Watch a Mesmerizing Hourglass Filled with 1,250,000 “Nanoballs” (Created by the Designer of the Apple Watch)

in Design | May 26th, 2017

Apple Watch design­er Marc New­son has cre­at­ed an hour­glass that stands about 6 inch­es tall, mea­sures 5 inch­es wide, and fea­tures 1,249,996 tiny spheres called “nanoballs,” each made of stain­less steel and cov­ered with a fine cop­per coat­ing. It takes 10 min­utes for the nanoballs to pour through the glass, from first to last. The action looks pret­ty mes­mer­iz­ing, to say the least.

You can pick up your very own hand-made hour­glass for $12,000. But if your pock­ets don’t run quite that deep, you can set­tle for watch­ing the time piece in the video above. Get more infor­ma­tion on the New­son hour­glass here.

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via The Verge

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Alan Watts Wax­es Philo­soph­i­cal About Time in The Fine Art of Goof­ing Off, the 1970s “Sesame Street for Grown-Ups”

Why Time Seems to Speed Up as We Get Old­er: What the Research Says

How Clocks Changed Human­i­ty For­ev­er, Mak­ing Us Mas­ters and Slaves of Time

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A Three-Minute Introduction to Buckminster Fuller, One of the 20th Century’s Most Productive Design Visionaries

in Design, Technology | May 3rd, 2017

Archi­tect, inven­tor, the­o­rist, and all-around fount of ideas Buck­min­ster Fuller came up with many new things, though most of us asso­ciate him with one above all: geo­des­ic domes. Those dis­tinc­tive hemi­spher­ic struc­tures built out of strong tri­an­gu­lar parts, hav­ing gone in and out of vogue over the decades, most recent­ly reap­peared in the zeit­geist as the type of lodg­ing promised to the atten­dees of the ill-con­ceived Fyre Fes­ti­val — an ultra-lux­u­ry mar­ket-tar­get­ed dis­as­ter not rep­re­sen­ta­tive, safe to say, of the world Fuller spent his entire career try­ing to real­ize. His vision of a future for “Space­ship Earth,” as he called it, drove him to cre­ate all he cre­at­ed, from new maps to new hous­es to new cars to new sleep­ing meth­ods. But what did he base that vision on?

“Fuller’s phi­los­o­phy could be best sum­ma­rized as being a social thinker, believ­ing that human­i­ty’s sur­vival is con­tin­gent upon how it man­ages Space­ship Earth and the resources it con­tains,” says the nar­ra­tor of the three-minute Proso­cial Progress Foun­da­tion primer above, “and that cre­at­ing abun­dance whilst doing lit­tle to no harm to the envi­ron­ment would help to alle­vi­ate a lot of the prob­lems in the world today.”

With every project he empha­sized “sys­tems think­ing,” or think­ing premised on “the idea that the world is an inter­con­nect­ed sys­tem with inter­con­nect­ed prob­lems, and that a way to solve these prob­lems would be to call upon col­lec­tive action.” We’d all have to work togeth­er, in his view, to solve the prob­lems we suf­fer togeth­er.

That notion may strike us as utopi­an even today, and indeed, most of Fuller’s inven­tions only saw lim­it­ed appli­ca­tion dur­ing his life­time. But the label of utopi­an, which sug­gests a dis­re­gard for the rig­ors of real­i­ty, does­n’t quite fit the man him­self, so much con­cern did he have for prac­ti­cal­i­ties like the effi­cient allo­ca­tion of resources, quick con­struc­tion and deploy­ment, and ease of use. But giv­en the dystopi­an terms we’ve increas­ing­ly come to use to describe events here on Space­ship Earth, maybe we need a Fuller-style prac­ti­cal utopi­anism now more than ever. If these three min­utes have giv­en you a taste for more of the details, have a look at Fuller’s video lec­ture series Every­thing I Know — but make sure to clear 42 hours of your cal­en­dar first. The future of human­i­ty may depend on it!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Inno­va­tion that Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Map Design (1943)

