While it’s easy to smile at stories of people changing their lightbulbs from incandescent to compact fluorescents, or choosing to ride to work on a bike over driving a car, it takes more than anecdotal blips at the grass roots level to feel confident that a sea change in attitudes and behaviors is happening in the face of our looming environmental crisis. Sometimes it takes knowing that Big Capital is playing on the same team — a dicey proposition however you cut it, given that powerful corporations are the worst offenders and their political influence and financial machinations ensure that their loyal politicians sit out badly needed regulatory measures to keep those very corporations in heed.

All of which is why stories, such as this one in Vanity Fair about General Electric and its young and dynamic CEO Jeffrey Immelt, seem so encouraging. When the second largest company in the world, after Wal-Mart (which too has recently embraced sustainability). His emphasis, for better or worse, is not ‘about being trendy or moral. It’s about accelerating economic growth.’ Green must beget green, in other words. Schmarmy as that may seem, it is realpolitik; for a shift in the environmental practices of major corporations can’t be catalyzed unless they are convinced of that shift’s benefits in terms of the bottom line.

 

A nice post today on Motionographer likening the experiential and technological melding of web / interactive with motion graphics design as Kid Convergence, the unformed but quickly maturing love child between two distinct (at least until recently) but lovingly compatible mediums.

The post offers up two recent examples to underscore the convergence: Designgraphik’s (designer Mike Young’s — one half of the excellent YWFT – ongoing web experiment) — a mostly linear flash and video clickthru experience – and the Nike Air campaign minisite (a showcase of Nike’s upcoming line of 180 and 360 performance kicks), employing a VJ-like keyboard interface to activate psychedelic video effects, produced by DUMBO-based Big Spaceship.

An interesting piece in the International Herald Tribune about the current fascination with the Georgia font (not familiar? hint: you’re reading Georgia right now).

A ton of blogs uses it. The new New York Times site uses it. If you sit in front of a screen for most of the day, chances are high that most of that time was spent with the font burning inobtrusively into your retinas. What you might not have known is that Georgia, along with its sans serif sibling Verdana, were created at Microsoft back in 1996 to be screen-friendly typefaces for the nascent web-browsing masses.

Read the article here.

An insightful and entertaining piece on the emergence of Wikipedia in this week’s New Yorker.

Wikipedia is an online community devoted not to last night’s party or to next season’s iPod but to a higher good. It is also no more immune to human nature than any other utopian project. Pettiness, idiocy, and vulgarity are regular features of the site. Nothing about high-minded collaboration guarantees accuracy, and open editing invites abuse. Senators and congressmen have been caught tampering with their entries; the entire House of Representatives has been banned from Wikipedia several times. (It is not subtle to change Senator Robert Byrd’s age from eighty-eight to a hundred and eighty. It is subtler to sanitize one’s voting record in order to distance oneself from an unpopular President, or to delete broken campaign promises.) Curiously, though, mob rule has not led to chaos. Wikipedia, which began as an experiment in unfettered democracy, has sprouted policies and procedures. At the same time, the site embodies our newly casual relationship to truth. When confronted with evidence of errors or bias, Wikipedians invoke a favorite excuse: look how often the mainstream media, and the traditional encyclopedia, are wrong! As defenses go, this is the epistemological equivalent of “But Johnny jumped off the bridge first.” Wikipedia, though, is only five years old. One day, it may grow up.

San Francisco web agency Odopod’s new site is unreal …

The site contains an in-screen CMS — click on the upper right icon, and login as guest, to activate it. From there, elements on the screen become editable — change colors around with color picker (the full-on color wheel, with tint and alpha settings, is a first as far as I know) right-click on text to rewrite text blocks, scale/move/rotate graphical elements, etc. A built-in file browser system lets the user look through remote directories and drag assets directly onto the stage. Most fun of all is the sketch feature, which allows you draw on the screen using an uncannily real and satisfying brush system.

These features are mere proof-of-concept for the guest user, but for an xml-allergic client with full login privileges, for example, this site is a god-send. He could edit the page directly, playing with layouts, background accents (his sketch is not only saved, but the process of its production is stored as well, allowing the sketch to build on the page as it was drawn) and text entries with zero fuss.

This takes WYSIWYG and kicks its ass into next week …

Developed, at least in part, by this talented fellow, Steve Mason.

On the sustainable energy front, two new technologies to be tweaked by …

Brown energy is the polite term being bandied about to describe new methods of capturing the methane gas (a chief component of natural gas, as well as a principle greenhouse gas, more potent in its heat-capturing effects than carbon dioxide) generated by cattle. Polite because it euphemizes the process of collecting gas from thousands of cows and pigs farting and shitting their way to their own annihilation.

