More images and a good interview at Dazed Digital.

New work by Swiss artist Zimoun is further proof that the simplest of materials and technologies, imaginatively utilized and carefully assembled, can produce delightful, captivating experiences.

(More on Zimoun's Zimoun's vimeo page.)

This is a very cool project archiving common symbols that are globally recognizable, free, and simple - a useful resource for designers or anyone who needs a good visual language reference.

Via.

Jiyeon Song's One Day Poem Pavilion uses light and shadow to reveal poems.

Using a complex array of perforations, the pavilion’s surface allows light to pass through creating shifting patterns, which–during specific times of the year–transform into the legible text of a poem. The specific arrangements of the perforations reveal different shadow-poems according to the solar calendar: a theme of new-life during the summer solstice, a reflection on the passing of time at the period of the winter solstice.

Via.

Let's start the week by quoting a new post from Seth Godin in full.

You can add value in two ways:

• You can know the answers.
• You can offer the questions.

Relentlessly asking the right questions is a long term career, mostly because no one ever knows the right answer on a regular basis.

We might add to that list "You can wonder what the questions to answer are."

As far as I'm concerned, we're rarely clear on which questions are the right ones either. First thing's first.

DLB: We all know about your socially conscious design work: the war buttons, Light Up the Sky, We Are All African, and of course the Design of Dissent anthology. Aside from making work with explicitly ethical messaging, how do you express your values in your day-to-day design practice?

MG: I don't think my ethics in ordinary design practice are different than anybody else's. Fundamentally, I try to do no harm, not to lie, and to have the same sense of responsibility to the community that any good citizen would have. My idea is that if you have a definition of good citizenship, you behave within that definition. I don't think it's terribly complex.

DLB: Could you expand on what's involved in being a good citizen?

MG: Well, it's a long and moralistic definition, but I think everybody knows what it means. It means that you don't deliberately go out and attempt to move people to anything that will harm them; you don't misrepresent anything that you're responsible for transmitting. It’s not a very complicated idea. Telling the truth is simple. But the truth is also full of ambiguity. Sometimes you don't know the truth. Sometimes the truth can produce pain and difficulty.

But I think the fundamental thing in the design field is not to urge people to buy something or to move toward something that would harm them. Beyond that, it gets into a long and maybe overly complex series of issues.

Read More...