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Watch an Ani­mat­ed Buck­min­ster Fuller Tell Studs Terkel All About “the Geo­des­ic Life”

Bet­ter Liv­ing Through Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Utopi­an Designs: Revis­it the Dymax­ion Car, House, and Map

A Har­row­ing Test Dri­ve of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s 1933 Dymax­ion Car: Art That Is Scary to Ride

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Dymax­ion Sleep Plan: He Slept Two Hours a Day for Two Years & Felt “Vig­or­ous” and “Alert”

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Mar­shall McLuhan, W.H. Auden & Buck­min­ster Fuller Debate the Virtues of Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy & Media (1971)

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Buckminster Fuller Creates an Animated Visualization of Human Population Growth from 1000 B.C.E. to 1965

in Design, Environment | April 25th, 2017

Sit back, relax, put on some music (I’ve found Chopin’s Noc­turne in B major well-suit­ed), and watch the video above, a silent data visu­al­iza­tion by vision­ary archi­tect and sys­tems the­o­rist Buck­min­ster Fuller, “the James Brown of indus­tri­al design.” The short film from 1965 com­bines two of Fuller’s lead­ing con­cerns: the expo­nen­tial spread of the human pop­u­la­tion over finite mass­es of land and the need to revise our glob­al per­spec­tive via the “Dymax­ion map,” in order “to visu­al­ize the whole plan­et with greater accu­ra­cy,” as the Buck­min­ster Fuller Insti­tute writes, so that “we humans will be bet­ter equipped to address chal­lenges as we face our com­mon future aboard Space­ship Earth.”

Though you may know it best as the name of a geo­des­ic sphere at Disney’s Epcot Cen­ter, the term Space­ship Earth orig­i­nal­ly came from Fuller, who used it to remind us of our inter­con­nect­ed­ness and inter­de­pen­dence as we share resources on the only vehi­cle we know of that can sus­tain us in the cos­mos.

“We are all astro­nauts,” he wrote in his 1969 Oper­at­ing Man­u­al for Space­ship Earth, and yet we refuse to see the long-term con­se­quences of our actions on our spe­cial­ized craft: “One of the rea­sons why we are strug­gling inad­e­quate­ly today,” Fuller argued in his intro­duc­tion, “is that we reck­on our costs on too short­sight­ed a basis and are lat­er over­whelmed with the unex­pect­ed costs brought about by our short­sight­ed­ness.”

Like all vision­ar­ies, Fuller thought in long spans of time, and he used his design skills to help oth­ers do so as well. His pop­u­la­tion visu­al­iza­tion doc­u­ments human growth from 1000 B.C.E. to Fuller’s present, at the time, of 1965. In the image above (see a larg­er ver­sion here), we have a graph­ic from that same year—made col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly with artist and soci­ol­o­gist John McHale—showing the “shrink­ing of our plan­et by man’s increased trav­el and com­mu­ni­ca­tion speeds around the globe.” (It must be near micro­scop­ic by now.) Fuller takes an even longer view, look­ing at “the con­flu­ence of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and trans­porta­tion tech­nolo­gies,” writes Rikke Schmidt Kjær­gaard, “from 500,000 B.C.E. to 1965.”

Here Fuller com­bines his pop­u­la­tion data with the tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs of moder­ni­ty. Though he’s thought of in some quar­ters as a genius and in some as a kook, Fuller demon­strat­ed his tremen­dous fore­sight in seem­ing­ly innu­mer­able ways. But it was in the realm of design that he excelled in com­mu­ni­cat­ing what he saw. “Pio­neers of data visu­al­iza­tion,” Fuller and McHale were two of “the first to chart long-term trends of indus­tri­al­iza­tion and glob­al­iza­tion.” Instead of becom­ing alarmed and fear­ful of what the trends showed, Fuller got to work design­ing for the future, ful­ly aware, writes the Fuller Insti­tute that “the plan­et is a sys­tem, and a resilient one.”

