Observatory

A Nod to Surrealism

By John Foster
In the image-driven web world most of us frequent today—Tumblr, Flickr, and Pinterest, for example — we are bombarded with images that beg us to look twice. It’s relatively easy to create a yellow zebra with blue stripes, if that’s what suits your fancy. Masterful digital imaging can bring us whatever level of Surrealism you may desire — if you can imagine it, it can be done with pixel manipulation. For artists not working in digital media — those who cut, build, draw, paint, glue, bend, and make things in the more traditional manner — there is something of a “Surrealist” popularity at hand today.

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Change Observer

The SunWater Project: Advanced Solar Technology for Poor Farmers

By Paul Polak
Farmers need a reliable, low-cost water pumping system so that they can grow cash crops to increase their incomes. They also need electric power to add value to their crops (grinding, processing, etc.). Current pumping systems cost too much or are unreliable. How can we radically reduce the purchase price of solar PV powered pumping systems along with technologies that efficiently transport irrigation water?

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Change Observer

Transforming Solar Pumping to Eliminate Rural Poverty

By Paul Polak
If I want to water my petunias, I turn on the tap outside my house, hold my thumb over the end of a battered green hose, and water away. If a small farmer in Ghana or China wants to water a small patch of vegetables he’s growing to sell in the local market, he breaks his back hauling water in two buckets or sprinkling cans from a nearby stream. It takes six hours a day every other day for three months to water a tenth of an acre of vegetables that he hopes to sell for $100.

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Observer Media

Jessica Walsh

By Debbie Millman
On this episode of Design Matters, Debbie talks to Jessica Walsh about selling moss covered rocks to her elementary school classmates, her quick assent in the world of design, becoming a partner with Stefan Sagmeister and, of course, taking those naked pictures.

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Observatory

The Conceptual Posters of Boris Bucan

By Rick Poynor
What still seems surprising about the posters Boris Bućan designed in the late 1960s and early 1970s for the Student Center Gallery, the Zagreb Drama Theater, and other Croatian clients is how confidently reductive they are. If this is not quite anti-design, it is certainly design gripped by a powerful sense of restraint. I recall my first impression of the posters in a gallery. The images seemed sharply defined, cerebral and enigmatic.

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Observatory

Finding The Story

By Rob Walker
When Emily Spivack points to product descriptions on eBay, and reveals them to be funny, poignant, or otherwise surprisingly meaningful stories and narratives, she’s up to something effective, and affecting. What looked to the rest of us like mere detritus, the marketplace vernacular of a virtual nation trying to hustle a buck from used goods, gets transformed. Now these are tales of love, of memory, emotion, misadventure, family, fame.

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Observatory

Anxiety, Culture and Commerce

By Alexandra Lange
In recent years, it has become a slam to say, of design collections and exhibitions, that they looked like a shop. When I take my son to the MoMA design collection, he looks in their glass fronted cases and sees the same Massimo Vignelli for Heller plates we have in our glass fronted cabinets at home. Should the difference be obvious? Or is the ability to experience design as a consumer how we spark an interest in history? A series of panels I've organized at MAD examines these questions in the past, present and future.


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Observatory

The Alphabet Card

Kit Hinrichs and Delphine Hirasuna
The year 1913 marked the peak of the picture postcard craze. Even though the population in America was less than 100 million, nearly 970 million picture postcards were sold in the U.S. alone. At a time when most people did not own a camera and color commercial printing was in its infancy, the little picture postcards were a delight to view. Collecting and displaying picture postcards in scrapbooks became a popular pastime. Manufacturers encouraged this by issuing postcards in sets so that the public would want to own the whole series.

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Places

Digital Deception

By Belmont Freeman
The technologies of representing architecture have advanced steadily over the years, from drawing to photography to digital rendering — and have lately taken a new leap. As Belmont Freeman argues, "the crafts of architectural rendering and photography have now merged into a common activity of digital image-making — so completely that one can conceive a work of architecture and produce a 'photograph' of it without having to go through the expensive, tedious and corrupting intermediate step of actually building the building. Welcome to the world of architectural photography without architecture."

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Observatory

The Tower that Beer Built

By Mark Lamster
Somewhat unwittingly, I have embarked on a series of pieces on skyscrapers born of alcoholic beverage magnates. The Seagram Building was the product of the (bootleg) whiskey fortune amassed by Sam Bronfman. In Dallas, we have the Kirby (nee Busch) Building, now a residential apartment house but originally a spec office tower financed by the St. Louis beer barron Adolphus Busch. Like the Woolworth in Building in New York, it celebrates its centennial this year.

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Observatory

The Medium Is The Mail

By Rob Walker
Something surprising arrived in the mail not long ago: actual mail. Jill Stoll's "random acts of mail art" combines artistic ritual, creative reuse, and the postal service as unexpected connector. It's a distinctly analog project — with a digital twist. And it made my day.

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Observatory

Audrey Real Helfand: Designer Manquée

By Jessica Helfand
On this Mother's Day we present Jessica Helfand's tribute to her mother, Audrey Real Helfand: designer manquée.
Where design was concerned, my mother was indefatigable: a passionate classicist, a committed modernist, she had a mind that never quit and the aesthetic fervor to match it. Back then, she was my adorable visual mother. Today, she’d be running her own design studio.

