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.

My Sweets are candy bars designed by London-based Tithi Kutchamuch. Specifically, they are candy bars designed to aesthetically deliver you less candy.

From his statement:

Bargain food persuades people by playing with the value of money, which has brought a lot of problems to society: over nutrition, eating disorders, obesity, illness, guilt, wasting food, wasting resources, over production, etc.

Can design make people buy food that offers less?

Something to consider for this weekend: Is selling less candy like this really ethical?

Designed by Denis Guidone, the Ora ilLegale Clock has a numberless face that, when tilted on its side, adds or subtracts an hour from the time. An ingeniously simple means of addressing the problem of resetting one's clock when the time changes.

It's not yet available, but is due to be manufactured soon by NAVA and for sale at the MoMA store in a year or two. Bravo!

Via.

Last Friday, we looked at some Boxes of Water and decided that underneath the environmentalist messaging, they weren't altogether that much better than the alternative. This week, let's look at something that is.

Designer Scott Amron, founder of Amron Exptl. managed to successfully think outside the box, so to speak, in developing his latest effort, New Soap, Old Bottle. New Soap, Old Bottle sells "brand name liquid soap packaged in old plastic soda bottles, plastic water bottles and glass beer bottles."

Soap in an old Coca-Cola bottle. Occam's Razor, baby.

The Stockholm-based design firm BVD is advertising their new line of products, available from the Japanese office supply company Askul. Among them is this clock, which I find worthy of reflection.

Consider the following: This is a beautiful clock, whose form follows its function. It is as easy to use in the context of an office as it is clever and visually striking. It is, by these counts, very nicely designed indeed. Things get less clear, though, when you consider that its core function seems to be reminding you every time you look at it that you're somewhere you don't want to be.

While we may have a taste for fine design and art, we certainly don’t have the budget to own much of it ourselves. Ask me what design I’m truly thankful for, and it would have to be the little things I enjoy using every day.

Here is my list of some affordable, unsung heroes that don’t often make the magazines and blogs, but are superstars to me nonetheless:

Pilot G-2 .07 Pens

They wouldn’t win any beauty contests and you can pick up six for five dollars, but these guys are my workhorses day in and day out. I don’t like to be caught without one. What sells me is the gel ink which glides across pages smoothly and at just the right width. Besides a solid clicking mechanism, their rubberized grips aren’t too shabby for a budget writing instrument. Moreover, you can actually buy replacement cartridges for them, provided someone doesn’t run off with your pen (or you lose it) before you run out of ink.

Read More...

Has this ever happened to you? You buy a product that requires some assembly, get it home, grab your screwdrivers or allen wrenches, open up that little bag of nuts and bolts only to find that you're missing one? Good god, that is frustrating. Talk about a waste of everyone's time and money.

Since this has happened to me at least a few times, I can only expect that it's happening all the time to these companies. Now, maybe some people don't call the company (I myself sometimes just live with it, or take it back to the mega-store I bought it at, etc.), but I bet some others do just about every day.

Read More...

This first piece is Rob Price’s iconic Grandfather Clock, wherein a sectional – yet functional— slice evokes the whole grandfather clock.

The detail that really sells it for me is the plexi face (Right). While the rest of the clock is solid wood, the “cut” exposes the joinery through the glass.

In a similar vein (no pun intended), I found this Dexter-branded “dismembered flatware” on the same website. A different kind of reductionism, but evocative, to be sure. I appreciate the detail of Dexter’s signature hypodermic needle puncture on each piece.