Fuller thought like a rad­i­cal­ly inven­tive engi­neer, but he spoke and wrote like a peacenik prophet, writ­ing that a sys­tem of nar­row spe­cial­iza­tions ensures that skill sets “are not com­pre­hend­ed com­pre­hen­sive­ly… or they are real­ized only in neg­a­tive ways, in new weapon­ry or the indus­tri­al sup­port only of war far­ing.” We’ve seen this vision of soci­ety played out to a fright­en­ing extent. Fuller saw a way out, one in which every­one on the plan­et can live in com­fort and secu­ri­ty with­out con­sum­ing (then not renew­ing) the Earth’s resources. How can this be done? You’ll have to read Fuller’s work to find out. Mean­while, as his visu­al­iza­tions sug­gest, it’s best for us to take the long view—and give up on short-term rewards and profits—in our assess­ments of the state of Space­ship Earth.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Inno­va­tion that Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Map Design (1943)

200,000 Years of Stag­ger­ing Human Pop­u­la­tion Growth Shown in an Ani­mat­ed Map

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Milton Glaser’s 10 Rules for Life & Work: The Celebrated Designer Dispenses Wisdom Gained Over His Long Life & Career

in Creativity, Design, Life | April 24th, 2017

“None of us has real­ly the abil­i­ty to under­stand our path until it’s over,” the cel­e­brat­ed graph­ic design­er Mil­ton Glaser mus­es less than a minute into the above video.

The 86-year-old Glaser’s many con­tri­bu­tions to pop culture—the  I ❤ NY logo, the psy­che­del­ic por­trait of a rain­bow-haired Bob Dylan, DC Comics’ clas­sic bul­let logo—con­fer unde­ni­able author­i­ty. To the out­side eye, he seems to have a pret­ty firm han­dle on the path he’s been trav­el­ing for lo these many decades. Aspi­rant design­ers would do well to give extra con­sid­er­a­tion to any advice he might share.

As would the rest of us.

His “Ten Things I Have Learned,” orig­i­nal­ly deliv­ered as part of a talk to the AIGA—a ven­er­a­ble mem­ber­ship orga­ni­za­tion for design professionals—qualifies as sol­id life advice of gen­er­al inter­est.

Yes, the Inter­net spawns bul­let-point­ed tips for bet­ter liv­ing the way spring rains yield mush­rooms, but Glaser, a self-described “child of mod­ernism” who’s still a con­tender, does not truck in pithy Insta­gram-friend­ly apho­risms. Instead, his list is born of reflec­tion on the var­i­ous turns of a long and most­ly sat­is­fy­ing cre­ative career.

We’ve excerpt­ed some of his most essen­tial points below, and sug­gest that those read­ers who are still in train­ing give spe­cial empha­sis to num­ber sev­en. Don’t place too much weight on num­ber nine until you’ve estab­lished a sol­id work eth­ic. (See num­ber four for more on that.)

MILTON GLASER”S TEN RULES FOR WORK AND LIFE (& A BONUS JOKE ABOUT A RABBIT).

1. YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE

Some years ago I real­ized that… all the work I had done that was mean­ing­ful and sig­nif­i­cant came out of an affec­tion­ate rela­tion­ship with a client.

2. IF YOU HAVE A CHOICE NEVER HAVE A JOB

Here, Glaser quotes com­pos­er John Cage: Nev­er have a job, because if you have a job some­day some­one will take it away from you and then you will be unpre­pared for your old age. 

3. SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.

Glaser rec­om­mends putting a ques­tion­able com­pan­ion to a gestalt ther­a­py test. If, after spend­ing time with that per­son “you are more tired, then you have been poi­soned. If you have more ener­gy, you have been nour­ished. The test is almost infal­li­ble and I sug­gest that you use it for the rest of your life.”

4. PROFESSIONALISM IS NOT ENOUGH (or THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT)

Glaser con­cedes that a record of depend­able excel­lence is some­thing to look for in a brain sur­geon or auto mechan­ic, but for those in the arts, “con­tin­u­ous trans­gres­sion” is the qual­i­ty to cul­ti­vate. Pro­fes­sion­al­ism does not allow for that because trans­gres­sion has to encom­pass the pos­si­bil­i­ty of fail­ure and if you are pro­fes­sion­al your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat suc­cess. 

