herebenotions

Fruity

A series of fruit drink packaginginspired by the appearance of the skin of various fruits - the banana, kiwi or the strawberry. By the Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa. I love the tactile feeling created.  Such a simple idea, can't believe it's never been done before.

Design intent

This is wonderful!  The bench is 'designed' to prevent loitering, but people find a way around that.

From this very through provoking talk...

Dan Lockton: Design With Intent (Persuasive 2008)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: environment affordances)

You can read more about Design with Intent here.

What with Nudge and Sway rocketing up the best-seller lists, there's lots of interest in how people really make descisions.  No doubt the advertising world will be taking note eventually. 

Full of beans

Great crema art. I miss coffee.  3 months and counting since I last had any.  I used to get my daily dose from Flat White in Soho.  Best coffee in London. Do check them out.

Mundane visuals

A collection of image mosaics that visually compare peculiar mundane objects in urban space, ranging from office buildings, over fitness equipment devices to detailed car tail lights.

The artist, Mark Luthringer, says, "the typological array’s inherent ability to depict prevalence & repetition make it the perfect technique for examining the excess, redundancy, & meaningless freedom of our current age of consumption."

Via urbancom blog

idio

Idio is a new online personalized music and design magazine which went live on Friday.

Here’s how it works. Users are asked to identify themselves demographically and use sliders to express their varying interests in subjects like music genres.

Idio then selects from professionally licenced and user generated content to create a personalized Flash magazine for each user.

When reading Idio, users are asked to rate particular articles in a simple up down fashion. That data will further contribute to determining what articles are displayed for different readers.

Bloggers and other writers whose contributions are selected will be paid by revenue sharing from ads. Contributions can come through direct submission or a resyndicated RSS feed. The company says that advertisers are willing to pay a premium for microsites and rich media ads embedded in the magazine and so the revenue shared will be substantial. It will be very interesting to see who the first advertisers are - there's weren't any in the version produced for me after I signed up.

Whilst it's an interesting concept, success seems largely dependent on generating large amounts of interesting content.  Seems like a lot of work for the editors behind the scenes.  I couldn't find anywhere to sign-up as a contributor, and making it difficult for expert readers to contribute seems to be simply replicating the offline magazine model. Even with an element of personalisation, not utilising the key asset of the web - the people who use it - seems a little odd.  Will be fascinating to see how it survives in the web2.0 world.

There's posts about it here and here, via techcrunch and buzzshout.

Feels familiar

An airport story told in the language of airport infographics:

See the film at http://funwithstuff.com/dswmedia/airport.html

From Information Aesthetics 

Light up

Philips Lumalive textiles make it possible to create fabrics that carry dynamic advertisements, graphics and constantly changing color surfaces. More about it here.

Street tag-art

Saw a kid stop and stare down at the pavement when I was coming back from a meeting, so went over to have a look...

Suddenly seeing this street-tagging everywhere though....

So just checked out their website.  Nice design and content, a gallery for fans to upload street art, *love* the band bios and the sock puppets...

Music not so hot though.  Shame.

Branded barcodes

Japanese Design Barcode turns standard barcodes into appealing and engaging brand elements. Cute.

Found on Springwise (well worth a peep, some interesting things from around the world)