The Pantone colour of destruction

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Michael Beirut at DesignObserver:

“…at another presentation, I glimpsed what perhaps will be a starting point for a new certainty, perhaps the ultimate one. Michael Braungart, author with William McDonough of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, talked about how graphic designers are contributing to the destruction of the environment. Braungart is not a designer. He’s a chemist. At one point in his presentation, he displayed a chart that described the precise amount of toxic elements in a single ink color. You felt the audience, 2000-plus strong, draw a collective breath. Here, at last, was true certainty: the promise that every piece of graphic design, each an amalgam of dozens of arbitrary, intuitive, ‘gee, this looks right to me’ decisions, could be put into a centrifuge, broken down into its constituent parts, and analyzed for the harm it could do to our environment.”

Best not get started on the ecological impact of the stuff that makes up a typical designer’s computer then…

Design in public services

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is the focus of an excellent, signal-rich blog by Brian Parkinson [found via Dan], who is a designer working for the NHS. My first job was as an architectural assistant working for the NHS in Wales about 10-11 years ago, in between my first degree and my post-graduate architetcure degree. Working in design in public service is sometimes frustrating but satisfying – I’ll be following Brian’s blog carefully.

Monday links, found with free wifi…

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Enjoying free wifi and good coffee at the moment in Tinderbox, Upper St, N1 [free until 1st November] and Foyles cafe on Charing Cross Road. Discovered Foyle’s hotspot while struggling to get connected in the souless surrounds of the Starbucks concession in Borders on Charing Cross Road.

Stood next to a window where the connection seemed to be there, if very poor – holding my laptop in one hand and trying to IM with one finger. Then, while cursing, opened a browser- and saw the splash-sponsorship screen for the hotspot bore the logos of Foyles and O’Reilly…

The cloud of connectivity was drifting across the road – not where I’d imagined it had orginated from at all! I shut down and moved across the road, where there was organic food, fine coffee, beer and nice tunes from Ray’s Jazz store that share the space with the cafe on the first floor of Foyles.

A lovely discovery to make, if it wasn’t my final week in London…

Kata

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Anthony Colfelt has been at the ForUSE conference in New Hampshire, and has an excellent piece on his reflections/conclusions drawn from the experience:

“Larry Constantine said it best in the final conversation that was held between the remaining delegates on the last day. “Process is like the training wheels for learning a craft. When one has gained enough experience one knows when to throw it away.” Ron Jeffries also had a good way of describing process. “Process is like a Kata, you practice techniques over and over and over to make you learn the art…” Having once studied Karate, the notion of practicing set techniques in different combinations really resonated with me. Through practice, you can draw on your route knowledge of individual techniques and combinations of them, to best solve a problem when faced with it.”

» The Vanity Experiment: ForUSE – Conclusions

The gift

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“The gift of the net” by Richard Barbrook in OpenDemocracy:

“Ever since the beginnings of modernity, free speech has been championed as a fundamental right of all citizens. Yet, for most of the population, this concept has been a piety rather than a reality. Big government and big business have long monopolised the media. But, ever since the advent of the net, freedom of expression for all no longer seems like a utopian dream. We can conceive of a society where making your own media is not just possible, but also a mass phenomenon. Sharing knowledge could become much more important than selling information.”