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Change Observer

8 Ways to Grow New York’s Design Sector

By Center for an Urban Future
New York City is home to more designers than any other U.S, city and a top location in the world for cutting-edge design. NYCxDESIGN — the city’s first citywide design festival, launching this week —builds on much of that activity to increase awareness about what design is and what it can do. But there is more the city can do to solidify New York’s claim as a capital of design.

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Observer Media

Ben Chestnut and Aarron Walter

By Debbie Millman
On this episode of Design Matters, Debbie Millman talks to Mailchimp's CEO Ben Chestnut and User Expereince Lead Aarron Walter about how they arrived where they are, why and how email marketing is fun, Freddie the monkey and how to create creativity.

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Observatory

The Age of Wire and String Rebooted

By Rick Poynor
The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus is a fiction of incomparable strangeness. What and where is the world that its stories describe with such dedicated observational precision? A new edition from the London literary publisher Granta has pulled off the improbable feat of making the book seem even stranger. Its visual interpretation by British artist and illustrator Catrin Morgan goes way beyond the norm for an illustrated book.

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Places

Temple of the Vanities

Thomas Jorion & Josh Wallaert
A century from now, when architectural historians consider how humans lived in the 20th century, most will look to the commercial centers of great cities and read therein a story about the rise of global capitalism. But perhaps a few will take a cue from archaeology and look instead to the modern temples: defense towers, nuclear reactors and industrial facilities sited in remote forests and on rocky coastlines, wherever there was oil to extract or a shipping lane to defend. Paris-based photographer Thomas Jorion has been documenting these structures in a series about vanity; here we present a portfolio of recent work.

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Observatory

Our Shopping Lists, Our Selves

By Jessica Helfand
Lists are the practical roadmaps by which we quantify our obligations. They're scorecards for accomplishment, spreadsheets for success. At once truncated and annotated, they urge us to consider hierarchy and value, want and need. Lists embrace both duty (what we’re meant to do) and aspiration (what we yearn to do), thereby perpetuating the enduring illusion that maybe we’re actually making progress.

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Observatory

Paranoid But Pretty

By John Thackara
In his new show at the German Architecture Center (DAZ) Matthias Megyeri has developed a design language for the artefacts of protection and security in public space. Megyeri poses the question: does protection have to be inconsistent with harmony and beauty? His answer is a family of padlocks, chains, fences, and razor wire that he describes as ‘lovable objects’. Megyeri’s show prompted me to Google “design” and “homeland security” once again and question: "Are we safer?"

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Places

Please Save Modernism from the Modern

By David Heymann
The Museum of Modern Art's decision to tear down the Folk Art Museum has incited huge controversy and intense debate. But as David Heymann argues, "While some claim the Folk Art Museum should be preserved because it’s a great Modernist building, and therefore part of the MoMA collection, rather than its campus, no one has unequivocally answered the question of why it is so. The discourse remains one of opinions asserted as imperatives: I love it / I never liked it / it must be saved / tear it down. So I think it’s an important question. Here is why I think the American Folk Art Museum is a great Modernist building."

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Observatory

New York + London: A Vision of Home

By Daniella Zalcman
When I moved from New York City to London late last year, I decided to create a series of double exposures. The images are part New York, part London, and collectively represent my vision of home.

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Observatory

Enjoying TypeToy

By John Foster
This week's Accidental Mysteries highlights the blog TypeToy — an online collection of mid-century design and typography created by Aaron Eiland. According to Aaron, the name of the blog is derived from the playfulness he sees from much of the work of that era.

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Observer Media

Wendy MacNaughton and Caroline Paul

By Debbie Millman
On this episode of Design Matters, Debbie Millman talks to Wendy MacNaughton and Caroline Paul about their first book collaboration, Lost Cat; Wendy's journey from advertising to Rwanda to illustration; and Caroline's path from Stanford to firefighter to author.

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Places

Expect Everything

Peter Holzhauer & Aaron Rothman
Since moving to Los Angeles several years ago, photographer Peter Holzhauer has amassed a significant body of work on the city. As Places photo editor Aaron Rothman writes, "because the city has been so heavily mythologized — as paradise or dystopia, or both — it can be difficult to resolve the idea of L.A. with its actual presence. Holzhauer's photographs — a graffitied tree suffused with Southern California light, a Jiffy Lube glowing in the night, a nondescript building with Korean signage topped by a billboard for a luxury condo —are balanced perfectly between materiality and idea." We're pleased to present a selection of Holzhauer's recent work.

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Change Observer

Harnessing the Power of Surprise

By Soren Kaplan
Think about the first time you picked up an iPod, iPhone or iPad and experienced the touchscreen as an extension of your fingertips. Reflect back on the first time you played the Nintendo Wii, drove a Toyota Prius, used Purell hand sanitizer, discovered the trendy design of Method soap, visited Starbucks, or saw Cirque du Soleil. The list of the usual suspects of breakthroughs could go on and on. Though these things are all quite different from one another, they tend to produce similar feelings of positive surprise — with a hint of delight, wonder, and intrigue — when we first encounter them.

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Observatory

The 99 Factor: A Man About Town & Country

By Owen Edwards
I was recently reminiscing about a hero of mine and sometime mentor, Frank Zachary, one of the last of the great editors and art directors of what now seems the golden age of magazines, who turned ninety-nine not long ago. I worry that those of us who knew Frank, and were lucky enough to work for him, are getting older ourselves, and that his tremendous talent and eye for editorial photography is no longer known by many in the graphic design and magazine worlds.

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