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.

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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.

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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.

Since your website is an important part of your brand, you've got to think about the content of the former as representative of the latter. You've just got to. To a potential consumer online, what your brand represents is nothing more than the content of your website. This means that if that content fails or is unconsidered in any significant (or, in fact, even in any seemingly insignificant) ways, your brand is in danger of representing this failure.

Given this framework, some decisions that may seem like good strategic ideas are in fact bad. The reason for this is an assumption on your part about your ability to provide a coherent semblance of total information, while at the same time actually providing either partial or exaggerated information. In a word, you're trying to trick, omit key information from, or (even worse) lie to your users. And it's not going to work.

"You guys don't have to trick me! You're my friends!"

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I was confronted the other day by this image of a prosthetic seat for a broken chair. It made me think about all the broken things I’d tossed out or seen tossed out over the years and what a waste that was. Waste is a real concern of mine lately, both from a design ethics standpoint and an economic one.

Most consumer goods today are so cheap that repairing them hardly seems worth it. Things move so fast that there is inevitably something new and improved to replace it. The new thing is bound to be cheaply made, as well. The cycle repeats itself.

In a way, I suppose, these broken things help fuel the economic engine. People keep buying replacements and designers keep making them. This is, of course, terrible because it’s a tremendous waste of resources.

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I recently read Jennifer van der Meer's thought-provoking piece, The Crowd Will Save Us: How the green movement taps participatory networks to drive innovation at Core77.

TCWSU is an appeal to marry up two significant and recent cultural developments which have affected nearly everyone in the design profession, namely, the "green movement" and design strategies employing social networking. The first really compelling bit of her argument is this:

Over 50% of consumers want greener, more natural [e.g.] housing cleaners, but only 5% actually purchase this category of product: consumers do not want tradeoffs. ...green-leaning consumers are looking for proven efficacy, broad availability, comparable price, and a brand they know and trust. They're not willing to settle for a product that performs less than a more eco-unfriendly alternative.

This statistic offers up something deep for us to think about: The (relatively) recent groundswell of interest in environmentally friendly product design is, while certainly "real," nevertheless only marginally capable of altering whatever practical or psychological norms motivate individuals to actually buy things.

The rest of TCWSU deals with some practical strategies about how social innovations in design might help us solve this complicated psychological problem afflicting products and brands, and rightly so. In addition to her practical conclusions, though, this strange statistic should certainly tell us something theoretical or psychological.

Namely, I wonder why, exactly, the psychological dependence on extant brands as the guarantor of quality isn't overcome by people's self-professed desire for greener products?

It's not you, it's me (via).

Several possible reasons occurred to me:

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Pull up on the cap to reveal the speaker and increase the volume. Lower it to reduce volume and turn the radio off. Twist the cap to change the station.

Natural mapping elevated to fine design. Bravo.

Via

Taxi Key to the City makes these nice Taxi Cards, cards you give to a taxi driver in a foreign country (here, China) to explain to him or her where you want to go, as almost certainly you don't speak Chinese, and on my experience, Beijing taxi drivers in particular speak just enough English to make it very dangerous to try to communicate.

DLB loves this diagram, from the Beijing Taxi Cards website.

When I was in China, I stayed with a family of American ex-patriots, and they lived in an ex-patriot community. They give out packages of these kind of taxi cards when you move in. The ones they give you are specific to your neighborhood, whereas the ones sold here are more general (they are mainly targeted at tourists for the 2008 Olympics).

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