Yule Heibel's Library tagged design →  View Popular, Search in Google

Some inspiring bike rack designs here - my favorite is the bike hanger from Seoul, Korea, and the giant comb in Roanoke, VA.

flavorwire bicycles bike_racks design

Learned about Openwear via this article.
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Long before Silicon Valley began dominating the innovation landscape with its ambitious, creative engineers and designers, there was, of course, the Italian Renaissance. A recent event in Italy, World Wide Rome, placed the rich history of Italian design ingenuity in a contemporary context. It focused on start-ups and entrepreneurs with new business models based on digital fabrication and open-source production–and with the do-it-yourself trend of today’s “makers movement” in mind.
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Who would have thunk? Interesting video.
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A city’s typeface. It’s not the first thing I think of when I imagine ways to make a city great, but in Chattanooga, Tenn. they make a strong case for the importance of having a custom typeface for the city.
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chattanooga typeface design urban_design branding smartplanet

2009 article about Ziba's (then-new) HQ, which I visited recently when I attended GOOD Ideas for Cities. It's a knock-out space and building, very beautiful. I found the following passage intriguing, given the interest in 'pinning'...
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The workstations are situated amid an interlocking sequence of podlike meeting rooms connected by sliding doors. It’s in these rooms that teams spend most of the workday, pinning their inspirations and ideas to the walls. “At first they were looking at one big room for everything,” says Jeff Stuhr, one of Holst’s two founders. “But we suggested a sequence of intimate spaces that you could journey through.”
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pinning ziba metropolis_magazine brian_libby portland architecture design

Alleys as tight urbanism - great way to characterize them.
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In America, by the way, it's rare that you find a shop in an alley, but this is common in Melbourne, Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka. Even major department stores have cut storefront windows into the back of their buildings that open onto alleys. And in Melbourne in particular, graffiti is endorsed by the city, it's become an iconic aspect of their laneways.
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Thinking about this article in relation to what Virginia Postrel wrote about design panels (as stifling)...
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“The U.S is the most conservative country that there is in terms of supporting design,” said Schwartz, who now practices in London and primarily works in Europe and the Middle East.

Indeed, panelists noted that both the High Line and Millennium Park were heavily influenced by community members and parks advocates, rather than coming from officials or civic leaders.

And often, it is the cities themselves that hold back the creation of new and exciting projects. Waldheim noted how cities across the country have been emphasizing the importance of their historic character, and how that may be holding them back.

“They’ve spent so much time betting on their heritage, their cornice line, their streetlines and their facades,” Waldheim said. In terms of marketing, he says, this has been a success for places like Boston, but it hasn’t helped the city draw in contemporary designs that may be more attractive to younger people, especially the large amounts of college students that move into and then out of the Boston area.

But as Cox notes, there tends to be a fear of change among residents in cities.

“Communities generally understand what they have,” said Cox, “and they’re uncomfortable about losing it.”
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Great idea.
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Though he’s less than a year away from holding two master’s degrees, Tomasulo is planning to stick with CityFabric. He says the t-shirt business is good, but also that he hopes to expand its reach in other ways to help communicate about cities and development.

“It’s not necessarily just for people who are urban planners or designers or people who live in downtowns,” he says. “The core focus is to engage people in conversation about their place.”
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Some terrific ideas here:
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This summer the Institute for Urban Design asked New Yorkers to submit ideas for making the city's public spaces "smarter, more beautiful and livable." Some 500 responses later, the institute then asked designers from around the world to shape these raw ideas into concrete projects for the city. The results of this "collaborative re-imagining" of New York were revealed during Urban Design Week, which came to a close on Tuesday, with 10 entries declared collective "winners."
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urban_renewal urban_amenities urban_design cities nyc atlantic_cities design

Very nice set of comments on the Steve Jobs quotes recently featured in the Wall Street Journal.
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Herewith, without further ado, a minor eulogy for Steve Jobs the CEO. When you look at the global economy today, here's what might strike you: Apple is an organization almost singularly unlike the massed hordes and would-be contenders to the throne that surround it. It is the one company seemingly tuned to hit the revolutionary apex, not race past the lowest common denominator. So how did Steve — after a legendary decade in the wilderness, exiled from the island of his own creation, watching it turn grey, dull, bland, and colonized, perhaps even lobotomized — rebuild it that way?
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Self-explanatory; great resource.
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In this post, we’ve compiled a list of businesses that have shared a peek inside their fascinating logo design process with the public. We hope it will get you started on your own.
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Design stuff, for reference.
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Here are 10 essential elements or aspects of good design that transcend context, industry, and geography.
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mit_techreview design reference lists tom_wujec bill_o'connor autodesk

I would love for TUDelft to be a great model, but looking at their faculty, I see only men and nothing but men. Sorry, but I remain unconvinced that a design school can be comprehensive and lay claim to "integrative" or even "lateral" thinking, if that that thinking is led by only one gender.
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Design education at the university level is broken: often ill-defined, shallowly specialized, and beholden to departments in art, architecture, or engineering. But if this is the case, how can the system be fixed—so that young designers can be properly trained not just in the pursuit of "making [things] look pretty" (as designer Don Norman lamented this month in an interview with Technology Review) but in the art and science of creatively integrating information to solve practical problems?

