But when I told him (again) that we should rethink the graphic presentation of his site, he kinda went off. “You’re wrong!” he said. “You’re standards are just too high!” Now, that may be true. I care a whole lot about what things look like. But then he went on to illustrate how the site has been functioning quite well to generate leads for his business. It was all true. His logic was sound. He was, in fact, getting tons of interest from this ugly-ass site.

Which begs this scary question: if design is meant to incite action, does it really matter if it’s pretty?

I want this. And I want a jetpack too. But mostly I want to know if the Autonobile, by design studio Mike and Maaike, is actually make-able, if it can be made to be safe and affordable. And if they can send me one as payment for posting it on this here inspiration feed.

Found here.

the role of design is not just ease of use but invisibility. In other words, the design should fit so well with user needs and expectations that it “dissolves into behavior.” The user is unaware of the choices the designer has made. In fact, the user should be unaware of the existence of the designer at all.

I know, it’s a little dry. But good stuff, nonetheless.

Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers,and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But forthe first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, non-governmental organizations, and companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

Right?

If you’re looking for awesome representation, and to be counted among the awesomest of the awesomest, you might wanna check out the new creative agency, The Loud Cloud. Good browsing here too.

5D Conference : AREA/CODE - Kevin Slavin.

1. Ideals beat strategies. What infuriates people most about Twitter is that it seems to have no plan, scheme, or angle. “Hey, Twitter” say the pundits: “don’t you know the business of business is to profit, by any means necessary?”

They’re as wrong as Dubya was about Iraq. The business of business is to create value — and that’s why Twitter’s not playing the tired, old game of value extraction. It is trying, instead, to create a more authentic kind of value — and to do that, you need ideals. Twitter pursues its ideals — democracy, peace, equity — with the quiet intensity of a true revolutionary.

2. Open beats closed. Anyone can use Twitter, make friends with anyone else on Twitter, and read anyone else’s Tweets, unless they’re locked. Here’s Oprah, for example. Openness is important because it unlocks 21st Century economics — the new economics of interdependence.

What are the new economies that Twitter unlocks? See the next three points.

3. Connection beats transaction. In the 20th Century, what was viral was mostly the flu. Today, Twitter is the master of viral economies. I got this awesome link from you got it from he got it from them. In the 21st Century, virality can make many different kinds of value activities significantly more efficient and productive. Today, viral economies pass links and messages from person to person. What will they pass tomorrow — cars, jobs, houses?

4. Simplicity beats complexity. Twitter has also mastered what I call economies of pain. Twitter’s bozo-proof: even Ashton Kutcher can use it. Apple, Google, now Twitter: all know that extreme simplicity is economically powerful because without it, network members never connect in the first place.

5. Neighborhoods beat networks. Twitter’s network effects don’t feel much like standard ones. I can subscribe to your feed, yet you don’t have to subscribe to mine — times millions. What’s going on here? Twitter realizes neighborhood effects, not just network effects: complex sets of intersecting, overlapping, mutually reinforcing network effects. Oprah’s followers are a neighborhood, and so are Ashton’s. You can benefit from joining many of these neighborhoods — not just one larger network.

6. Circuits beat channels. Twitter isn’t building a new media channel. It’s turning yesterday’s channel into a circuit. Oprah doesn’t broadcast to you: rather, the innovation is that you can talk to her, you can talk to your friends about her, she can talk to all of you, and anyone can talk to everyone. Twitter has dropped a neutron bomb of real-time feedback into the heart of media: yesterday’s inert, rigid channel becomes a flexible, ever-shifting, reconfigurable set of circuits instead. Efficiency is gained — and monopoly is vaporized — as demand coalesces around supply, and vice versa.

7. Laziness beats business. Twitter hasn’t rushed to cram a “business model” down peoples’ throats. Instead of back-slapping each other after cutting deals, the Twitter guys are lazy. Why? They’re waiting to play, experiment, see what offers utility, creates value, and makes people truly better off. Business is too busy, most of the time, to care about any of that. Laziness says: “business models happen.”

8. Public beats private. Tweets are, by default, public. Not only can you message Oprah — but your messages to Oprah are public. Why is that important? Imagine, for a second, if banks had been run by Tweet instead of by executive suite: would Wall Street have been able to loot its depositors silly? Nope. Authentic value doesn’t hide in the shadows.

9. Messy beats clean. Hashtags and @s, Time notes, weren’t invented by Twitter - they were the result of people playing with Twitter. Twitter is messy — people can use it in uncontrolled ways — and that messiness means Twitter has better ideas faster than, for example, Facebook.

10. Good beats evil. To create a better kind of value, you’ve got to strive to be better. Authentic value doesn’t flow from evil — it flows from good. What’s evil about media? Saturation bomb ads, of course. And Twitter neither advertises nor accepts orthodox ads. Twitter, ultimately, is trying to conceive a better kind of advertising — and it can never do so if its already made a deal with the devil.

And there’s probably more. Right?