Design Encyclopedia

Still in its early stages, The Design Encyclopedia is a user-built wiki-style resource that has the potential to be an essential tool for student and professional designers alike.

thanks Lindsay!

Spam Architecture

Romanian artist Alex Dragulescu make computer generated architectural and floral forms using variables from junk e-mail.

Just when you thought it was safe to eat breakfast...

CBS is advertising its Fall season on eggs. From CNNmoney.com comes this helpful quote:

"We recognize that viewers have busy lives and with 'egg-vertising' we have found a great way to reach them out of their homes and in their daily lives, but in a way that also brings the message back into their home - and literally onto the kitchen table," said George Schweitzer, president of the CBS Marketing Group, in a statement.

Read more here.

"Crop Cul-de-Sac: Matthew Moore’s land-art project on his family’s Arizona farm announces an alien invasion—suburbs"

By Randi Greenberg.

"Something is not quite right at Sycamore Farms. Located in Maricopa County, Arizona—one of the nation’s fastest-growing areas, including the sprawling cities of Phoenix and Scottsdale—the fourth-generation family farm’s crops are all arranged to mirror the layout of a forthcoming suburban development..."

... Continue reading the Metropolismag.com article...

Just say NO (to design awards)

There's heavy political debate going on over at Design Observer, where Michael Bierut posted an article about designers refusing to attend the National Design Awards hosted by Laura Bush at the White House. Here's a snippet of what the non-attending designers wrote in response to the invitation:

We understand that politics often involves high rhetoric and the shading of language for political ends. However it is our belief that the current administration of George W. Bush has used the mass communication of words and images in ways that have seriously harmed the political discourse in America. We therefore feel it would be inconsistent with those values previously stated to accept an award celebrating language and communication, from a representative of an administration that has engaged in a prolonged assault on meaning.

Read the entire letter and commentary here.

via

Rubber Sidewalks

Recycled tires are being used as a more flexible substitute to concrete for sidewalks. From the Christian Science Monitor article:

Some 130,000 square feet of rubberized sidewalks grace about 60 North American cities, giving local governments an alternative to concrete and its attendant pitfalls, such as rising prices, exorbitant trip-and-fall lawsuits, and a trail of chopped-down urban trees.
...

Unlike concrete, which is poured and set on location, the prefab rubber squares arrive from its California factory and are cut to fit. Installers usually place Rubbersidewalks pavers over a bed of crushed granite and connect the pavers using interlocking dowels. The result: a sidewalk with a two-inch-deep footprint - far shallower than its concrete cousins. To repair a rubber sidewalk, workers simply unlock the dowels and remove the individual paver.

Each square foot of rubberized sidewalk contains almost one discarded tire. Americans generate about 290 million waste tires a year, according to the Rubber Manufacturers Association in Washington - many of which languish in junk yards or are burned.

Read the entire article here.

Green Burials

At Greensprings Natural Cemetery you can carry your environmental principals to the grave. From the Newsvine article:

At Greensprings, where a plot costs $500 plus a $350 fee to dig the grave, bodies cannot be embalmed or otherwise chemically preserved. They must be buried in biodegradable caskets without linings or metal ornamentation. The cemetery suggests locally harvested woods, wicker or cloth shrouds. Concrete or steel burial vaults are not allowed. Nor are standing monuments, upright tombstones or statues.

Only flat, natural fieldstones are permitted as grave markers (they can be engraved). Shrubs or trees are preferred.

And only one person is allowed in each 15-foot-by-15-foot plot.

"This is more than just dig a hole in the woods and roll them in. We see it as a natural return to the Earth, becoming part of the circle of life," said Mary Woodsen, a lifelong conservationist and the cemetery's president.

Read the entire article here.

Thanks Charlie!

No more secrets?

It seems someone at the Secret Antiperspirant company reads blogs, since their new campaign "What's Your Secret" appears to be a direct ripoff of the popular PostSecret site.

