A glimpse inside Amazon's new bookstore.
“Amazon Books—like the surrounding mall—feels like it's predicated on anxiety. Its very existence may be meant as an answer to anxieties within the company about a persistent inability to overcome the question of ‘discovery,’ both for Amazon Publishing titles and in general—the company remains dependent on consumers finding products they’re interested elsewhere and then buying them, presumably at a discount, from their website. But other anxieties dictated what the store was allowed to become. The store is aggressively inoffensive. It is nice only insofar as it is bland and has good lighting and they let a customer take his pretty chill dog in. The store is the physical incarnation of a monolithic business of immense wealth that is changing the face of literature itself, but from within it is all very boring, safe, in an upscale grey palette kind of way.”
3D-printing earthquake-proof towns, brick by brick.
“Quake Column is an earthquake-resistant structure built from interlocking 3D-printed sand blocks. Inspired by ancient Incan construction, the angular blocks are designed to shift and resettle after a seismic event, unlike the rigid cemented-together rectangular blocks of most modern buildings. Such nested architectural components promise an easily scaled response to living in a seismic zone such as San Francisco. Builders could simply incorporate irregularly shaped 3D-printed blocks into their constructions and the resulting buildings would resettle rather than break apart after the big one hits.”
Exploring issues of morality and social culpability in design through gaming.
“When Prison Architect was first announced, some considered it to be in poor taste. What next? Concentration Camp Tycoon? As a matter of act, a game along those lines already exists: it's called Train and it was designed in 2009 by Brenda Braithwaite. The trick is that players don't understand at first that they're transporting innocents to a concentration camp, they are simply trying to solve a logistical problem involving loading boxcars. Only later are the precise nature of the human freight and its destination revealed, and the intention is to make a point about awareness and complicity: break anything down into a series of limited practical problems to be addressed and the monstrous totality of what is being done swims out of view.”
In his rather splendid book Design Your Life, Vince Frost asks … why?
“The humble question mark: A stroke and a dot creates a universe. A lightning strike. Over the centuries the symbol has taken on a life of its own. The Japanese and Chinese have now embraced it in their character set. In Arabic, which reads right to left, the question mark is the mirror image. It’s a universal symbol. ___? Fill in the blank. Who. What. Where. When. Easy to ask. Easy to answer. Why. A little word that asks so much. Three letters. So many possibilities. As a designer I question things constantly. ‘Why’ asks us to delve deep, to tap for answers. ‘Why’ is about getting information. We set out on a quest for an answer. The brief lays out the quest, and we begin to ask questions: what are the different ways to express the potential solutions? It’s simple. We do what any good designer does. We take an opportunity and turn it into something that is unique to the situation. Why is a gateway to possibility. Why is the door to a solution. Turn it around. Q: What happens if you don’t ask why? A: Nothing.”
Experimental psychology, packaging design and the peculiarities of sensory perception.
“Along the way, Spence has found that a strawberry-flavored mousse tastes ten per cent sweeter when served from a white container rather than a black one; that coffee tastes nearly twice as intense but only two-thirds as sweet when it is drunk from a white mug rather than a clear glass one; that adding two and a half ounces to the weight of a plastic yogurt container makes the yogurt seem about twenty-five per cent more filling, and that bittersweet toffee tastes ten per cent more bitter if it is eaten while you’re listening to low-pitched music. This year alone, Spence has submitted papers showing that a cookie seems harder and crunchier when served from a surface that has been sandpapered to a rough finish, and that Colombian and British shoppers are twice as willing to choose a juice whose label features a concave, smile-like line rather than a convex, frown-like one.”
That is all.