But its scatological characteristics aside, it’s impossible not to recognize a certain elegance to the operation, both ecologically: 

… More utilities are thinking of buying the gas outright. Pacific Gas and Electric has agreed to transport gas from a big digester that Microgy, a digester manufacturer, is building in California. Right now Microgy plans to sell the gas on the open market, but Robert Howard, vice president for gas transmission and distribution, said P.G.& E. may buy some gas itself. “This technology provides pipeline-quality gas and reduces carbon emissions, so of course we’re in favor it,” he said.

The environmental boons are many. According to Agstar, digesters are already keeping 66,000 tons of methane from escaping each year into the atmosphere, while generating enough energy to power more than 20,000 homes.

and economically:

The potential market is huge. Agstar officials say that at least 70,000 dairy and swine farms are big enough to support a commercial digester and could collectively provide enough energy to power more than 560,000 homes, while keeping more than 1.4 million tons of methane out of the atmosphere.

“The business model of producing energy along with food will transform the economics of rural America,” said Michael T. Eckhart, president of the American Council on Renewable Energy, based in Washington.

Indeed, anaerobic digestion yields not just methane, but leftover liquids that farmers can use or sell as fertilizer, waste heat that can heat their homes and barns, and fibrous solids that make excellent bedding for cows. Farmers also save the costs of controlling odors and treating waste. “Two years ago I couldn’t even convince farmers that digesters work,” said Melissa Dvorak, marketing manager for GHD, a company based in Chilton, Wis., that sells digesters. “Now, all they ask is what the payback will be.”

The full article is in the NYTimes, via Treehugger.

***

Crowd power is an equally interesting (and less messy) attempt at siphoning energy from the otherwise irreversible slide towards entropy. The imaginative idea is based on tapping into the restless, unceasing energy of the city itself; footfalls, vehicle vibrations, the general ambience of a busy day. Unlike Brown Power, this is still in the prototype phase, but it has received a lot of financial investment already. What they have so far:

[Project engineers] Bates and Price are now in the process of developing a joint partnership to make the idea a reality. The architectural team is working with university research groups to finish two vibration-harvesting prototypes by December. The first is a staircase that will contain hydraulic or piezoelectric technology in the risers. The technology will pick up kinetic energy from commuter footfalls and convert it into an electrical current.

Climbing stairs requires more force, which means there’s more energy to be tapped. Engineering experts from the University of Hull hope to develop a system that will convert at least 50% of the six to eight watts each person typically generates while walking. The current will be stored in a battery, which can be used to provide energy for lighting or electronic devices. The second prototype is a wireless lighting system that will use tiny generators with components designed to resonate at the same frequency as surrounding vibrations. The resonance will either move a magnet relative to a coil or put stress on a crystalline structure inside a generator to produce a current. Light-emitting diodes connected to such vibration harvesters could illuminate the underside of arches.

Full article is here. Also via Treehugger.

 

For those Overheard In New York-obsessives, add a spatial fever to your flavor …

Here is Overplot, a clever Overheard in New York / Google Maps mashup. Arguably, the best Google Maps mashup out there …

[via Curbed]

Two weeks ago, billionaire investor Warren Buffett announced that he will give away 85% of his wealth to charity. That’s $37.4 billion in liquid stock, $31 billion of which will pass on to the hands of Bill Gates (the only person on the planet richer than he is), who along with his wife Melinda, as you know, runs the formidable Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (as you might also know, Bill recently quit day-to-day operations at Microsoft in order to administrate his charitable organization full-time).

Bravo to both of these guys — fat cats with soul. Buffett, the folksy, gnomic financial figure who belongs to a previous, more upright era of money-making, has some choice quotables in this NYTimes article:

***

“I’m not an enthusiast for dynastic wealth, particularly when 6 billion others have much poorer hands than we do in life.”

***

“I love it when I’m around the country club, and I hear people talking about the debilitating effects of a welfare society,” he said. “At the same time, they leave their kids a lifetime and beyond of food stamps. Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust officer. And instead of food stamps, they have stocks and bonds.”

***

Not that his children will be left empty-handed. Mr. Buffett said that the assets he is not giving to charity today will be divided up later between other philanthropic causes and his family. His children, he said, were not at all disappointed not to be receiving the lion’s share of his fortune.

“They’ve known all along my views on inherited wealth, and share them,” he said in a news conference this afternoon. “They have money that most people would dream of. They’re lucky, in that respect, when they selected their parents.”

 

 

Snowboarding whiz Shaun White (winner of the gold at Turin earlier this year) does a composite-heavy — no green screen! – spot for HP.