One of the world's largest industrial-design programs, at Delft University of Technology in Delft, the Netherlands, has been operating under this philosophy for four decades.
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Five basic tips to design "green" from Zillow.
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Designing a new home is part art, part science. It takes both to make a house that’s energy-efficient, uses less material to build, and connects with its building site – what we call “green building.”

But, beauty is skin deep and sometimes “green” is, too. A truly green home is green from the inside out; the “green” can’t be separated from the “home.” Sure, you can make any house more energy-efficient, but that’s usually just cosmetic surgery. Loading up a house with energy-saving gadgets helps a little, but a green home is born that way, starting before the design was just a twinkle in the architect’s eye.
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Brilliant article by Paula Scher on the current craze for info-graphics. Conclusion:
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All of the charts, graphs, diagrams, and maps look interesting and involving. They are designed to appear scientific and very believable. They are immediate, even urgent, and you have the sense that you are about to learn something. They are all part of an increasing trend away from reading, reflection, and understanding the world in a broader context. Information becomes style. Information is an end in and of itself: it exists by itself, with no over view, no history, no context, and demonstrates that almost anything can be measured. It is faux info.

Ask a designer to make a diagram of your clothes closet and how many white and black articles of clothing you have worn and on what days and see if there is a pattern. There probably is one. It will make a sensational chart. Compare the amount of homeless people in relationship to the amount of trees in various neighborhoods. It sounds important, doesn't it? A diagram with those statistics might really look significant.

Faux info is seductive because it looks like a computer program has gathered all the data, put it in the proper order, quantified it, made all of the appropriate comparisons and links, and fed it to you in a scientific style that demonstrates authority and infallibility. The information does your thinking for you, and you don't have to think at all. Buyer beware.
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This, from a designer. Take heed, people.

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TED talk video of Paula Scher's presentation on design, play, and seriousness. Interesting distinction between seriousness and solemnity: quotes from Russell Baker, "Washington DC is solemn, New York is serious" (hint: serious is good, solemn is pedestrian/ boring/ conventional)... ;-)
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Paula Scher looks back at a life in design (she's done album covers, books, the Citibank logo ...) and pinpoints the moment when she started really having fun.
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Nice profile:
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Paula Scher is one of our favorite designers and arguably the most daring typographer in design history, whose work never ceases to surprise, delight and provoke, thriving on reinvention yet oozing Scher’s unmistakable style. In this excellent microdocumentary, part of Hillman Curtis’ artist series, Scher recounts her creative process on some of her best-known projects, including her famous Citi identity work the iconic New York Public Theater campaign, which evolved into a whole new style that eventually permeated the New York design aesthetic across multiple facets.
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Can't remember how/why I came across this article, but Faruk Ates has an interesting perspective:

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Google’s design process—if you can call it that—revolves entirely around engineering-driven solutions and something I will call “data thinking”: present the problem as a mathematical formula like any other, come up with systematic solutions that attempt to solve the problem and its various “problem components” (think individual UI buttons, copy text, visual design and so forth), then employ testing until a final result is produced. We know this is their process from their own words, but the point was long made clear by Doug Bowman when explaining his departure from Google.

What’s pointedly missing from Google’s approach is the human factor: there is no empathy in the process. It lives or dies entirely by the “sword of data” (Doug’s beautifully apt words, not mine), and while that can be a recipe for success—Google is doing quite well in the market—it is rarely a recipe for beauty, taste or comfort. It’s a cold process, almost entirely devoid of any humanity, precisely because it produces results that lack a human touch. There is no personal identity in the end result, because “data” is not a person.
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Interview with Justin Crane, co-founder/ co-chair of New England's biggest design festival / urban architecture mash-up:
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How did Common Boston emerge?

It originated humbly about five years ago, with a bunch of recent architecture grads just sitting around in a cafe. We were thinking about Boston...about how it has the highest percentage of architects of any city, and a general public that's very active in their community -- yet the two don't always see eye-to-eye. Boston is in many ways a birthplace of community activism, and we wanted to get the neighborhoods excited about such a big part of the city -- architecture.
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Kathy Sierra's post on graphics - how and why.

webdesign blogging presentations graphics design blog visualization kathy_sierra

Useful site with upcoming and archived webcasts; this is the section on Architecture, Construction, and Engineering.

research design brighttalk webcasts video reference architecture urban_design ecological_urbanism