These remind me of this brilliant poster for Stanley Kubrick's 2001.

1. Design for Disability

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.

Rubik's Cube Font Generator

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.

1. Business needs to get social

In a Forbes.com article from last month, Joshua-Michele Ross neatly summarizes why social technologies are reshaping business and why this change in communication demands ethical behavior from companies:

[T]he organizing metaphor for the social Web is relationship, and the building blocks are trust, reciprocity and authenticity...Businesses that ignore the call to be "social"--that is, to abide by a social contract with their constituents (customers, partners, resellers, employees)--run the risk of appearing pathological.

2. To survive a recession, spend more on design

When times are tough, companies often try to save money by cutting back on creating new products or marketing spending. However, according to a recent New Yorker article, companies that do this risk losing out to their competitors when the economy recovers.

a McKinsey study of the 1990-91 recession found that companies that remained market leaders or became serious challengers during the downturn had increased their acquisition, R. & D., and ad budgets, while companies at the bottom of the pile had reduced them.

3. More ethical MBA's?

The New York Times reports that ethics pledges and courses in business ethics are becoming more popular among today's MBA's:

In the post-Enron and post-Madoff era, the issue of ethics and corporate social responsibility has taken on greater urgency among students about to graduate. While this might easily be dismissed as a passing fancy — or simply a defensive reaction to the current business environment — business school professors say that is not the case. Rather, they say, they are seeing a generational shift away from viewing an M.B.A. as simply an on-ramp to the road to riches.

4. Design versus Data

The web offers the opportunity to collect instant feedback from users, meaning any site design or ad copy can be endlessly tested and tweaked to perfection. This is causing a great deal of tension between traditional designers, who create through experience and knowledge, and analytic-driven design teams who base decisions upon data.

While the two sides can work together, for the time being, data seems to be driving designers out. Google's lead visual designer quit last month, citing a culture of data that was "unfriendly to designers". The New York Times wrote last week that marketers anticipate similar battles between "creative types and wonks" as they rely upon more and more data to craft the perfect pitch.

Core 77 semi-recently posted an interesting, longish interview with Nathan Shedroff, chair of the MBA in Design Strategy program at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco and the author of several books on design. His most recent book is Design is the Problem, which is about "how the design industry can approach the world in a more sustainable way."

The interview itself is broad -- Shedroff expands on ten or so related concepts, each one germane in some way to his overall view of "sustainability." Whether or not you'll find his take on every topic persuasive in every detail, they are as a whole uniformly interesting and well-measured. No small task, considering the breadth of opinions he delivers: he discusses everything from the maligned value of business to the proliferation of NGOs to rampant occidental capitalism.

His points are also admirably rooted in practical reality. One of my favorite moments from the interview comes in response to the question, "What should business be doing to change the world for the better and what can designers do to encourage this to happen?" The quote below is his answer to the latter half of this question, abridged in several places where the lack of context rendered it unintelligible.

Designers need to start making changes ourselves, with or without a mandate, in the things we make. We can choose to not talk about materials substitutions or other improvements in impacts if our managers don't want to hear about them and, instead, we can highlight the improvements they do want to hear about -- like improvements in efficiency. We can learn to speak "their" language authoritatively and speak to risk mitigation and gains in owner's equity.

We need to talk about this to our peers, managers, and clients with an encouraging, quiet, and strong imperative that isn't sensationalized. If they turn-off at the mention of climate change, switch to cute, fluffy polar bears drowning. If they don't respond to that, explain that the market for their goods tanks when customers are out of work, afraid of the food they eat, or their homes are flooded.

Probably worth a read.
(Photo credit: Core 77)

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Consider the design of a package for a single piece of food. Is this practice wasteful or does this reduce waste?

Your moment of Zen for the day:

Clockwise from top-left: One banana, one plum, an ear of corn, a single egg.

Way back in November of last year, we noted that economic signs all pointed to a foreseeable future in which designers were going to have to start thinking about ways to do more with less. We noted that "[s]chematically, a more challenging climate for business tends to mean a more challenging climate for design." We also wondered if this was necessarily the case.

If the economic downturn was looming then, it's nearly in full bloom now, and a lot of fine pieces have since been written about its effect on design to come. I thought it might be nice today to do a brief review of the literature which has helped my clarify my answer to our earlier pondering (in the affirmative).

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