http://natearcher.ca

The vast majority of designers go somewhere different, are inspired and stimulated and maybe even humbled by the experience — but leave without turning their insights into value that local people can use. The exchange ends up being one-way in favor of the visitor.

The most exciting opportunity for innovation lies in combining the knowledge systems, tools, and social and territorial assets of South and North. In a light and sustainable economy, we will share resources such as time, skill, software or food using socially embedded systems, enabled by networked communications, that are a hybrid of assets from North and South.

Thackara makes an excellent case for this new form of hybrid innovation between the North and South. However an earlier line in the piece proposes another approach that isn’t a new solution but an integral intermediate step in Thackara’s vision. “we can do more good at home than abroad”. Before we begin this cross-cultural trade perhaps there is something the North can do to help. As Thackara explains, “Poverty is a real enough challenge for half of the world’s population, but in many cases it’s caused by patterns of development exported from and imposed by, the North.”

What would happen if we tried to identify issues in our living patterns which negatively impact those of others? I would image small changes in ourselves and our lifestyle could have a huge impact on the entire global community. Is something standing in the way of this kind of radical change? Are we too set in our ways? Perhaps.

The New York Times has a slideshow of Olafur Elliasson’s waterfalls in New York, including the one under the Brooklyn Bridge.

“The New York City Waterfalls” is a public art project of four man-made waterfalls rising from New York Harbor, some as high as the Statue of Liberty. Organized by the nonprofit Public Art Fund and the city of New York, it is being billed as the city’s biggest such project since “The Gates,” the $20 million effort by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 2005.

For the 90 days following today, June 20, 2008, I’m going to think about, sketch, draw, and prototype ideas about mobile design and post them here. Like folks recovering from any addiction, I don’t know what is at the end of these 90 days. I’m just gonna commit to thinking about it every day for 90 days and have faith that something good will be on the other side.

(via Adaptive Path)

I stumbled on the space collective today and posted it on designboom. The gallery is an amazing collection of images. The curated selection of images and links is so refreshing compared to the same info graphics and black and white photos on ffffound. The format would work so well for a blog. It also reminds me of 19th century art exhibitions where the paintings were hung floor to ceiling, this is kind of a 21st century equivalent (with hyperlinks).

…I can’t help sensing the emergence of a curious new industrial revolution, driven by play as the first was driven by steam. As steam did then, so now play lives among us as a phenomenon long ignored by the machinery of production — evanescent, vaporous, unexploited — and inasmuch as production abhors a vacuum, it was perhaps just a matter of time before it moved to colonize the vacant, vacuous space of play.

– From Play Money by Julian Dibbel

(via Adam Crowe)

A new type of artist arises: someone whose task is to gather together existing but overlooked pieces of amateur art, and, by directing attention onto them, to make them important. (This is part of a much larger theory of mine about the new role of curatorship, the big job of the next century.)

Mass advertising is restricted. Billboards are categorically banned; advertising in subways, buses, removed. Towns take up “Advertising-Free Zones.” (link)

Smoking is proven to be good exercise for the lungs.

A highly successful new magazine — Ordinary People, edited by the nonagenarian Studs Terkel — focuses only on people who have never done anything in particular to deserve attention.

(via kottke)

(via PSFK)

Hockey player Sean Avery is the latest celebrity cum designer (or at least the latest celebrity with a marginal interest in style).

(via electro^plankton)

Its not about consumers, it’s not about users. It’s all about people.

– Timo Veikkola, Nokia: A view of the future – trends research, ethnography and design. ( via This Blog Sits at the:)