1. 100 Abandoned Houses in Detroit

Photo by Kevin Bauman

Kevin Bauman's Flickr group, 100 Abandoned Houses, beautifully captures the faded glory of Detroit houses and in many cases their return to nature.

2. Facebook's Eroding Ethics

Image from Gizmodo

Facebook is turning out to be the design ethics story of the year. Gizmodo has a scary summary of Facebook's past and present sins against it's users.

And to top it off, just today, Facebook has been found adding data-collecting apps to profiles without users' knowledge. The jury's out on whether this is a bug or a feature, but read the above article before you decide...

3. Why Did Hunt's Ketchup Go HFCS Free?

Hunt's has announced that it is reformulating to remove High Fructose Corn Syrup from its ketchup. Not because it's the right thing to do (which is controversial), but because consumers have worn them down:

“Manufacturers are tired of hearing about the e-mails, the 800-number calls and the letters,” says Phil Lempert, editor of the Lempert Report, which focuses on supermarket trends. “People don’t want it, so why fight them?”

If companies won't lead, at least they'll follow the market.

4. Your Office Chair Sitting Is Killing You

BusinessWeek has an article explaining how sitting in chairs is bad for us, and how office chair design doesn't account for this.

"The Aeron is far too low," says Dr. A.C. Mandal, a Danish doctor who was among the first to raise flags about sitting 50 years ago. "I visited Herman Miller a few years ago, and they did understand. It should have much more height adjustment, and you should be able to move more. But as long as they sell enormous numbers, they don't want to change it."

Maybe instead of that fancy office chair, I should get a higher desk and some better shoes...

5. The Humble Indie Bundle

In the early days of BlogLESS, we professed our love for World of Goo, both as a game and for it's anti-DRM stance.

For the next five days, you can get it, along with four other acclaimed indie games, and name your own price. Moreover, you can decide where your money goes. You can pay the developers, or give to charities EFF and Child's Play, or choose how you want to split the money.

We're not involved with this offer in any way. But this is a model we'd like to see more of.

Buy good games. Do good. We can get behind that.

Developed by 2D Boy, a two-person team, World of Goo is a puzzle game with a simple mechanic—assembling minimal physics-simulated structures so your Goo-balls can exit the level, Lemmings-style. More than this, it has great production values (made with open source software!) and a lot of heart. If you’re in need of some fun, we encourage you to check out the demo.

Don’t just take our word for it. The critics totally dig the full game.

When you’re ready to take the plunge, you can purchase it on Steam (which we also like), or from WiiWare. ((I may go the Wii route over Christmas because I like waggle controls and it seems to be a bit more reasonably priced than the PC version ($15 vs. $20)))

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I didn’t want to dwell on DRM anymore, but after responding to a comment on Tuesday’s post, I felt the need to play devil’s advocate—to prove that we’re not just idealists, but seriously thinking about this stuff.

My original suggestion was to remove all protection, embrace the effects of copying and change the pay structure. Ideally, the net result would be fewer pirates, thus more revenue. But maybe that’s just as radical as putting DRM on everything—who knows if it would really work?

The truth is: this stuff is still evolving. There isn’t a perfect model of DRM out there that works in the best interests of both the publisher and the user.

However, rather than be defeatist, I’d like to share with you one that does a fairly decent job by taking the middle path.

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Nothing too revelatory for the BlogLESS regular here, but I thought I'd offer you a little story. This all happened in about ten minutes last Friday, and in those minutes, I found myself mentally reinforcing a few key maxims for web design.

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Geeks don't take holidays. Despite the fact that yesterday was Labor Day, the internet buzzed with the news that Google was soon to release its own browser, Chrome. Everyone knew this because Google mailed a press release --in the form of a comic book-- over the weekend.

Some blogs seemed to get a chuckle out of the gesture ("No Joke: Google Introduces the Chrome Browser with a Cartoon"), but I think Google played this one well.

McCloud's visual style is clean and minimal, just how we like it. Moreover, he uses Google employees as protagonists to give it that "pretty bird" appeal.

First off, who better to make the comic than Scott McCloud himself? The man literally wrote the book on comics as visual communication. He takes what could have easily been a rather dull presentation and makes it lively and accessible.

But accessible to whom? Who is the audience for this comic? There are some topics, like process management, that seem geared towards the technical crowd. But then what developer needs to have open source explained to them?

Perhaps Google believes that its users --not just its developers-- should know these details about the software and its politics. Maybe your dad should know how plugin security works. If the new browser is to succeed, Google needs to appeal to more than just surface features (i.e. chrome).

It shows a lot of respect for the audience to actually try to teach them something rather than try to gloss over it with buzzwords or fancy effects. If Google can educate its audience about what is important in a browser, it will make them critical consumers.

If users are smarter because of their efforts, it raises the bar for everyone who makes a browser-- which, presumably, puts Google in a good position. In that sense, the comic is a form of pedagogical marketing.

Tiny Showcase usually showcases (and sells limited editions of) tiny works of art. However, recently "inspired by the posters on classroom walls, but free from any commitment to reality," TS has a giant poster created by Ray Fenwick – Life of Mystery — An Illustrated Guide – on offer.

The thing about KEYS is that they're incomplete...

Besides being pithy, mirthful and incredibly well typeset, has as its centerpiece a sort of "Life of Mystery" manifesto, which I'll paraphrase for you now:

Life holds plenty of mystery, but it often seems like the wrong kind of mystery. Life's mysteries are usually either depressing or bland. Fortunately, there's another kind of mystery, the fun kind, the kind that "leaves you spun out in the most amazing ways." This mystery is a feeling, a vague sense of mysteriousness. We can create a life of mysteriousness: We can feel like that forever!

I think this addresses something that designers often forget: Sometimes the best parts of our experience with stuff in the world is getting "spun out" in a cool way. Think about how cool early viral marketing could feel, or even think about the infamous ATHF incident in Boston, and then ask yourself, when you're setting off to design something: Is there some way I can make this engage people in that fun kind of mystery?

It's important! And we know it's important, because it's exactly why we're designers. Designing stuff is a way of coming into work every day and addressing the fun kind of mysteries in life.

So here's a mentality shift to ponder for your manifesto: Don't even try to address the loose ends out of existence; design the loose ends!

New Zealand artist Julian Oliver's latest work, levelHead, allows viewers of the piece to interact with a 3D world by simply moving wooden blocks around in front of a web cam...Through moving and rotating coded blocks, the "player" attempts to move a tiny trapped man through an elaborate, interlocking labyrinth stretching one's spatial memory and logical reasoning skills.

As much as I like taxing the limits of my reason in order to understand the complex requirements of a seemingly hostile world, I'm not sure I need an augmented reality in order to do it.

Could this possibly be any fun, or is it just training us for something unsavory?

Via.

If you're keeping up with the design-blogosphere, you've probably already seen that the British Royal Mint recently revealed their new coinage.

If not, then you have now.

The young gentleman responsible for these designs (which were chosen from a public contest) is Matthew Dent, who says this:

I found the idea that members of the public could interact with the coins the most exciting aspect of this concept. It's easy to imagine the coins pushed around a school classroom table or fumbled around with on a bar - being pieced together as a jigsaw and just having fun with them.

I've always thought that being charged to design currency would be an interesting design project. It certainly seems as if it would be incredibly high-stakes: as if literally everyone would have an opinion, as if this moment of design would really count. But would it?

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