This one’s dedicated to all the students working on their final thesis or senior project. It shows the suffering on deadlines, doubts and dreads that artists and designers have to fight against while trying to finish their work.

Bang-yao Liu, a student from the Savannah College of Art and Design made it subject to his senior project. For him post-it notes were the real enemies in his work.

This is my senior project at Savannah College of Art and Design. Where my idea comes from is that every time when I am busy, I feel that I am not fighting with my works, I am fighting with those post-it notes and deadline. I manipulating the post-it notes to do pixel-like stop motion and there are some interactions between real actor and post-its.

So if you are suffering too much make it topic of your thesis to deal with your psychological creativity blocades before you enter real life. Interesting is also the making-of movie.
Found via Wooster Collective.

Good50×70 is a project that collects poster designs and provides it to charitable institutions like Amnesty International, Greenpeace or the WWF. The makers call it “Creativity for free” – the creative community should be a “force for good”. Yet they stemmed already fifteen workshops, twenty exhibitions and over 4,000 posters – a respectable success. (Image credits: Simonluca Definis).

The next exhibition of the posters will be held at La Triennale Gallery in Milan. The exhibition will open on the 19th of June, and will end on the 12th of July. The exhibition will be preceded by a set of workshops led by three of Good 50×70’s jury members: Alain Le Quernec, Woody Pirtle and Yossi Lemel. The workshops will all take place at different schools in Milan on the 15th, 16th and 17th of June.

However I think that one poster is missing – it is a graffiti we found in Sydney. Seb saved it on a picture.

Did you ever think about what positive effect daylight has when it is streaming into a room? Of course we know that light makes us feel good and bright. But what about the patterns on the wall it creates?

“Daylight in a room indoor gives information or signs of something outside the physical room. These signs give us a subconcious feeling that our perceived space is larger than the physical room. The contrast betwwen and indoor decreases.”

That is what Daniel Rybakken knows about the relation between light and room – and with this in mind he created “Surface Daylight”, a light panel with light in the surface and therefore simulating streaming daylight into a room. With his project he won the Design Report Award 2009 at the SaloneSatellite in Milan.

I think this award found the right winner. The project is amazing as it uses the latest technology in light (and shows what can be achieved with it) in an ubiquitous and aesthetically appealing way.

Historically Germans are known to be very efficient. Also Germans are known to be clean – designwise you can see it in the “form follows function” feever that was born in Germany’s Ulm School, but today Germans have a good reputation in sustainable engineering and alternative energies.

Additionally Germans are known to be the world champions in waste separation. Here is a good example for an “invisible design” in the sense of Lucius Burckhardt. The task here was rather “we need a container to collect the separated rubbish” then “we want to offer our residents an environment of sustainablility”.

The outcome is this monumental trash grading device that I found near Neumarkt in central Cologne. Designs like this (some would call it no-design indeed) happen everyday and are made by administrators who are not able to see the full picture and integrate one object into a whole system of things.

I guess it is better to be very cautious to what futurologists want to tell us – like a medicine man they are trailing through the country to sell their future tales. Why they can be successfull? Because sometimes we just want to believe what they tell us, especially when it is good news.

Now, Matthias Horx, one of the German quacksalvers, wants to know that the virtual community euphoria is already in decline. Companies would already establish e-mail free days and people would call themselves “ex-onliners”: they left the virtual space to improve their quality of life.

What good news! So finally we can get rid of the many online platforms we participate in and that take hours to keep them updated and filled with social activity. Soon we will probably get back to meeting for a hot drink in a nice an cozy café… time to close one or two of our face books.

The new X-ray scanners make anything visible that is under your clothes (photo via BBC).

“Europe delays airport X-ray eye” was what I read on BBC News today. Subject was the plan of the E.U. to introduce full body scanners that scan the whole body of passengers at security checks on European airports. The plan is now delayed as the members of the European Parliament (MEP) voted for a further study on the implications for privacy and health.

Scanners that make the whole naked body of a passenger visible to the security staff – a sick surveillance idea that cannot be found even in the repertoire of George Orwell’s “1984″. Unbelievable in first hand is the fact, that passengers (=human beings with their own privacy) are confronted with machines that have such a deep impact on their privacy without being warned – if not by coincident the topic stumbles onto the front pages of newspapers, tv’s and websites.

Well, so our MEPs decided that the “implications for privacy and health” should be further examined. So what was the primary object of study? Which amount of electromagnetic or X-ray radiation is necessary for operating the full body scan? Or how easily the scanner is in handling? How much time it consumes to expose the passenger?

There is a huge problem with new technologies: machines are primarily or even only tested on their physical effects, but not on their implications for society and humanity. How does the new full body scanners effect people whose small breasts and penises, love handles or artificial anuses become visible? What happens if pictues from the scanners find their way into the internet (as we know it is a common thing that especially in the U.K. data get lost now and then)? How is human dignity affected by such measures?

When it comes to new technologies, the societal and human implications definetely have to be the first that need to be regarded. As an act of humaneness, there is no other possibility. In this case, however, it is not even a matter of social research, but a matter of justice: Full body scanners simply offend our basic rights.

Yesterday I sat down on a bench in a metro station in Bonn when a woman sitting next to me spilled coffee on her coat. She was shirty – presumably the nipple of her coffee to go was leaking. After asking another woman for a tissue and cleaning up the mess, she took out a book and started reading: the title of the book was “Mieses Karma” (engl.: Bad Karma).

Can something like this happen by chance? It seemed like the book’s content jumped over to the cup. So: Can objects have a bad karma? If then, designers as object specialists should have knowledge of the metaphysical side-effects of their products and “karmic design theory” has to be on the curricula soon.

Here is a fantastic idea for those nerds that completely organize their social life in virtual networks like facebook, studivz, myspace or else: With this shirt that shows a QR Code containing your profile ID, you don’t even have to talk to people on streets anymore. They can just take a picture of your code with their mobile phone and will then be directed to your facebook profile.

This is quite clever as it redirects more sociality to the internet and away from our public areas. How boring to see people communicating in cafes or on down in the street. Moreover it offers completely new ways for stalkers – they can now easily track their object of desire. And our governments will also be happy to be able to observe and allocate people more easily. There’s a lot of advantages for sure in this brilliant idea! Reminds me a bit of convicts wearing their registration number. Really a fashion for passionate Continue Reading »

From Studio Düsburg, a studio for experimental architecture, comes an interesting architecture project that deals with the re-intergration and transformation of former industrial areas into modern lifestyle and culture.

The “Autobahn 59″ is a highway built in the sixties and connects parts of the Rhein-Ruhr-Area in North-South direction. Even today it is a construction of high technical standard, because a lot of parts of the highway are bridges. Near to the exit Duisburg-Marxloh there used to be a railroad bridge. When the railroad track went out of use they reconstructed Continue Reading »

In times of sustainability and environmental friendly products there is kind of a new field in design that gains attention. »Social Design« becomes more and more popular. Even UNESCO is partnering actions around the issue, e. g. in »Design21 – The Social Design Network«:

Are you a socially conscious designer, non Continue Reading »