Jean Prouvé "Antony" Chair from Vitra

This is a beautiful chair, amazing construction and design. I used to own one....now that I'm moving across the country, I decided to give it away, but I thought I would tell you about it, just because it's so purty...though not the most comfortable chair ever.

here's some background:

Official authorized version by the Prouve estate, produced by Vitra Germany. Designed in 1954 by Jean Prouve. Jean Prouvé (1901-1984) was one of the major designers of the 20th Century. Outside of France only a relatively small circle of collectors and cognoscente are familiar with his work. For many years now, Prouvé's work has formed a key focus of the Vitra Design Museum Collection.

Many connoisseurs regard Antony as Prouvé's finest design. This chair stands out by virtue of its unconventional construction producing a sturdy yet dynamically curvaceous form. It makes a great lounge or living room chair, or a simple and elegant bedroom chair to read a book on.

Frame made of black lacquered steel rods. Seatshell made of molded wood, lacquered white.

H 34.5" x W 20" x D 22.5"

Seat Height 16"

Cute Flash Design Studio - Knowawall

nice projects, a recognizable style, interesting clients...what more could you ask for?

oh, a name that people can spell. Sorry guys, but it's true: say this one out loud to someone and watch them try to understand what you're saying:

http://www.knowawall.com/

Other than that, these guys are great. They're doing a site for Maya Lin among others and have won a few nice awards. I've already referred a few people to them who are looking for cool Flash sites.

The main reason i snicker at the name is that when i first heard of them, i Googled them (of course) and i found the lyrics to a Country song. (enjoy!)

(i have provided just the chorus here, but if you're hungerin' for more, just google "Know a Wall")

"
Song: I Know A Wall When I See One by J.B. Rudd/Jerry Salley

I know a wall when I see one
And I'm looking at one right now
Heartaches written all over this one
One I can't get around
Where's a door when you need one
I know a wall when I see one
I know a wall
"
etc.

Recycled Cardboard "Log" Cabin

My friend Stephan von Muehlen built this rad little log cabin out of recyclable materials from Build It Green NYC -- a nice and cosy bedroom, no?

He was inspired by a 2005 show at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan featuring refugee housing...

Sarah Cox from Dwell Magazine blogged about it here :
"He constructed the cabin in five days by building a deck with storage underneath and attaching vertical plywood fasteners to hold the tubes at each corner. The cabin features a corrugated plastic ceiling and, like any good winter enclosure, the walls are insulated–in this case with a layer of felt window gasketing between each tube."

Free InDesign Library - Wireframe Elements

Here are some useful wireframe elements I put together to share. Feel free to grab this file and add your own stuff to it. If you have any great items you want to share, please send them to me so I can add them!

This library works on Adobe InDesign CS2 for Mac and Windows.

I hope Interaction Designers who haven't tried InDesign will do so now....I prefer it to Visio any day.

Feel free to leave comments/suggestions.

download the file here >

you will also need the Vector Safari from oddlaa.com.

Here is a sample document that shows them all: download the indd >

thanks,
maya

Report from the TED conference

Jordan Ayan has a great blog with lots of info about the recent TED conference. He's also put up a photo album of the conference.

check it out >

Reblog: Blast from the ITP Past

thanks so much to Jonah of Coin-Operated for the link!



Rania Ho’s “Modem” video is a great reminder of Internet connectivity from the not-so-distant past! Check out the video above - it’s a ton of people making that “modem” sound we all love. If you squint you might be able to see Jonah in the vid somewhere..

TED Award Honorees Describe How They Hope to Improve the World

From a NY Times article. I'm a big fan of Partners in Health. Make sure you check out the related links at the bottom:

MONTEREY, Calif., March 8 — Some 1,200 rich and influential people were encouraged Thursday night to help build medical clinics in Rwanda, identify millions of unnamed species and support efforts to report on a still-secret story.

The challenge was part of the annual TED Prize, the centerpiece of the annual TED conference, named for the confluence of technology, entertainment and design.

Last fall, the conference organizers named this year’s prize winners: former President Bill Clinton, the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson and the photographer James Nachtwey. Now, several months later, the winners have made public their projects. The foundation that runs TED is awarding each of them $100,000, and attendees are encouraged to contribute toward the goals.

Mr. Clinton asked for help for his foundation in building a rural health care system for Rwanda.

Dr. Wilson wanted assistance in creating an “Encyclopedia of Life,” an Internet database to catalog the 1.8 million known species of living things and identify perhaps 10 times as many more.

Mr. Nachtwey said he needed diplomatic contacts to travel to the site of a “big story that the world needs to know about,” but he declined to specify his topic. He said when he returns, he wants to create unusual ways to display his photographs.
...

President Clinton’s foundation has been working with a Boston organization, Partners in Health, for 18 months to rebuild the health care system in a part of Rwanda, constructing a hospital and four clinics offering free care and preventative health services. The results have been so successful that the government has agreed to extend the system to the entire country.

read the whole article on NYTimes.com >

Related Links:

* The TED Prize
* The EO Wilson Biodiversity Foundation
* William J. Clinton Foundation
* Partners in Health
* Jamesnachtwey.com

Webcast on Digital Design and Geometry in Architecture

From Kevin Walker, who says they are going to webcast this cool seminar (please note the time is UK time)

Subject: Maths-Art Seminars at London Knowledge Lab: Digital Design
and Geometry in Architecture, Foster & Partners, 13 March 2007

DIGITAL DESIGN AND GENERATIVE GEOMETRY IN ARCHITECTURE:
THE WORK OF FOSTER AND PARTNERS? SPECIALIST MODELLING GROUP

An LKL Maths-Art seminar by
Brady Peters and Xavier De Kestelier,
Foster & Partners, London

Tuesday 13 March, 6.00 - 7.30pm

Foster and Partners is an international studio for architecture,
planning and design led by Norman Foster and a group of Senior
Partners. The advent of digital technologies has allowed the practice
to design and build structures with complex geometric forms that would
not have been feasible as little as twenty years ago. The practice's
in-house Specialist Modelling Group (SMG) has introduced a highly
advanced three-dimensional computer modelling capability that allows
architects both to explore design solutions rapidly and to communicate
data to consultants and contractors.

