My subjects are chosen for what they are and how I might paint them.

Karate, 2009

Track and Field, 2009

Lake Chambers, 2006

Twan Verdonck’s toys for the mentally-challenged are now part of MoMA’s permanent collection.

On the ethical design front: Brain Pickings has posted a collection of smart designs for the differently-abled. Bravo!

2. Betcha can’t stop with just one click

How long will you click on it?

Check out this award-winning Pringles ad. Probably the wittiest banner ad we’ve ever seen ((maybe the only one)).

3. Chinese Painting Villages

This is surreal.

“Chinese Painting Villages”, such as Dafen or Wushipu in Shenzhen, …employ about 10,000 artists and produce more than 60% of the world’s oil paintings.

Via.

4. Design History Lesson: Keyboard Layouts

Why are keyboards so poorly designed and yet so difficult to fix?

USAToday writes about the updated Escape and Delete keys on Lenovo laptops. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but there is actually quite a bit of baggage when it comes to keyboard layouts. An interesting lesson on how bad design prevails and why innovation can be so challenging.

[I]n New Jersey, Carla, a telephone associate for one of the top three HMO plans in the United States…is paid a salary as well as a monthly bonus based on the number of claims she can “retire” without payment. Without resorting to fraud, Carla is supposed to discourage false claims by making all claims harder to register, in general. That’s how Carla’s supervisor explained it to her when she asked, point-blank, if she was supposed to mislead customers. She feels bad about it, but Carla is now the principal breadwinner in her family, her husband having lost a lot of his contracting work to the stalled market for new homes. And, in the end, she is preventing fraud. How does Carla sleep at night, knowing that she has spent her day persuading people to pay for services for which they are actually covered? After seeing a commercial on TV, she switched from Ambien to Lunesta.

The book, or at least this part of it, will attempt to evalute the generation and interpretation of the circumstances that engender this kind of ethical dissonance. Rushkoff calls the generative worldview corporatism, a mindset in which we adopt a role more like that of a share-holder than that of a member of a society. Under this mindset and the resulting set of real-world circumstances, “it’s as if the world itself pushes us toward self-interested, short-term decisions,” and the “more decisions we make in this way, the more we contribute to the very conditions leading to this awfully sloped landscape. In a dehumanizing and self-denying cycle, we make too many choices that–all things being equal–we’d prefer not to make.”

Author Douglas Rushkoff

However:

[These choices] are the false choices of an artificial landscape–one in which our decision-making is as coerced as that of a person getting mugged. Only we’ve forgotten that our choices are being made under painstakingly manufactured duress. We think this is just the way things are. The price of doing business. Since when is life determined by that axiom?

Contrariwise, Rushkoff insists that “corporatism didn’t evolve naturally. The landscape on which we are living–the operating system on which we are now running our social software–was invented by people, sold to us as a better way of life, supported by myths, and ultimately allowed to develop into a self-sustaining reality. It is a map that has replaced the territory.”

If that’s right, then there is nothing less than a critical need for designers to help redesign the map. We’ve got to not only design things that “human-centered,” but that are centered around the kinds of humans we want to be.

The great Bill Moyers anticipated this discussion back in 1996, when he told us that “for all our frailties, despite the strange ways we make decisions and the bizarre means by which we have to raise money, despite our byzantine paths to creativity, we are free–you and I–to regard human beings as more than mere appetites and America as more than an economic machine.”

That sentiment should be writ large in each of our design playbooks.

Neat. (Images via.)

If I only had a nickel for every time someone asked me what a person can do with Twitter…

Well, here are two good examples:

Tim O’Reilly spoke recently about how he uses Twitter as a publisher to build a community. Not to amplify his own status, but to support things and people that he wants to see more of in the world. “Create more value than you capture”, he says. It’s the same philosophy that made his media company successful and it continues to work for him on Twitter.

Not to be outdone, Amanda Palmer of the Dresdon Dolls used Twitter to make $19,000 in 10 hours using auctions and by organizing impromptu donation-funded gigs.

2. Design Tips for Crowdsourcing Applications

There’s a nice piece from Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab about how the UK’s Guardian newspaper used crowdsourcing to quickly catch up to a rival newspaper’s scoop, creating a website where readers helped filter through thousands of pages of government expense reports in a matter of hours.