5. LESS IS NOT NECESSARILY MORE

I have an alter­na­tive to the propo­si­tion that I believe is more appro­pri­ate. ‘Just enough is more.’

6. STYLE IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED

Style change is usu­al­ly linked to eco­nom­ic fac­tors, as all of you know who have read Marx. Also fatigue occurs when peo­ple see too much of the same thing too often.

7. HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN

The brain is the most respon­sive organ of the body…. Thought changes our life and our behav­ior. I also believe that draw­ing works in the same way…. Draw­ing also makes you atten­tive. It makes you pay atten­tion to what you are look­ing at, which is not so easy.

8. DOUBT IS BETTER THAN CERTAINTY

One of the signs of a dam­aged ego is absolute cer­tain­ty. Schools encour­age the idea of not com­pro­mis­ing and defend­ing your work at all costs. Well, the issue at work is usu­al­ly all about the nature of com­pro­mise…. Ide­al­ly, mak­ing every­one win through acts of accom­mo­da­tion is desir­able.

9. IT DOESN’T MATTER

Glaser cred­its essay­ist Roger Rosenblatt’s Rules for Aging (misiden­ti­fy­ing the title as Aging Grace­ful­ly) with help­ing him artic­u­late his phi­los­o­phy here.  It doesn’t mat­ter what you think. It does not mat­ter if you are late or ear­ly, if you are here or there, if you said it or didn’t say it, if you are clever or if you were stu­pid. If you were hav­ing a bad hair day or a no hair day or if your boss looks at you cock­eyed or your boyfriend or girl­friend looks at you cock­eyed, if you are cock­eyed. If you don’t get that pro­mo­tion or prize or house or if you do – it doesn’t mat­ter.

10. TELL THE TRUTH

It’s inter­est­ing to observe that in the new AIGA’s code of ethics there is a sig­nif­i­cant amount of use­ful infor­ma­tion about appro­pri­ate behav­ior towards clients and oth­er design­ers, but not a word about a designer’s rela­tion­ship to the pub­lic. If we were licensed, telling the truth might become more cen­tral to what we do.

BONUS JOKE

A butch­er was open­ing his mar­ket one morn­ing and as he did a rab­bit popped his head through the door. The butch­er was sur­prised when the rab­bit inquired ‘Got any cab­bage?’ The butch­er said ‘This is a meat mar­ket – we sell meat, not veg­eta­bles.’ The rab­bit hopped off. The next day the butch­er is open­ing the shop and sure enough the rab­bit pops his head round and says ‘You got any cab­bage?’ The butch­er now irri­tat­ed says ‘Lis­ten you lit­tle rodent, I told you yes­ter­day we sell meat, we do not sell veg­eta­bles and the next time you come here I am going to grab you by the throat and nail those flop­py ears to the floor.’ The rab­bit dis­ap­peared hasti­ly and noth­ing hap­pened for a week. Then one morn­ing the rab­bit popped his head around the cor­ner and said ‘Got any nails?’ The butch­er said ‘No.’ The rab­bit said ‘Ok. Got any cab­bage?’’

Read Mil­ton Glaser’s “Ten Things I Have Learned” in its entire­ty here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mil­ton Glaser Draws Shake­speare & Explains Why Draw­ing is the Key to Under­stand­ing Life

Mick­ey Mouse In Viet­nam: The Under­ground Anti-War Ani­ma­tion from 1968, Co-Cre­at­ed by Mil­ton Glaser

World-Renowned Graph­ic Design­er Mil­ton Glaser Has a Laugh on Old Jews Telling Jokes

