“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.”