[link via Motionographer]

Red, the most goofy and whimsical of the generally amazing Adicolor motion shorts … Brought to us by The Directors Bureau (aka Roman Coppola and Andy Bruntel)

And if you, like me, spend a lot of bloodshot hours staring at Flash in a general state of despair and hallucinatory disorientation (debugging actionscript at four in the morning is AWESOME), then you will find this animation most amusing. For it poses the question: as bad as you have it, how do you think Flash feels? Check out Animator vs. Animation here.

(Those in the know will recognize and appreciate this clever updating of Osvaldo Cavandoli’s iconic La Linea cartoons …)

 

Here’s a site that points to the future by remixing bits of the past — in this case, old, Victorian lithographic images from Dover Publishing (at least that’s whom the designer/programmer/animator Caleb Johnston credits for the illustrators).

The site’s navigation scheme is fairly straightforward and idiot-proof. In a nutshell, roll over something clickable and then click on it. The meat of the experience, moreover, is what happens upon the click, which is per usual a swirling, spinning, throbbing, flashing rush of animal parts, plant matter, calligraphic type, women in petticoats, and Olde English gentlemen under tophats. The experience pretty deftly evokes the obsessive thematic delirium that grips you in depths of a drug trip. Speaking theoretically, of course. Ha.

The compositional and motion work are really astonishing, both aesthetically vivid and technical seamless. Given Flash 8’s video alpha and clip blurring cabilities, it’s difficult — and probably pointless, really – to tell, in several transitory instances, whether Johnston is employing some expert tweening or playing pre-rendered video. That ambiguity, however, belies a clear trend towards the convergence of rendered and pre-rendered animation on the web (currently represented by the respective capabilities of After Effects and Flash), a convergence which will be realized soon enough. The two factors that determine how soon that is are 1) how well Macromedia will integrate with Adobe’s mother borg, and 2) how that integration aligns with the rate of advance in home computing processing power. What say you, Moore?

Anyway, strong, strong work!

(ps. and the sound design — by Dallas Johnston — is boss too)

Two pieces in today’s Times …

This discusses the green building movement in New York, and features SOM’s recently completed 7 World Trade Center, and Sir Norman Foster’s Hearst Building. When they say ‘green,’ they mean it in more senses than one:

Of course, it isn’t just environmental consciousness that is motivating developers. Because green buildings use from 30 to 70 percent less energy, they can be run for less money — but leased for more, because companies want healthy offices, which several studies have shown lead to increased productivity.

This op-ed by Jamie Lincoln Kitman of Automobile Magazine applies some lucidity to the hype surrounding hybrid cars:

Several bills floating around Congress, for instance, have proposed tax incentives to buyers of hybrid cars, irrespective of their gas mileage. Thus, under one failed but sure to resurface formulation, the suburbanite who buys a hypothetical hybrid Dodge Durango that gets 14 miles per gallon instead of 12 thanks to its second, electric power source would be entitled to a huge tax incentive, while the buyer of a conventional, gasoline-powered Honda Civic that delivers 40 miles per gallon on the open road gets none.

And under some imaginable patchwork of state and local ordinances, the Durango buyer might get a special parking space at the train station and the right to use a high occupancy vehicle lane, despite appalling fuel economy and a car full of empty seats, while the Honda driver will have to walk to the train from a distant parking lot after braving the worst of morning rush hour traffic on the highway just like everybody else.

*** 

Holy hyperlinking! While we are discussing the Times, I was pleasantly surprised when I saved the above article and received this smart, Amazon-style followup — a long-overdue feature, for sure:

Gizmodo recently linked to this clearinghouse of information regarding the most highly anticipated and disappointingly problematic release since the Spruce Goose. It’s hard to separate the promise from the hype, the real critics vs. the haters. But the games under development that they list here — and they are legion — will bring the simmering stew of anticipation to a boil and send the fanboys home to change their shorts.

 

 

I knew Blaine Brownell from architecture school — I was an undergrad and he was a grad student working on his thesis. He’s in Seattle now, and a Seattle friend of mine, recently sent a link to his blog Transstudio to me. A couple of weeks later, Archinect posted this interview with Blaine in Business Week (be sure look through the slide show section). So in a short amount of time, the Blaine Brownell alarm has been sounding, and thus a closer examination was in order.

It appears that Blaine has just published a book called Transmaterial: A Catalog of Materials that Redefine our Physical Environment (a description of the book, published by PAP, can be found here) that documents innovations in materials and their potential uses, aesthetic and practical, in architectural design. It’s not always easy for architecture to get press for innovation; after all, construction methods haven’t significantly changed in thousands of years (the Romans invented concrete, and not much about it has changed about concrete except that we now have big trucks with rotating cylindrical barrels to haul it around in. Oh, and maybe rebar). Architectural ‘innovation’ is invariably of a formal or stylistic nature, and that esoteric criteria — which float above the pablum in an aesthetic cloud-world, populated and described by the crispy, airless, sometimes bloviated phonemes of archispeak – tend to leave most people cold. Compare that to technological innovation, which gives rise to new ontologies with each OS or software launch (how would you explain Google to someone in 1980? Or the internet?) and whose outcomes affect and are immediately recognizable to millions of people – to anyone who has a desktop computer, for instance, who can practically feel the difference between the dreadful OS9 and the elegant OSX kicking them in the head.

