“This web site contains material from an ongoing doctoral project… Embedding spatial parameters and properties in new products of architecture through an integrated design process.”

“This article is a summary of findings from a workshop held in November of 2001 and another in January 2002 on the subject of brands, branding, and how they might evolve in the future. It is meant as a kind of document from the future sent back to the present, but from several possible futures instead of merely one. To be sure, these futures are extreme, and purposely so. They are designed to push the world of branding into dynamics that haven+t and may never happen but still illuminate for us how they interact with each other, the market, and ourselves in a way that is difficult to see otherwise.”

“The visual system needs to determine the color of objects in the world. In this case the problem is to determine the gray shade of the checks on the floor. Just measuring the light coming from a surface (the luminance) is not enough: A cast shadow will dim a surface, so that a white surface in shadow may be reflecting less light than a black surface in full light. The visual system uses several tricks to determine where the shadows are and how to compensate for them, in order to determine the shade of gray ‘paint’ that belongs to the surface.”

“Where do creative people get their inspiration? Ted Hughes likened it to fishing, while JG Ballard thinks it has more to do with whisky. Here, psychologist Guy Claxton reveals why we’re all more creative than we think, while Kate Mikhail talks to 10 gifted individuals about the source of their bright ideas.”

“The smiley :-) and its many variants are an important (and fun!) part of the worldwide online social culture — allowing emotions to be conveyed in plain text. It has been in widespread use since the early 80s, when it was first proposed. Yet the original message in which the smiley was invented had been lost — until now. After a significant effort to locate it, on September 10, 2002 the original post made by Scott Fahlman on CMU CS general bboard was retrieved by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax (cmu-750x).”

“The most important event in thousands of years has happened: We have contacted extraterrestrial life… The alien ambassadors will be staying in the finest hotel in New York. However, their bodies are quite different from ours, so many of the things in their hotel room simply will not work. We need you to redesign these objects for the ambassadors. You’ll need to apply the principles of industrial design to make sure they are comfortable and safe.”

“Welcome to the digital library of MIT Theses, a collection of selected MIT master’s and doctoral theses available online. Please note that this is NOT a complete collection of MIT theses. It includes only theses that were scanned by Document Services in the past few years, for printing or electronic delivery to requesters. The range of years represented in the collection, however, is 1888 to present.”

“The inspiration behind the new project, [Dave Stewart] explains fervently and at length, has been the complete failure of the entertainment industries — particularly the music business — to nurture talent. The creative industries are, he says, increasingly beset by corruption and rely, increasingly, on soulless corporate tactics that demolish talent and individuality just to boost short-term profits.”

“Over the years, HTML has only become bigger, never smaller, because new versions had to maintain backward compatibility. That’s about to change. On 5 August 2002, the first working draft of XHTML 2.0 was released and the big news is that backward compatibility has been dropped; the language can finally move on. So, what do you as a developer get in return? How about robust forms and events, a better way to look at frames and even hierarchical menus that don’t require massive amounts of JavaScript.”

“…there is no better introduction to the chaotic nature of the [New York City] than its airports… ‘New York airports were among the most confusing in the world,’ said Paul Mijksenaar, the 57-year-old Dutch designer, who has been brought in by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to redo the obtuse airport signs… As an information designer, Mr. Mijksenaar’s specialty is taming chaos. Over the last two years, he has begun to turn the perplexing welter of signs at Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark into an orderly series of transitions that will ultimately replace more than 5,000 dated and confusing ones, easing the way for some 90 million travelers each year.”

“Welcome the the Ziggy Stardust 30th Anniversary Site. Make sure to contribute your Ziggy Stardust memories, reflections, photos and imagery to be featured in this new site.”

“Can design change the world? I don’t pretend that social and political problems can be solved with technology, but tools, technologies, and techniques of communication can profoundly alter our relationship to the world, to power, and to each other. This Web log is a collection of notes on the built environment, graphic design, product design, architecure, the decisions we make, and the impact they have. It is an exploration and a work in progress.”

“It’s time the great advertising lines earned some recognition. Slogans, straplines, taglines, end lines, payoffs, claims and signatures — even some headlines. The Advertising Slogan Hall Of Fame, sponsored by ADSlogans Unlimited, recognizes excellence and best practice in advertising, benchmarking creativity — identifying the best in branding.”

“Okay, there are a lot of art forgeries but only a small subset of these forgeries graduate to become their own genre of performance art. I’ll highlight a good example or two here and leave further investigation as an exercise for the reader.”

“Virginia Postrel, the author of The Future and Its Enemies, writes the Economic Scene column for The New York Times business section every fourth Thursday. Her new book, The Age of Look and Feel will be published by HarperCollins in June 2003. In the book, she explores the economic, cultural, social, personal and political implications of the growing importance of aesthetics in business and society.”