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Every Page of Depero Futurista, the 1927 Futurist Masterpiece of Graphic Design & Bookmaking, Is Now Online

in Books, Design | March 22nd, 2017

You can try to dis­man­tle your e‑reader, but you can’t unscrew an eBook. Despite hav­ing cast his artis­tic mind, as did his fel­low 20th-cen­tu­ry Ital­ian Futur­ists, force­ful­ly into the world to come, could For­tu­na­to Depero have imag­ined that such a ques­tion would arise in the 21st? The Trenti­no-born painter, writer, sculp­tor, and graph­ic design­er, led a high­ly cre­ative life, pro­duc­ing no work more endur­ing than the instant­ly rec­og­niz­able Cam­pari Soda bot­tle. But just last year, a group of enthu­si­asts suc­cess­ful­ly raised more than $250,000 on Kick­starter to bring back into print Deper­o’s sec­ond-best-known cre­ation: Depero Futur­ista, also known as “The Bolt­ed Book.”

Designed by Depero as “a kind of portable muse­um or call­ing card, a port­fo­lio of his career to date — includ­ing paint­ings, sculp­tures, tex­tile and archi­tec­tur­al designs, the­ater and adver­tis­ing work, word­plays, man­i­festoes, and reviews he received in many dif­fer­ent lan­guages,” Depero Futur­ista, as described by the reprint pro­jec­t’s web site, also shows off his “skills as a design­er and typo­graph­i­cal wiz­ard.”

These impress as much in 2017 as they must have at the time of the book’s first pub­li­ca­tion nine­ty years ago in Milan, and the bind­ing method remains as dis­tinc­tive: “Com­pris­ing 240 pages, the book is secured by two large indus­tri­al alu­minum bolts that when removed allow for the pages to be removed, rearranged, or exhib­it­ed indi­vid­u­al­ly.”

You may nev­er have heard of Depero, but today’s most respect­ed design­ers cer­tain­ly have, and some of them appear in the pro­jec­t’s Kick­starter pro­mo video giv­ing tes­ti­mo­ni­als not just to the impor­tance of Deper­o’s aes­thet­ic achieve­ments in gen­er­al but The Bolt­ed Book in par­tic­u­lar. It offers a “bridge between the past and the future” in design, an inno­v­a­tive, iron­ic, and play­ful use of the “machine aes­thet­ic,” and evi­dence that “Depero, despite his idio­syn­crasies, was one of the most cre­ative of the Futur­ists.” (It also, of course, holds the title of the first-ever book “bolt­ed by two giant clasps.”) But per­haps the most com­pelling comes from Ste­fan Sag­meis­ter: “This book con­tains the favorite pack­ag­ing of my favorite drink, Cam­pari Soda. For this alone, it should be con­tributed at prop­er­ly — Kick­start­ed.”

Suc­cess­ful­ly Kick­start­ed, the new and 100 per­cent faith­ful reprint of Depero Futur­ista (whose few sur­viv­ing orig­i­nals sit most­ly in insti­tu­tion­al col­lec­tions) should arrive in July of this year. Even if you can’t get your hands on a real, bolt­ed copy just yet, you can view each and every one of its pages on the reprint pro­jec­t’s site. All the bril­liance on dis­play does make one regret that the Futur­ist move­ment end­ed with the tar­nish of Fas­cism. But now that ref­er­ences to the lat­ter seems to have re-entered the pub­lic con­ver­sa­tion, maybe the time has come to bring back the vig­or­ous, for­ward-look­ing artis­tic inven­tive­ness of the for­mer as a kind of coun­ter­vail­ing inspi­ra­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 144 Beau­ti­ful Books of Russ­ian Futur­ism: Mayakovsky, Male­vich, Khleb­nikov & More (1910–30)

Down­load Orig­i­nal Bauhaus Books & Jour­nals for Free: Gropius, Klee, Kandin­sky, Moholy-Nagy & More

Down­load 20 Free eBooks on Design from O’Reilly Media

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Buckminster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Innovation that Revolutionized Map Design (1943)

in Design, Maps | February 20th, 2017

Last week we brought you news of a world map pur­port­ed­ly more accu­rate than any to date, designed by Japan­ese archi­tect and artist Hajime Narukawa. The map, called the Autha­Graph, updates a cen­turies-old method of turn­ing the globe into a flat sur­face by first con­vert­ing it to a cylin­der. Win­ner of Japan’s Good Design Grand Award, it serves as both a bril­liant design solu­tion and an update to our out­mod­ed con­cep­tions of world geog­ra­phy.

