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05.15.13: Rob Walker
Finding The StoryEmily Spivack's exhibition of unexpectedly interesting stories from eBay.
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04.17.13: John Thackara
Big, Hairy, and AgileThe UK government’s digital services platform, gov.uk, has won the Design of the Year award.
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03.07.13: Alexandra Lange
After the Museum: The TumblrTo create metamuseum.tumblr.com, a multi-museum, multi-curator Tumblr @MADMuseum, I saw it as a kind of curatorial game: Show Me What You’ve Got.
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01.18.13: Rob Walker
What Are You Looking At?The maps of the future will tell you what to look at. Sometimes, you should look elsewhere.
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10.26.12: Rob Walker
System As PhotographerSystem as photographer, and photographer as system.
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09.17.12: Rob Walker
Card TricksThe digital doesn't annihilate the analog, and business card creativity proves it.
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06.27.12: Rob Walker
Observational Instruments, ObservedPeeping at the Venue project's delightful gear, and Google's Seussian Trekker
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06.09.12: Alexandra Lange
Introducing Strelka PressOn Strelka Press, a new "digital first" publisher of longform architecture and design criticism.
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06.07.12: Rick Poynor
On My Shelf: A History of the MachineErik Nitsche’s New Illustrated Library of Science and Invention is a landmark of modern, low-cost, mass-market, educational book design.
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06.01.12: Rob Walker
The Infrastructure of the CloudOn the material structures we depend on to deliver us the immaterial digital world.
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04.09.12: Rob Walker
Where We WorkThe computer-screen desktop, considered as a category of work space.
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03.26.12: Michael Erard
The Elements – Molecules, Atoms and Quarks – of StyleThe cipher shared by great poets and the best brand namers is essentially that the littlest things mean the most.
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03.10.12: Alexandra Lange
City of Shoes: Is Urbanism Scalable?Can Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh scale his online shoe business into a city?
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02.26.12: Rick Poynor
John McHale and the Expendable IkonArtist, graphic designer, information theorist, architectural critic, sociologist, futurist: it’s time to rediscover John McHale.
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02.13.12: Alexandra Lange
Round Thermostats and Crystal Lanterns, RevisitedOld designs, new tricks: updates on lawsuits filed against the new Nest thermometer, and on behalf of midcentury masterpiece Manufacturers Hanover.
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01.30.12: Owen Edwards
Designers Leap, Users LagTrying to meet the challenges designers and engineers set for us is pretty much hopeless, though we can have a lot of fun trying.
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01.25.12: John Thackara
Virtual Boring AgentThe Virtual Boarding Agent Orly Airport in Paris. It's spooky, clever and very well executed — and most people seem to ignore it after a first casual glance.
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01.09.12: John Thackara
A Reading List for Mr. MontiWhen the new Italian Prime Minister, Mr. Mario Monti, gave his acceptance speech to the Italian Senate before Christmas, he used the word "growth" 28 times and the word "energy" — well, zero times.
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11.23.11: Michael Erard
What I Didn’t Write About When I Wrote About Quitting FacebookThe author writes about the genre you could call the Social Media Exile essay.
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11.05.11: John Thackara
Turn-Key Food HivesThere's almost no contact between the health apps crowd and the food system crowd.
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10.27.11: Owen Edwards
A Demanding Man: Steve JobsSteve Jobs was more like a great architect than a corporate CEO. Yet, there are those who ask, "Isn't the ultimate measure of a human being the way they treat other people?" In the case of Steve Jobs, this requires some reflection.
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09.01.11: Rick Poynor
Chris Foss and the Technological SublimeIs cult science fiction artist Chris Foss’s work just highly effective illustration, or can it be seen as a visionary form of art?
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06.29.11: John Thackara
Geeked-out GardeningA “computer that runs your garden” also known as an Automated Garden Facility (AGF), also known as Garduino.
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06.08.11: Rob Walker
Dedigitization“Digital goods” are increasingly seen as having real value. Increasingly, though, things from the digital world are crossing over into physical manifestations that can be bought and sold.
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05.26.11: Rick Poynor
A Dream World Made by MachinesAdam Curtis’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is a complex, demanding, audacious piece of television.
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02.22.11: Alexandra Lange
ISO The Digital Sidewalk CriticWhy is it so hard to say, "I hate my iPad"?
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02.01.11: John Thackara
If It's Not the Destination and It's Not the Journey...A team at Rutgers University, uses ultrasonic sensors, GPS receivers and cellular networks to find empty parking spaces. While technically impressive, this is an absurdly over-complicated answer to the wrong question.
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01.10.11: Alexandra Lange
Is No the Answer?Bag bans, yes. But why is no plastic the answer?
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01.09.11: Rob Walker
Ghosts in the MachineEveryday we are busy producing fresh masses of life-affirming digital stuff. What happens to this “stuff” when we die?
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12.13.10: Carl Schoonover
Portraits of the MindThe book, Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century (Abrams) documents this overlooked dimension over two millennia of obsession with the brain.
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12.01.10: John Thackara
Jellyfish FarmScientists warn that most natural seafood could disappear by 2048.
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11.29.10: John Thackara
In the Air of MadridOur world is awash in eco information, but starved of meaning.
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11.05.10: Rick Poynor
An App for the Self-Replacing BookBritish artist Tom Phillips’A Humument, must be one of the most successful artist’s books ever published. Now, in an entirely logical development, comes The Humument app for the iPad.
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10.25.10: John Thackara
From Easter Island to Three Mile IslandYou don't need to know how a combustion engine works to drive your car to work. Why should you need to know anything about the programming behind the pixels just to get around the web?