A few quick UI tips I gathered from the article:

1. Keep the choices limited. The Guardian didn’t ask people to write a report or notes for the pages, just click one of four buttons to rate it. This made it accessible to more people and helped them move through many pages quickly.
2. Make it a video game. Graphing progress and posting it on leaderboards helped motivate readers with a sense of accomplishment and competition. (similar to my.barackobama.com)
3. Pretty bird. Analytics showed people looked through more pages when they were accompanied by a picture of the person in the report. In their words, it turned a boring .pdf into a detective story.

3. FTC to Patrol Blog Swag

Aside from the occasional lawsuit, product reviews on blogs are unregulated. The Federal Trade Commission plans to change that soon.

It seems many companies gift bloggers with money or free product for a review and many writers do not disclose this in their articles. Although the companies don’t tell the bloggers what to write, it’s certainly a conflict of interest. So marketers and bloggers beware: if you don’t follow ethical practices, the FTC may come knocking.

4. How do you design a package for a product that (technically) doesn’t exist?

The Book Design Review asks an interesting question: who makes those fake book covers for books that aren’t released yet?

Danger Mouse had a similar problem with his new album Dark Night of the Soul, when his record label refused to release it due to contract disputes. Unable to legally sell his music, instead he sold an “album” containing a custom-printed blank CD-R , encouraging his fans to download a leaked copy and burn it themselves.

It’s an interesting design type to consider in this age of digital downloads. Without a physical package, what does the “cover” or “box” look like for a bunch of bits? Maybe that’s an emerging design specialization….

If our response to our environmental debts is anything like our response to the current recession, we can be reasonably sure not only that the market will seek to correct it, but also that the response will come late, painfully, and with warnings that are only obvious in retrospect. Instead of waiting, perhaps we should fix our definitions of the economy, our definitions of growth, and most importantly our definitions of happiness today. Wouldn’t you rather be making beautiful things of lasting value anyway?

Indeed. Blinn’s article is full of similar sentiments, many of which I recognized from the DLB playbook. (He actually says at one point: “Make less. Make it better.”)

I probably wouldn’t have posted about this article in particular though, except for the fact that DLB is currently in the process of hiring someone to help us develop our business. We’re doing some interviews this week, and this lovely sentiment caught my eye: “Don’t let people who aren’t involved in building your company get involved in selling it.“

I think that ought to be an iron law for every little design firm.

Image from Boing Boing Gadgets

Jas Bhachu created a font generator by affixing different shaped rubber stamps to each cell of a Rubik’s cube. It’s probably a bit slow to write with, but the resulting letterforms are unique.

Also, check out this awesome packaging. Bravo!

Via.

Rubikcubism

Rubik Kubrick (what a great title!) by Space Invader

French artist Space Invader has a series of art that uses Rubick’s cubes as pixels.

In Rubikcubism, he recreates (in)famous images: everything from A Clockwork Orange (seen above) to 9/11 and the painting Origin of the World.

Via.

Bonus:

10 more Rubik’s cube-inspired designs.

This is no doubt a triumph for the company and even for the role of technology in democracy more broadly. Jon Williams, the BBC world news editor, is perhaps sentimental but certainly not entirely wrong in asserting that "the days when regimes can control the flow of information are over."

Photo from the recent Tehran protests, posted by Flickr user .faramarz.

Many of us also know by now that Twitter received a call from someone at the US State Department last Monday, asking them to delay scheduled maintenance of its global network. This maintenance would have cut off service to Iranians using Twitter to broadcast the moment-to-moment happenings at the protests to the world.

The official position of the State Department was given by P.J. Crowley, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs: “This is completely consistent with our national policy. We are proponents of freedom of expression. Information should be used as a way to promote freedom of expression.”

The role of convenience in US policy with regard to promoting freedom of information is not the point here. That point is either facile or wildly contentious, and I’m not interested in finding out which.

Rather, the point — and I think this is critically important for those of us who contribute to Twitter — is that the service has now set a precedent of conceding to the US government. Unlike (e.g.) Google, Twitter has shown willingness (however well-motivated) to respond to "soft" government intervention.

That fact should give us pause in considering our future relationship of Twitter, especially as the service grows and takes on now-unexpected roles in our Internet lives.