But as some read­ers have point­ed out, the Autha­Graph also seems to draw quite heav­i­ly on an ear­li­er map made by one of the most vision­ary of the­o­rists and design­ers, Buck­min­ster Fuller, who in 1943 applied his Dymax­ion trade­mark to the map you see above, which will like­ly remind you of his most rec­og­niz­able inven­tion, the Geo­des­ic Dome, “house of the future.”

Whether Narukawa has acknowl­edged Fuller as an inspi­ra­tion I can­not say. In any case, 73 years before the Autha­Graph, the Dymax­ion Map achieved a sim­i­lar feat, with sim­i­lar moti­va­tions. As the Buck­min­ster Fuller Insti­tute (BFI) points out, “The Fuller Pro­jec­tion Map is [or was] the only flat map of the entire sur­face of the Earth which reveals our plan­et as one island in the ocean, with­out any visu­al­ly obvi­ous dis­tor­tion of the rel­a­tive shapes and sizes of the land areas, and with­out split­ting any con­ti­nents.”

Fuller pub­lished his map in Life mag­a­zine, as a cor­rec­tive, he said, “for the lay­man, engrossed in belat­ed, war-taught lessons in geog­ra­phy…. The Dymax­ion World map is a means by which he can see the whole world fair­ly at once.” Fuller, notes Kelsey Campell-Dol­laghan at Giz­mo­do, “intend­ed the Dymax­ion World map to serve as a tool for com­mu­ni­ca­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion between nations.”

Fuller believed, writes BFI, that “giv­en a way to visu­al­ize the whole plan­et with greater accu­ra­cy, we humans will be bet­ter equipped to address chal­lenges as we face our com­mon future aboard Space­ship Earth.” Was he naïve or ahead of his time?

We may have had a good laugh at a recent repli­ca of Fuller’s near­ly undrive­able, “scary as hell,” 1930 Dymax­ion Car, one of his first inven­tions. Many of Fuller’s con­tem­po­raries also found his work bizarre and imprac­ti­cal. Eliz­a­beth Kol­bert at The New York­er sums up the recep­tion he often received for his “schemes,” which “had the hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry qual­i­ty asso­ci­at­ed with sci­ence fic­tion (or men­tal hos­pi­tals).” The com­men­tary seems unfair.

Fuller’s influ­ence on archi­tec­ture, design, and sys­tems the­o­ry has been broad and deep, though many of his designs only res­onat­ed long after their debut. He thought of him­self as an “antic­i­pa­to­ry design sci­en­tist,” rather than an inven­tor, and remarked, “if you want to teach peo­ple a new way of think­ing, don’t both­er try­ing to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of think­ing.” In this sense, we must agree that the Dymax­ion map was an unqual­i­fied suc­cess as an inspi­ra­tion for inno­v­a­tive map design.

In addi­tion to its pos­si­bly indi­rect influ­ence on the Autha­Graph, Fuller’s map has many promi­nent imi­ta­tors and sparked “a rev­o­lu­tion in map­ping,” writes Camp­bell-Dol­laghan. She points us to, among oth­ers, the Cryos­phere, fur­ther up, a Fuller map “arranged based on ice, snow, glac­i­ers, per­mafrost and ice sheets”; to Dubai-based Emi­rates airline’s map show­ing flight routes; and to the “Google­spiel,” an inter­ac­tive Dymax­ion map built by Rehab­stu­dio for Google Devel­op­er Day, 2011.

