Twenty-Four in Philly

And back to the airport, cheesesteak in hand.

  11/20/2009

  Subtlety is underrated.

• This is important.
  
  
• NYC design-darlings Rich, Brilliant, Willing redesign their website. The best feature happens when you let it sit for a while and come back to it.
  
  
• Haters gonna hate.
  
  
• The Lego Remote Control cartoon was on Wired's Gadget Lab blog this summer, and I had no idea.
  
  
• DIY MUJI. (What would Naoto say?)
  
  
• I saw the Dirty Projectors play last week. They were great. The opener, tUnE-yArDs, was also very impressive. You should watch her perform.
  
  
• It looks like I'm starting to firmly plant my other foot in the world of interaction design: I'll be helping to run a workshop at the upcoming MIT Media Lab's TEI conference and I'll be attending Interaction10, the interaction design communities' conference.
  
  
• I had the opportunity to attend the openeing reception for the new Konstatin Grcic exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago this week. Not only is this an important exhibition for Chicago's image in the international design community, but it's also a successful museum show on design because it reveals Grcic's process and it allows people to touch (!) and sit on (!!) dozens of his chair designs. Those simple— but important— exhibition details inspired me to think about what makes design work (and sometimes fail) in a museum setting. A blog post is forthcoming.

  11/20/2009

  Autumn began in London

Life is good with the experimental jetset.

  11/14/2009

  Summer ended in London

  11/08/2009

  Snow Leotard

• THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THE FEW OF US WILLING TO GET OUR HANDS DIRTY.
  
  
• "Until recently, treating design as an intellectual medium, rather than a practical one, was rare in Europe and rarer still in the United States, where designers are more deeply rooted in the “build a better world” optimism of 20th-century modernism than in other countries."
  

  - NYT article on the Boyms (whose work I don't particularly care for, but I find this quote compelling)

• The Drunkard's Progress
  
  
• 1974, in the sunshine.
  
  
• In B flat. Best use of YouTube since Breakcore Kid. (Not really, but I wanted an excuse to link to Breakcore Kid again-- the best use of YouTube ever.)
  
  
• The Unlucky Motorist. Life can always get worse.

  11/02/2009

  Segway Hacks

Created for Core77.

Labels: sketchbook

  10/02/2009

  It's time to work on some new design projects.

With two similar designs to ones I've created popping up recently, I think it's time for me to put some new work out in the world:

Did Urban Outfitters rip me off? Or Suck UK? Or is this idea floating in conceptual zeitgeist?

The original exhibited earlier this year:



See 'Stimulation' in more detail at craightonberman.com.


A recent lamp by British designer Guy Brown:




Coil Lamp, created in 2008:



I emailed with Guy, and he was really nice about it all-- he had never seen Coil before. He had considered making his lamp the way I made mine, and actually I had considered his wire frame solution as well.

So, the take-a-way for me is two-fold:

1. I need to make more projects to stay a head of the design zeitgeist.
   
   
2. Even in the age of Google it's still basically impossible to search for conceptual ideas to see if they already exist. Ideas have no physical form, and are difficult to search for. Search engines are text driven, not image driven. Press & blog coverage is imperatively important.
   

  9/29/2009