details scattered here and there, linework without color/color without line work. But from a content standpoint it’s also interesting—he uses sketching as a method of ‘reportage’—he goes on location, talks to people, then captures them and their environment in a loose collection of drawings. The possibilities for crossovers into design-thinking are huge. This is the first time I've seen illustration and ethnography/observational research come so close to one another, and it's exciting...

  • "Twitter needs to be differentiated from what people write on Twitter. The fact that so many people now use Twitter as a public email system, or as a way to instant-message their friends in front of other people, is immaterial; Twitter is a note-taking technology, end of story. You take short-form notes with it, limited to 140 characters. "
    - from "In Defense of Twitter" on BLDG Blog

  • John Vanderslice w/ the Magik*Magik Orchestra performing "Too Much Time". This song is amazingly catchy, and the added drama of the strings really makes it epic. I truly believe there's nothing better than strings in rock songs.

  • Candy Chang in an urban-planner, graphic designer, and artist, and her website is full of really really great ideas and projects. I stumbled across her site through a NY Times article on her recent redesign of the NYC Street Vendor Guide, which she transformed into an gorgeous inforgraphic poster. Once in her site, though, I was entranced with project after project that engage the urban environment and really think about community and public space. Her diversity of skills and interests is really inspiring.


  5/22/2009


  Cold feet, stuff to do.

  • An abandoned Japanese island. Amazing. But why didn't Vice send a better photographer?

  • There's just something about this awkward table/light/chair/thing that I like. I'm not sure what it is, really. Read about it here.

  • I love the subtle concept of this wall clock. Brilliant.

  • I was reflecting the other day that Red House Painters' "Songs for a Blue Guitar" may be the only album I have consistently listened to for close to 9 years. Upon this reflection, I decided to Google the album and discovered this snippet from the Rolling Stone review: "Aptly, Wallace Stevens best evokes the impact of these songs in his 1937 poem "The Man With the Blue Guitar": 'The blue guitar/After long strumming on certain nights/Gives the touch of the senses, not of the hand/But the very senses as they touch/The wind-gloss.' Exactly."

  • This 16-step online sequencer is basically a mini-Tenori-On (or mini-Monome, if you will)-- it makes sequencing visually and physically understandable. As an aside, here's Fourtet using one for the first time, which he must have fully integrated into his live show, since he used at his Chicago set last week. It's so dead simple-- it really, really makes me want one.

  • Matt & Kim - Lessons Learned. I'm obsessed with this video. Is the song insanely catchy or insanely stupid? Is the video sublime genius or sublime stupidity? Did they really get naked in Times Square? did the cops really just let them go? And how about that ending? Either way, there must be something to it all, because I've watched it a dozen times.



  5/02/2009


  Coil Lamp, First Edition

Last Thursday I was selected to exhibit an updated version of Coil Lamp at Design Within Reach's annual "Chicago Design Now" exhibition. Originally created for the Deceptive Design design exhibition I helped organize last fall, the latest version of Coil has updated proportions and refined details that make it ready for purchase. So with that, I'm proud to announce that 'Coil Lamp' is now available from craightonberman.com:




  5/02/2009


  Twenty-Six Basslines



  4/21/2009


  class-A space/ classy space

  • I love a good trestle table. Thomas Alonso (of my personal favorite Okay Studio) has an especially notable trestle table design. While you're there, be sure to check out his other projects. I especially like the DNA edition of the 5 Degree trestle and the Clothestree.

  • One minute you're cruising down a sunny street in Park Slope, Brooklyn. You cross an intersection, and suddenly all hell breaks loose.

  • Steve Reich is amazing. Music for 18 Musicians is one of my all time favorite albums to get lost within. Today I was amazed by Clapping Music:
    "Clapping Music (1972) was Steve Reich's attempt to write a piece of music requiring nothing but the human body -- two performers that hand-clap. His first attempt at translating phase technique from recorded tape loop to live performance was his 1967 Piano Phase for two pianos... As one player keeps tempo with robotic precision, the other speeds up very slightly until the two parts line up again, but one sixteenth-note apart. The second player then resumes the previous tempo. This cycle of speeding up and then locking in continues throughout the piece; the cycle comes full circle three times, the second and third cycles using shorter versions of the initial figure. Although Reich's original intent was for Clapping Music to be a phase piece, he found that the idea of phasing was not appropriate for the simple ways in which to experiment with sound using the human body. Instead, he employed a shifting technique -- still cyclic, like phasing. Reich states that the piece is "to have one performer remain fixed, repeating the same basic pattern throughout, while the second moves abruptly, after a number of repeats, from unison to one beat ahead, and so on, until he is back in unison with the first performer." Clapping Music is intended for performance in a large space where the echoes and reverberations of the clapping create "a surrounding sensation of a series of variations of two different patterns with their downbeats coinciding."
    Watch it. Too conceptually obtuse? Don't get it? My friend Michael sent "Reich Meets Wonder"-- a much more funky and totally more visual version.

  • THIS FLYING LOTUS MUSIC VIDEO IS BATSHIT CRAZY AND AFTER 45 SECONDS IT GETS ABOUT AS NSFW AS YOU CAN GET WITH OUT BECOMING FULL-ON PR0N.

  • Junior Boys - Work. One of the hotter tracks off the new Junior Boys record. Ah, the cold & melancholic upbeat of an impending Spring season.

  • The Dark Side of Dubai - An epic article on the ugly underside of Dubai, which the global economic downturn is starting to reveal. A few excerpts:
    "He is currently working on the 67th floor of a shiny new tower, where he builds upwards, into the sky, into the heat. He doesn't know its name. In his four years here, he has never seen the Dubai of tourist-fame, except as he constructs it floor-by-floor"

    "Sheikh Maktoum built his showcase city in a place with no useable water. None. There is no surface water, very little acquifer, and among the lowest rainfall in the world. So Dubai drinks the sea. The Emirates' water is stripped of salt in vast desalination plants around the Gulf – making it the most expensive water on earth. It costs more than petrol to produce, and belches vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as it goes. It's the main reason why a resident of Dubai has the biggest average carbon footprint of any human being – more than double that of an American."

    "Sultan sits back. My arguments have clearly disturbed him; he says in a softer, conciliatory tone, almost pleading: "Listen. My mother used to go to the well and get a bucket of water every morning. On her wedding day, she was given an orange as a gift because she had never eaten one. Two of my brothers died when they were babies because the healthcare system hadn't developed yet. Don't judge us." He says it again, his eyes filled with intensity: "Don't judge us."


  4/10/2009


  Jai-Alai: Sport of the Future

Jai-Alai: Sport of the Future



  4/07/2009


  Reach the floor


Housewares Show Infotoons


  4/03/2009

 
                 XML feed | chicagobloggers | I power blogger.