And, just above, we see the Dymax­ion Woodocean World map by Nicole San­tuc­ci, win­ner of 2013’s DYMAX REDUX, an “open call to cre­ate a new and inspir­ing inter­pre­ta­tion of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Dymax­ion Map.” You’ll find a hand­ful of oth­er unique sub­mis­sions at BFI, includ­ing the run­ner-up, Clouds Dymax­ion Map, below, by Anne-Gaelle Amiot, an “absolute­ly beau­ti­ful hand-drawn depic­tion of a real­i­ty that is almost always edit­ed from our maps: cloud pat­terns cir­cling above Earth.”

via Giz­mo­do

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Japan­ese Design­ers May Have Cre­at­ed the Most Accu­rate Map of Our World: See the Autha­Graph

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Abstract: Netflix’s New Documentary Series About “the Art of Design” Premieres Today

in Design, Television | February 10th, 2017

All over the world, so many kids grow­ing up, stu­dents look­ing for a major, and even adults angling for a career change say they want to get into “design.” But what do they mean? The word encom­pass­es a bewil­der­ing­ly wide (and ever-expand­ing) range of dis­ci­plines, respect­ed and expe­ri­enced prac­ti­tion­ers of eight of which the new Net­flix doc­u­men­tary series Abstract takes as its sub­jects: archi­tect Bjarke Ingels, illus­tra­tor Christoph Nie­mann, inte­ri­or design­er Ilse Craw­ford, stage design­er Es Devlin, graph­ic design­er Paula Sch­er, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Pla­ton, auto­mo­bile design­er Ralph Gilles, and shoe design­er Tin­ker Hat­field.

“I can guess what you’re think­ing, because I have watched a lot of design doc­u­men­taries,” writes Abstract cre­ator (and WIRED edi­tor-in-chief) Scott Dadich. “Restrained, pol­ished, pret­ty — so many of them look like a mov­ing ver­sion of a cof­fee table book. You’ve got soft­ly lit inter­views, eso­teric con­ver­sa­tions, and sub­tle track­ing shots of wide land­scapes beneath unob­tru­sive music. Most of it is clean, min­i­mal, and bor­ing as hell.”

Instead, he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors have matched each of the design­ers this series pro­files with a dif­fer­ent doc­u­men­tar­i­an with their own dis­tinct style: the direc­to­r­i­al ros­ter includes Mor­gan Neville (who made Best of Ene­mies, the recent doc­u­men­tary on Gore Vidal and William F. Buck­ley) and Bri­an Oakes (direc­tor of Jim: The James Foley Sto­ry).

Indiewire’s Liz Shan­non Miller describes the series as doc­u­ment­ing, among oth­er things, the work­spaces of these design­ers in a kind of detail “on the lev­el of MTV’s Cribs.” Though “per­son­al lives are kept rel­a­tive­ly out of the pic­ture, Abstract man­ages to get sur­pris­ing­ly inti­mate with the cre­ators at its cen­ter.” You can get a taste of that from the clip just above of Ingels’ episode in which he explains what his team want­ed to do with the game of “urban Tetris” that was build­ing the VM Hous­es in Copen­hagen. “It cre­at­ed a lot of noise,” he says of the hous­ing pro­jec­t’s dar­ing design, one that still catch­es the atten­tion of passers­by today.

All of Abstract’s episodes come out today, but before you binge on them (and if you don’t have a Net­flix mem­ber­ship, you can always sign up for their free one-month tri­al), you can read this Archi­tec­tur­al Digest inter­view on it with Ingels and Neville. “This show is about peo­ple who are intense­ly curi­ous and try­ing to under­stand, in a very prac­ti­cal way, how to make the world we live in a bet­ter place, whether it’s a more com­fort­able place or a more effi­cient place or a more egal­i­tar­i­an place,” says Neville. And what does that require? “Under­stand­ing that life is always evolv­ing, the world is always evolv­ing, and that means that yesterday’s answers might be the answers to a dif­fer­ent ques­tion than what the ques­tion is today,” says Ingels. “So it always starts with ask­ing ques­tions and refram­ing the ques­tion” — and of course, as you’ll wit­ness count­less times through­out the length of the show, ven­tur­ing an answer.