The SMG, currently a team of seven, was formed in 1997 and has been
involved in over 100 projects, providing consultancy in advanced 3-D
modelling techniques, and the creation of custom digital tools. SMG
expertise encompasses architecture, art, maths and geometry,
environmental analysis, geography, programming and computation, urban
planning, and rapid prototyping.

The SMG specialists are a new breed of architectural designer, the
digital design specialist, requiring an education based in design,
maths, geometry, computing, and analysis. Digital design specialists
use geometry as a means of description and as a way to harness the
complexity of a building design, seeking to use science in an artistic
manner. This requires a new range of skills, which are not part of
architects' training and thus one of the roles of the SMG is the
education of architects in the use of digital techniques and the role
of geometry in design of buildings.

Brady and Xavier, both members of the SMG, will introduce the Group's
work, and also the work of the SmartGeometry Group
(smartgeometry.com), an independent, international organisation
involving experts from leading architectural practices and CAD
software houses, whose aim is to advance education and research in the
area of 3D CAD applications.


TIME: 6 - 7.30pm, Tuesday 13 March 2007
PLACE: London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald St, London, WC1N 3QS
[Travel information / Maps at:
http://www.lkl.ac.uk/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=42&Itemid=32
]

All welcome. No reservation required, but an email to
lkl.maths.art@gmail.com would be appreciated.

The seminar will be webcast live at: www.lkl.ac.uk/cms/live. A video
recording will then be available at the LKL event video archive.

Join the email list for future seminar announcements:
http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/lkl-maths-art

LEMURplex Performance, Gallery, Learning: Space

LEMURplex Performance, Gallery, Learning: Space

i heart LEMUR!!!!

TED Starts Today! Wednesday March 7th

TED Talks are absolutely amazing, make sure you see them all online at http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/.



There's an article in the NY Times on TED entitled: "Where Artists and Inventors Plot to Save the World" check it out >

Here is a pretty good Business Week article that can give you some more background:

Forget Davos: I'm Booked Up For TED
The Monterey thinkfest has become Silicon Valley's -- and Tinseltown's -- place to be seen

Long before Google (GOOG ) bought YouTube and iTunes began hawking Grey's Anatomy episodes, Silicon Valley was trading secret handshakes with Hollywood at an exclusive gathering on the California coast. Beginning in 1984, high-rolling techies mixed with entertainers and others to trade big ideas at the TED (technology, entertainment, and design) conference, held in recent years in Monterey. The Apple (AAPL ) Macintosh was first unveiled during TED. Wired magazine received its first seed money there. And last year Google used the occasion to appoint Larry Brilliant head of its billion-dollar charitable arm, Google.org....Read the rest of the BusinessWeek article

More Lunar Eclipse photos from Flickr

from someone named anieteke...

lunar eclipse

we watched it from Brooklyn-- it was amazing-- strange and beautiful. It was especially nice to get some perspective, as one kind of forgets, living in NY, that we are on a larger planet that consists of more than just NY.

These photos are from the BBC's reader submissions slideshow

They also have a good article on lunar eclipses.

$100 Laptop: Not Enough User Testing?

There's a good Business Week article with a slideshow that's worth checking out. It talks about the Graphical User Interface (called Sugar) on the famous laptops (XO and the "one laptop per child" program is an idea that arose out of the "failure of standard attempts to use computers in education to improve the lives of underprivileged children")

To quote the article, "Typically, a handful of computers, designed for business applications, are installed in schools; students only use them in special computer classes and are forced to share. Negroponte's idea was to give a laptop to each student that he or she could take to every class and bring home at the end of the day. "OLPC is child-centric, designed to be a seamless part of their lives at home, at school, and in play," he says."

What is shocking to me is that they apparently did not do any user testing. This goes for both the hardware and the software. The article quotes John Maeda as saying,"They're backed up by John Maeda, a user-interface design guru from the Media Lab who has been watching the XO development process from its beginnings. 'They're using the Steve Jobs method,' he says, referring to Apple's famous chief executive and design whiz. 'You don't use focus groups. You just do it right.'"

Will they have guessed what underprivileged kids want and how they behave on a computer correctly? We'll find out in the next few months...

Visual Apartment Search Maps

here's a new one: hotpads.com

A lot like Housingmaps, which uses Craigslist as a source and Google Maps as an interface to show you photos of apartments right on the map, HotPads just got started and is still working out some interface/design issues but they have a good solid Flash interface with some cool features like links to specific neighborhoods and neighborhood info (pulled in from Wikipedia), which, if you are moving to a new city, is very important. For example, I learned that notable residents of the neighborhood I would like to move to include OJ Simpson, who grew up there, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Must be a fun neighborhood!

here is a direct link to the San Francisco rentals map if you want to check it out. The NY City one's good too.

Mac Market Share Now 6.38%

Interesting news. Sounds like the Intel Macs were a bit conversion-booster.

from Apple 2.0:

Apple's (AAPL) market share has grown to 6.38% according to a new survey by Net Applications (details here). The results are based on a survey of browser visits to some 40,000 URLs and break the stats down between non-Intel (4.29%) and Intel (2.09%) machines. According to MacDailyNews, which has been tracking these numbers, this represents an increase of 2.05% over the past six months.