However, while the original is funny, touching, and sad in equal parts and often has a cathartic effect for both the secret senders and readers, the corporate version is just trite and crass (see sample, with its odd stock photo, at left).

via

Backyard Biodiesel

The Christian Science Monitor reports on the growing number of people making their own biodiesel:

In his two-car garage, Kevin Newman is pouring used French fry oil from local restaurants into a pair of General Electric household water heaters - his version of the giant petroleum cracking towers found at an oil company refinery. He deftly moves hoses around, scrubs the impurities from the oil, performs chemical tests, and, voilà, a week later, he is filling-up his pickup truck with biodiesel. He figures his home refinery saves him and his business, which has six trucks, about $1.75 a gallon.

"If you can bake a cake, you can make biodiesel," says Mr. Newman.

With diesel at $3 a gallon, 50 cents more than last year, ingenious Americans like Newman are turning their garages and basements into mini-refineries. Websites publish instructions, community colleges offer classes, and biodiesel adherents give tours touting the improvement in exhaust emissions. Country and Western star Willie Nelson has his own "fresh farm biodiesel." Companies casually sell the equipment to turn used cooking oil into diesel as if owning your own refinery is part of the American dream.

Read the entire article here.

Girls on the Left, Boys on the Right

According to researchers in the UK, parents of female children are more likely to vote for left wing candidates. From the TimesOnline:

Professor Oswald and Dr Powdthavee drew their data from the British Household Panel Survey, which has monitored 10,000 adults in 5,500 households each year since 1991 and is regarded as an accurate tracker of social and economic change. Among parents with two children who voted for the Left (Labour or Lib Dem), the mean number of daughters was higher than the mean number of sons. The same applied to parents with three or four children. Of those parents with three sons and no daughters, 67 per cent voted Left. In households with three daughters and no sons, the figure was 77 per cent.

But it was the “switchers” who provided the most compelling evidence. By examining declared voting preferences for the period 1991 to 2004, Professor Oswald and Dr Powdthavee found that 539 people switched from Left to Right, and 802 switched from Right to Left. The most significant difference between these two groups of switchers? The voters who swung from Right to Left had borne, on average, more daughters.

Read the entire article here.

"Healing by Design"

The current issue of Ode has an article on how hospital architecture affects healing:

Many hospitals are “built catastrophes, anonymous institutional complexes run by vast bureaucracies, and totally unfit for the purpose they have been designed for,” writes Dutch architectural historian Cor Wagenaar in The Architecture of Hospitals, an international collection of groundbreaking studies, essays and hospital design plans published this summer by the Netherlands Architecture Institute. “They are hardly ever functional, and instead of making patients feel at home, they produce stress and anxiety.”
The consequences can be serious. Recent studies show that stress may hinder healing by intensifying pain, suppressing the immune system and causing heart problems, insomnia and depression. By inadvertently heightening patients’ stress, hospitals may be undermining patients’ recovery.

However there is a new hospital design movement arising:

The transformation is already happening at places like the new Rikshopitalet University Hospital in Oslo, Norway, where architects designed a large facility on a human scale inspired by the comforting layout of a traditional village. “To promote health is to promote security and well-being,” writes Arvid Ottar, chief architect of the new hospital. “For us, such feelings are linked strongly to the feeling of recognition. We felt that our solution lay more in the domain of town planning than architecture.”

Read the entire article here.

Sustainable Design Resource

renourish is a great new site dedicated to helping socially consicous folks find the resources they need (like paper, ink, printing, packaging, and more) to create more sustainable design! Especially useful for folks new to the concept.

via John at Social Design Notes, who just got back to town and already beat me to this great find at Houtlust!

Bicycle Trip Planner

The folks at byCycle have created a handy web based bicycle trip planner, which finds safe, swift routes through urban areas. Currently the service is only available in Portland, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh, but make a donation to this unfunded project in your city's honor and maybe you can convince them to add your town next!