Abstract is a Rad­i­cal­Me­dia pro­duc­tion made in asso­ci­a­tion with Tremo­lo Pro­duc­tions. It was exec­u­tive pro­duced by Mor­gan Neville, Scott Dadich (Edi­tor in Chief of WIRED), and Dave O’Connor, Jon Kamen and Justin Wilkes.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pao­la Antonel­li on Design as the Inter­face Between Progress and Human­i­ty

Saul Bass’ Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Short Pon­ders Why Man Cre­ates

Saul Bass’ Advice for Design­ers: Make Some­thing Beau­ti­ful and Don’t Wor­ry About the Mon­ey

Pow­ers of Ten: The 1968 Doc­u­men­tary by Leg­endary Design­ers Ray and Charles Eames

Sketch­es of Artists by the Late New Media Design­er Hill­man Cur­tis

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Philographics Presents a Visual Dictionary of Philosophy: 95 Philosophical Concepts as Graphic Designs

in Design, Philosophy | January 4th, 2017

We so often hear pic­tures described as worth a thou­sand words apiece, but the Philo­graph­ics project seems to have found a way to increase that val­ue by at least 27,218. Or it has if you believe its blurb from Co.Design: “It takes the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy 28,250 words to explain the wool­ly con­cept of rel­a­tivism. It takes Genis Car­reras 32 words and a sin­gle image.” When the Girona, Spain-based graph­ic design­er har­nessed his pro­fes­sion­al back­ground in graph­ic design to his inter­est in phi­los­o­phy, some­thing hith­er­to unseen result­ed: a visu­al dic­tio­nary of phi­los­o­phy.

“I start­ed the project two years ago with the inten­tion to merge the world of phi­los­o­phy and graph­ic design,” writes Car­reras on the page of the Philo­graph­ics Kick­starter dri­ve, which raised £65,217 in 2013. “In the begin­ning it was a set of 24 posters, explain­ing philo­soph­i­cal the­o­ries like Dual­ism, Free Will, Exis­ten­tial­ism or Ide­al­ism using only shapes and colour. But so many impor­tant ‘isms’ were left out that I decid­ed to add more designs to the col­lec­tion. Today the project con­sists of 95 designs, each of them depict­ing a dif­fer­ent ‘ism’ using a unique com­bi­na­tion of geo­met­ric shapes, col­ors and a short def­i­n­i­tion of the the­o­ry.”

The video above shows some exam­ples, more of which you can browse one-by-one at Stu­dio Car­reras’ site, which also sells art prints, post­cards, and the book Philo­graph­ics: Big Ideas in Sim­ple Shapes. Brain Pick­ings’ Maria Popo­va calls the results, which look a bit like the kind of high-design mid­cen­tu­ry paper­back cov­ers that have late­ly come back into vogue, “a play­ful and thought­ful cel­e­bra­tion of sym­bol­ic and metaphor­i­cal think­ing — that dis­tinct­ly human fac­ul­ty that is the hall­mark of our imag­i­na­tion,” and one meant to “tick­le our curios­i­ty and spark deep­er inter­est in influ­en­tial the­o­ries of human nature and human pur­pose that those of us not for­mal­ly trained in phi­los­o­phy may not have pre­vi­ous­ly been inspired to explore.”

These images cer­tain­ly make the famous­ly wordy field of phi­los­o­phy — and one so often lam­pooned for that wordi­ness — infi­nite­ly more invit­ing for the philo­soph­i­cal­ly inclined visu­al thinkers among us. If Car­reras is con­sid­er­ing Kick­start­ing anoth­er edi­tion of Philo­graph­ics posters, might we sug­gest black­light ver­sions? Dorm-room philo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sions the world over may attain a new lev­el of rig­or as a result.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

55 Cov­ers of Vin­tage Phi­los­o­phy, Psy­chol­o­gy & Sci­ence Books Come to Life in a Short Ani­ma­tion

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy, from 600 B.C.E. to 1935, Visu­al­ized in Two Mas­sive, 44-Foot High Dia­grams

8‑Bit Phi­los­o­phy: Pla­to, Sartre, Der­ri­da & Oth­er Thinkers Explained With Vin­tage Video Games

Phi­los­o­phy Explained With Donuts

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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