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07.16.10: Rob Walker
The Song DecodersPandora, is convinced it can guide you, to music that you like. The premise is that your favorite songs can be stripped to parts and reverse-engineered.
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04.21.09: Steven Heller
Father of Shrek, Grandfather of TweetWilliam Steig was the father of vanity license plate abbreviations and the grandfather of the Instant Messenger, SMS, iChat, and Twitter shorthand.
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04.09.09: Jessica Helfand
What's The Story?And what becomes of all those dead tweets, anyway — all those long-expired, evaporated updates?
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04.06.09: Mark Lamster
Wiretapped!Would you believe it's those shifty Canucks, and not the spooks at the NSA, who have the Lamster phonelines tapped? Outrageous but true.
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03.03.09: Gabrielle Esperdy
Less Is More Again — A ManifestoWe have amazing electronic tools at our disposal; culture has modernized at staggering, computer processed speeds. But the tools are abused and cultural change is stupefying. Things are over-designed because new tools must be exploited; here, design says “look what I can do!”
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01.28.09: Rob Walker
Dumb and Dumber 2.0American consumers have long shown an “exceptional willingness” to buy, for instance, technology products before their utility is clear.
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10.15.08: Dmitri Siegel
Design by NumbersDmitri Siegel discusses Stephen Baker's new book The Numerati and how data-mining and personalized content may impact design.
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05.30.08: Jessica Helfand
Reflections on The Ephemeral World, Part One: InkAn elegy to the makeready — those sheets of paper, re-fed into a press to get the ink balances up to speed, leaving a series of often random, palimpsest-like, multiple impressions on a single surface — in the digital age.
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03.28.08: Matthew Peterson
The Cuckoo Bird and the KeyboardDesigners are famously nauseated by novices' use of neutral quotes — or dumb quoes — in place of true quotes. Why do we care so much? Should we?
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02.07.08: Adrian Shaughnessy
Look and Feel / Nip and TuckIf clients are happy to refer to the output of graphic designers as
look and feel,where's the harm?
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01.11.08: Cheryl Towler Weese
Is Apple Soft on Crime?Here's the real question: could a climbing crime rate and the rise of the iPod be related? Has the iPod's design increased its likelihood of theft, and if so, what role could Apple's designers play in developing solutions?
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07.07.07: Richard Turley
Off the GridWhen you abandon most of the rules, how do you define a mistake? How to art direct a newspaper from the middle of the muddy Glastonbury music festival.
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04.25.07: Thomas de Monchaux
What If Apple Is Bad for Design?Every commentary on the ubiquity of the iPod, or on the divertingly near prospect of the Apple iPhone, seems to emphasize that what distinguishes Apple is something called "Design." Design, or a particular understanding of it, has been good for Apple. But is Apple good for design? What if the answer is no?
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04.08.07: Rob Walker
Back to Basics Egg & Muffin ToasterIn a recent issue of The M.I.T. Sloan Management Review, Michael Schrage, a business writer and an M.I.T. researcher, challenged what Bruce Greenwald, has said about the fate of all innovative technologies: “In the long run, everything is a toaster.”
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10.29.06: Michael Erard
The G WordGoogle has launched an effort to keep people from using their name as an all-purpose verb. Don't want to be evil? Then don't act as if you can win if you constrain the creative productivity of language.
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05.19.06: Michael Bierut
Eight-and-a-Half by ElevenAn installation of over 10,000 tiled pieces 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper redeems what has often been dismissed as a banal graphic format.
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03.12.06: Adrian Shaughnessy
Google and the Tyranny of Good DesignThe Google logo — that scrap of oddball typography — is perhaps the most famous piece of graphic design in the world today. In its own small way, it's a little beacon of insurrection, in a world where graphic designers have become the agents of conformity.
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07.08.05: Jessica Helfand
New Models for Design Efficiency: Introducing Ottoeniac Link http://www.newyorker.com/ http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/rbm/mauchly/jwm8.html http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0001NBMAS/ref=pd_sxp_f/002-9888674-0621611?v=glance&s=dvd
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06.22.05: Jessica Helfand
The Adventures of Cynic Boy and Design Mom in 3DBrainwashed I may be, but I distinctly noted an homage to Salvador Dalí — with perhaps a gentle nod to René Magritte — last night while sitting through Robert Rodriguez's ludicrous, yet oddly luscious new movie, The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3D.
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04.24.05: Rick Poynor
Eduardo Paolozzi, 20th Century Image-MakerIf a visual artist created more concentrated, exhilarating images of science, technology and the media realm during the mid-20th century than British artist Eduardo Paolozzi, then I would like to see them. Paolozzi, who died on 22 April aged 81, was first of all a sculptor, but the screenprints he produced in the 1960s rank as masterpieces of the medium.
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03.31.05: Momus
Paper Spends More Time With Its FamilyI remember the first time I noticed paper coming back as a sort of small, particularised, opaque digital ghost of itself. It was in 1996. There was much talk, at the time, of "the paperless office". People were beginning to refer to paper mail derisively as "snail mail". But computers, as if they felt sorry for the displaced and humiliated paper, began to find other roles for the stuff. More ornamental, decorative, playful roles...
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02.16.05: Jessica Helfand
The New Paper Chase: Cyberspace on The Auction BlockOn February 23, Christies in New York will auction more than 1,000 items dating as far back as the early 17th century, all of it tracing the history of cyberspace.
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11.30.03: Rob Walker
The Guts of a New MachineThe iPod, a digital music player, it weighing just 6.5 ounces and holding about 1,000 songs.
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11.30.03: Rob Walker
Digital Tools for Making Brilliant MistakesThe many options for digitally antiquing your 21st-century self-expression.
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