Jessica Hische has created Day-Ruining Invoice Notepads. The covers are letterpressed and the interiors are 2 color offset. They're bound with glue black binding tape. As Swiss Miss notes, a set of them will "certainly make any designer snortlaugh if you give it to them."
You can buy them here.
While the makers of the Wheelmate Steering Wheel Desk Tray (a desk that attaches to your steering wheel "for easy access to a writing and drink storage surface") warn consumers that they ought not use this product while driving, "for safety reasons," users of Amazon.com have lit up switchboard at the product's Amazon Customer Image Gallery and Customer Reviews section, registering their views on the fatuousness of this warning, and on the danger of this product design more generally. It's an unusually great moment for Amazon customer feedback working as a vehicle for social critique.
Oh, did I mention it's damn funny?
These worked great in the cockpit for our tanscontinental flights!, November 4, 2009My copilot and I both used these during our "daily grind" transcontinental flights from San Diego to Minneapolis. We had to modify them a bit to fit snug against the instrument panels (when we bought them we didn't realize the planes we fly don't have steering wheels!), but in the end it did the job. With our laptops firmly in place we were able to focus our attention on what really mattered, participating in raids with our WoW clan. During our last flight we were so immersed in trying to take down Eranikus that we overshot Minneapolis by a full hour and a half before some annoying flight attendant interrupted us, babbling something about "FAA and F16 fighters."
We'll definitely use this product again at our next gig, whatever and whenever that happens to be...
Highly recommended!
Amazing! Holds my sheet music perfectly while driving., May 7, 2009This has been a total lifesaver. It allows me to prop my sheet music against the wheel, allowing me to play the guitar with both hands while driving.
Makes a boring drive easier, November 19, 2009You wouldn't believe how much more interesting my commute is now that I have something to do other than just stare out the window! I'm using it right now to post this review and I never
1. Perhaps needless to say, I think having philosophers working in design is just obviously a good idea. But why?
2. What makes a good designer? For my money, most of what good designers do is look at the world (or a certain very small subset of it) and try to figure out how it ought to be. Think about that. An Eames chair is just a claim about how chairs ought to look, feel and so on. And they're so damn popular among designers because we all, in our considered professional opinions, agree with that claim. "Yup," we think, "the world is a better place because of that thing. The Eames boys really had something worth saying about how the world ought to be."
3. With practical philosophers, this is even more explicit. They are concerned entirely with figuring out what it means to claim that the world ought to be some way rather than another, and with figuring out ways to systematize their thinking in order to capture our intuitions and theories about that.
4. So what designers can take for granted (that they've got it right about the way the world ought to be), philosophers make explicit. That means there are two ways to be a good designer. Either you've just got spot-on intuitions, or else you do some practical philosophy to tune up those intuitions. And I think most of us can use a regular tune-up.
5. I think a lot of bad design is based on lazy, solipsistic thinking on the part of designers. When we all look at something and think that we were better off without it, or we'd be better off with something else, what we're thinking is that the normative claim the designed object represents is just wrong.
6. Which is all to say that if designers are interested in getting it right systematically, what they're interested in is scrutinizing their intuitions. You can do that with a lot of different tools: cognitive science, experimental psychology, design theory, and so on. But if you want to get down to the kind of skills that undergird those disciplines, there's only one place to go.
Check out his other stuff, too.
At issue: Good.is asked some of the world’s most prominent futurists to explain why slowness might be as important to the future as speed. I've excerpted some of my favorite bits here:
I was discussing slide design with a colleague - specifically, the tendency of Powerpoint to kill good slide design - and remembered seeing these posted on Scott Hansen's Blog ISO50 a while back. They were originally posted at Square America with the heading "It’s 1975 And This Man Is About To Show You The Future (Scenes From An IBM Slide Presentation)." Here's a small sample, but check out the full collection, too.
The whole article is more than worth a read. Here, I've excerpted parts relevant to our interest (design ethics) below.
No Logo, Naomi Klein’s treatise on anti-globalization, sets the tone for the decade's debates about consumerism and branding.
American Apparel moves into its current factory in downtown Los Angeles. Under the leadership of Dov Charney, it becomes an incongruous champion of locally-produced fair-labor clothing, racy quasi-pornographic advertising, and Helvetica.
After a tight presidential election introduces the world to the Floridian hanging chad, AIGA's Design for Democracy begins a massive effort to redesign and standardize voting across the nation.
Ridiculously-good CG on display here. Alex Roman takes us through a series of artfully-presented architectural spaces. (Really, it's all CG)
