March 2010
20 posts
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Dieter Rams on good design
Calm, collected, German.
Legendary industrial designer Dieter Rams, in his 40 years with Braun, established a clean design aesthetic which now serves as inspiration for many of today’s Apple products. These are his ten principles for good design:
Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design makes a product understandable.
Good design...
February 2010
23 posts
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Global weirding
This is a really cool illustration by Justin Gabbard for The New York Times, relating to this great piece by Thomas Friedman:
The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some...
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Home of the future
Behold, the home of the future. This model of sustainable living is currently on display in downtown Vancouver. Made from two shipping containers and wrapped in cedar and pine beetle wood, the home features local and recycled materials, energy-efficient appliances, solar panels, and a green wall on the exterior that shows how you could insulate the structure from hot and cold temperatures.
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“You simply cannot achieve any level of sustainability without challenging common...”
– Jess Sand, Roughstock Studios
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IdeaPaint
I’m pretty in love with the concept of IdeaPaint, which you can use to turn any paintable surface into a dry-erase board. I’m not sure why this hasn’t existed for years already, but it’s good to see that it’s out there now. It looks like it takes a bit of time to install, but it’s half the cost of a whiteboard, better-performing, more...
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Communities for Change
Communities for Change is a UK project celebrating community organizations involved in grassroots action on sustainability. The logo and brand development by Because Studio are a great example of Europe’s clean design aesthetic. If this same project were done in the U.S., I’d expect a lot of brown and green with stock illustrations of leaves and all of the type to be set in...
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WatchTim Brown urges designers to think big
Tim Brown, CEO of innovation and design firm IDEO, discusses using human-centered “design thinking” to explore new ways of addressing some of the world’s biggest challenges.
IDEO recently launched a program titled Living Climate Change where they invite people to imagine life in 20 or 30 years and how we can make things better instead of...
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Parliament workspace
The guys over at Portland design shop Parliament have built themselves one hell of a workspace. From the looks of things, much of it was hand-built using reclaimed materials and accented with vintage design artifacts.
(via)
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Follow us
Just a quick thank you to everyone that’s been following the blog and has helped out by giving their feedback. We have a lot of exciting ideas coming up, so be sure to stay tuned. And if you have anything you’d like to see posted here, let us know. Thanks!
Here are a few easy ways to follow Modern Evolution:
Twitter: @modevolution
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Alex Steffen: The Seattle Talks
Sustainability expert Alex Steffen of Worldchanging gave a two-night presentation in Seattle just before heading off to the Copenhagen climate summit. In the talks, he laid out exactly where we came from as a society and where we’re headed. According to Steffen, we’re pretty much toast unless we immediately begin rebuilding our cities. He calls out the lesser steps towards...
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