Thanks Jen!

McDonald's Gym

It seems McDonald's is rebranding it's beleagured Playlands as "R Gyms". According to the Whittier Daily News:

A McDonald's in Whittier on Friday became the first in California to open an R Gym - a new play area that has stationary bicycles, basketball hoops, an obstacle course and other exercise activities aimed at getting children to work off calories consumed at the fast-food chain.

The nation's first R Gym opened at a McDonald's in Tulsa, Okla., in March. Eventually R Gyms will spring up at McDonald's restaurants around the country, replacing the old play areas that featured plastic tube runs and slides, officials said.

One unique feature is an interactive video game that lets children peddle along with characters on a videoscreen while exercising on a stationary bicycle.

via

Lil' CIA

Virtualpolitik has an entertaining review of the cartoon mascots used by various government agencies, including the NSA's trademarked Crypto Kid shown here.

via

Burqa's Eye View

Sara Terry, gives a perspective from inside a Burqa in Afghanistan using her cell phone camera. From her Backstory article in the Christian Science Monitor:

As odd as it may sound, I thought that a burqa might be the answer to my problems. Here on a five-week assignment to shoot photos for a humanitarian organization, I was dismayed to realize that I wasn't going to be able to move freely. There was a standing threat against Western women working for aid organizations - prime targets for kidnapping and sale to the Taliban. Understandably enough, the organization restricted my movements, rarely allowing me out on the street unless I was in a car - and never allowing me to go anywhere alone.

Read the entire article here.

Delawning

The New York Times has a nice article about the Edible Estates project:

In this quintessential 1950’s tract community about 25 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, the transformation of the Foti family’s front yard from one of grass to one dense with pattypan squash plants, cornstalks, millionaire eggplants, crimson sweet watermelons, dwarf curry trees and about 195 other edible varieties has been startling.

“The empty front lawn requiring mowing, watering and weeding previously on this location has been removed,” reads a placard set amid veggies in oval planting beds fronting the street.

The sign is a not-so-subtle bit of propaganda proclaiming the second and most recent installment of Edible Estates, an experimental project by Fritz Haeg, a 37-year-old Los Angeles architect and ersatz Frederick Law Olmsted. The project, which he inaugurated on the Fourth of July weekend in 2005 in a front yard in Salina, Kan., is part of a nascent “delawning” movement concerned with replacing lawns around the country with native plants, from prairie grasses in suburban Chicago to cactus gardens in Tucson.

Read the entire article here.

Thanks Amy!

The Competition.

A recent Adweek readers' survey on 33 top US ad agencies, asked respondents to also "list agencies they're talking about that weren't in the survey". Color me surprised to find my company got a mention:

ALR Design: an underdog trying to bring integrity and political conscientiousness to branding and advertising (and being largely ignored).

Many thanks to whomever thought we were worth mentioning (despite being largely ignored)!

Mr. Yuk

A flashback to a bit of social marketing from childhood (at least from mine). Mr. Yuk was very memorable as a kid and was apparently effective enough to still be in use today!



thanks Charlie!

Shameless Commercialism

For fun (and minimal profit) I've made some CafePress shirts for this blog.

...and yes we really are incorporated.

Taking the park for a walk.

Architecture students in Halifax, Nova Scotia, created a hamster wheel style park to encourage people to talk about the lack of public green spaces in their city.

Read more about the project in the Halifax Daily News.

Homecoming

I didn't have a chance to see Homecoming, Joe Dante's entry for the Showtime Masters of Horror series, when it aired on TV, but it looks like I'll have another opportunity to watch the anti-Bush zombie movie, that features undead soldiers retrning to cast their ballots in a national election, now that it's coming out on DVD this month.

Save the date.

I will be part of a Real World Panel Discussion on July 18th at C3 in Richmond, VA, which is just one of eight events that make up their 2 day Freelance and Small Biz Boot Camp.