I love Andy Gilmore. Something about him reminds me of Stanley Kubrick.

This Wednesday, enjoy a moment of Zen. Take a look these aerial shots of Northern Netherlands tulip fields in full bloom. It's like a wall of those great mid-sixties Gene Davis pictures.

Via.

It's Monday, and as we're all getting ready to start our weeks, getting ready to start working on our products, or with our clients – anyway, going out there and designing stuff – I'm going to try to keep it short and sweet. What I'm going to do specifically is lay a little aphorism on you, which I hope you'll think about as you go about your business. Here it is:

The way we talk about design changes what design is.

And if that's too Zen or Heideggerian for you, let's get practical. Why are all of our clients coming to us now talking about the power of social networking? It's because we've been talking about it for so long. Thousands upon thousands of blog posts have for years now been extolling the virtues of tribe-building, grass-roots social marketing, and the post-brand branding strategies to business decision makers.

And all the talking worked. Now, non-designers and non-technorati have been convinced that indeed the social media revolution has changed the way all of these important design activities need to be conducted, and have done so, I believe, swept up in a fervor emergent from the blog-level discussions of designers and technology advocates.

You can draw a parallel to most social phenomena here: from green design revolution to the French Revolution. These things took off precisely because people kept giving reasons why they should, compelling others until critical mass was reached.

If the way we talk about things influences the way things are, then every blog post is a vote: A vote for one of the possible ways that design could be. And if we don't just love the current state of the nation, we need to be casting our votes every day for the future shape of the discipline.

I lurked on Twitter for a long time, trying to figure out how best I could use it in the service of DLB. What is it useful for as a "tweeter"? A follower?

As far as I can tell, there are two distinct values that Twitter can provide you as a follower, and unfortunately, they are mututally exclusive. You can either (1) follow everyone you ever encounter and grow yourself a massive reciprocity-driven follower-base, thus boosting your social networking gravitas while subsequently ensuring that you're never going to cut through the fog of uninspired self-promotion-cum-egomania and find good, useful tweeted content, or (2) you can just follow really interesting and awesome people, and get some real content-value out of the service, but sacrifice a "gimme" at boosting your personal PageRank.^*

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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

Richard Holden, of the firm Holden Cherry Lee, has an interesting take on the problems of overcrowded urban living, and on an overpriced housing market, the Micro Compact Home.

The homes are an exact cube, with a side length of 9 feet. They contain everything needed to live, including a toilet, shower, minibar, sink, cooking facilities, a double bed, and "dinner for five". Horden cites the aerospace industry as a primary influence. They are currently being tested with students in Munich, and Horden cites plans for short-stay business living in London.

You've got to see some of the plans for this thing, particularly the tree village, and the beautiful dream of the low e-home. I wish I was organized enough to live in one of these.

The micro-compact low e-home is all-electric and powered by photovoltaic solar panels of 8sqm with a small diameter vertical axis wind generator.

For several years, I worked with a startup, which, more than anything else, is really just a process of convincing yourself that all the pain now is worth the rewards in the future. Or else your startup is privately funded, in which case you basically work for a corporation with a policy where employees can give themselves their own job titles, but I digress, and anyway, this was not the case for me.

From my experience dealing with people in both situations, though, I think it is safe to assume that either way, you are surrounded by people thinking about money. I did this. I inadvertently surrounded myself with people who thought and cared a lot more about money than I did.

And you know what? Slowly but surely, I started to care about money. It crept up on me. I started thinking about it. I started using it as motivation for myself and the people on my team.

I turned into exactly what I didn't want to be, and it was because I had nothing else. The hours were crap, the pay was bad, the responsibility was enormous. I had no social life to speak of, and barely any sleep. It was everything it wasn't supposed to be.

So that ended (I won't tell you how). And after a several-month tailspin coming out of the experience, I am glad to say I've finally got something else again: My little design firm, Design Less Better.

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Take pause and appreciate with me a moment of enormous visual power, created "accidentally-by-design" in the convergence of flickr and lunch-in-a-box.

Further proof that a simple framework can yield astonishing visual results, and of course that the world wouldn't start wobbling on its axis if we spent less time on kickin' web graphics and more time designing our plates...