That is perhaps the nature of things. But at least the snail’s pace of physical material can now ride the blogosphere at the speed of dsl, thanks to Transstudio. Architects, contractors, fabricators, vendors, interior descecrators and you stingy sheetrock-loving clients, bookmark now.

In any case, let me know if something gets built with transparent concrete anytime soon — the architect in me needs some old school materials porn every once in a while. Oh, and whisper sweet archispeak in my ear while you’re at it.

In somewhat related news (and onto a topic that’s dear to my heart and a bone that can never quite be tickled enough), check out the always-entertaining Peter Hall’s self-evidently named essay Living Skins: Architecture as Interface, published in the Adobe Design Center.

[from Core77]

 

Spore is the upcoming ‘god’ game designed by Will Wright (of Sims fame), and ‘god’ — as in oh my fucking * — is right; its procedural gaming engine takes emergent AI to another level. As this paradigm-busting demo video (of Wright’s presentation of the game at the recent Game Developer’s Conference) progresses, the edges of gameplay leap continuously outwards, past every conceivable boundary of expectation. To be released sometime this fall, Spore displays a complexity and plasticity beyond pretty much anything you thought possible for a computer game today.

The tingling you are feeling is the Shock of the New …

 

When branding kills …

 

Holy crap! A great adventure in DiY fuzzy logic here (and a terrific application of flash 8’s Bitmap class — long overdue, imho).

You make a rough sketch, and then retrievr scrapes the flickr database for corresponding images.

Check out retrievr here.

[from Newstoday]

Adidas’ web-presence seems to grow more and more seductive all the time …

Their ‘What’s Next’ site pushes flash 8 to the limit — how they manage to get so many video-animated sprites on the stage at the same time boggles the mind …

Adidas’ Adicolor campaign, featuring kicks that have a paintable surface (Adidas also supplies the paint, natch), is intriguing. Beyond the playful art direction, this site is poignant for me because I have been working on the thematically related NIKEiD site (Nike is Adidas’ largest North American competitor) – both of these sites employ the mass customization principle (that Dell, of course, pioneered) though in qualitatively different ways.

Taking Adicolor as a comparison study against iD, the immediate difference is that Adicolor has an artisanal character that the iD experience doesn’t — a user doesn’t merely choose materials and color swatches through an on-line interface, the results of which are then fed through and delivered via an unseen, global manufacturing supply chain. Adicolor involves direct, and distinct, contact with the product itself during the customization process — you paint on the shoe with your hands. One act is closer to design (iterative, limited kit-of-parts, manufactured), the other is closer to art (one-shot, individuated, hand-made — and no UNDO button!); two identical NIKEiD-designed products may be produced as a result of limited permutations, but no two Adicolors ever will.

Truly, Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is in need of an update.

 

Many opportunities and perils are converging around the still dateless release of the Playstation 3.

Will Sony’s gambit with Blu-Ray technology pay off? Will the quality and multimedia muscle of its games offset the apparent difficulty of developing them for the platform? How long can Sony withstand the post-release hemmorhaging before it begins to profit off expensive and so far untested technology? And given the large headstart that Xbox 360 has (a headstart which is growing longer with each passing day), will the PS3 fulfill the expectations that have grown feverish in the vacuum?

There is no doubt much Tums-popping and Peptol-swigging in the hallways of Sony right now.

The full article is here.

 

This has been bouncing around the blogosphere recently, and hey, I’ll bite.

Jeff Han and the people at the NYU Media Research Lab have been developing touch-screen systems that are capable of sensing multiple points of contact, which go far beyond the current ‘point-and-poke’ paradigm. The result is a form of interaction that appears incredibly intuitive to use, and is almost balletic to watch.

The full description is on the MRL site is here.

The software prototypes they document in the video are sheer interface porn.

 

Big props to Meredith and Cindy for their robotic work in the Les Freres Corbusier production of Heddatron! The Sunday Times has written a terrific article about it, complete with one of those flash audio slideshow deals. Hells yeah!

There were earlier Wired and Time Out New York pieces about the play as well. But unless they include flash fade-ins and volume-controllable audio, they shall be relegated to second billing status.

Meredith and Cindy, for those that don’t know, are the brains behind the Botmatrix, and they bring us closer every day to the Singularity.