Gui Menga is a graphic designer from São Paulo, he started 239 days ago, the Daily Advice for a Creative Life, a tumblr blog,where he’s using handmade lettering to illustrate quotes, tips and advice for creative professionals and designers.

(from: http://www.signpaintersfilm.com) //  watch the trailer

An exploration into the world of Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones.

The italian graphic designer Massimo Vignelli has died today aged 83. His identities for international brands undeniably shaped how the world looks today. His work has been exhibited in North America and Europe. His clients included American Airlines, Ford, IBM, Xerox and Gillette. He designed the signage for the New York and Washington subways, and suggested the name Metro for the Washington system.

This is how the team Multipod Studio presents its new creation: the popup-house

Four days and a wireless screwdriver are all you need to build the structure of a Pop-Up House. The house, compiled of insulating blocks and wooden panels, delivers affordable thermal insulation like you’d never believe.

Multipod Studio have patented a unique approach to passive construction that delivers outsanding thermal insulation at an affordable cost. No special tools required, the house is assembled using lightweight and recyclable materials for quick installation. The materials used are inexpensive so the cost remains unbeatable and the thermal envelope created means no additional heating is necessary. The first prototype of this new type of passive house, has bloomed in the pine valleys of the South of France.
The Pop-Up House is an innovative concept that aims to challenge passive house construction.

Low cost, recyclable and passive, the Pop-Up House has all of the qualities of tomorrow’s homes.

29 WAYS TO STAY CREATIVE from TO-FU on Vimeo

District nine presents an isolated country managing with an isolated alien visit, it seems to me that there’s not the rest of the world, that Johannesburg is presented like “the city”, like a social development model to study for the future.
Wikus says at the very beginning “we try to engage with the prawns” I think this sentence is one of the most important to understand the first dynamic of the movie.
Engage there can mean “we try to work with them but can also mean we try to take, own, take on, or even put some of our culture in them.
Looking closely  we can see a white “propriety of MNU” on the head of  the “prawn” Christopher Johnson .
We are in the presence of the humans scared of this unknown species and as said an intervisited guy in the start of the movie “If they were from another country, we might understand but they are even not from this planet” and  the sense in that I think it was, we all have fear of what is unknown, we all will find something that is more strange unknown and foreign than somebody else, it is like saying that there are no limits on what will be scary for us.
The example of the strangers, the aliens,  are in this sense almost limitless. It is because of that that they feel free to call them, like Wikus does, prawn.
Talking about the process of transforming Wikus I was very impressed by the words of the little “prawn” during the preparation of the biological bomb that will infect Victor:”why must it take so long? Because it is very difficult…so much can go wrong”.
I think want to mean that the identification process in the “other” it’s really delicate, difficult and probably dangerous in some case. Like that he wanted to allude to difficulty of the contamination in more general sense.
After Victor’s infection the movie go on two levels, between the nigerians that kill and eat aliens to have their strength, and the ability to use their weapons and Victor who is already infected and  is beginning the process of transformation in “prawn”.
At this point the situation completely changes, the point of view on the horror and on the “strangerness” is overturned.
Here our point of view is inside the horror, in a “torture chamber”, a big hospital space where on the “prawn” bodies are sperimentated different research, Wikus is now so, subject of this research.
In the most cruel way, to his alive meat and without anaesthetic are perpetrated the experiments of scientist (this reminds me of what I read about the experiments of Josef Mengele in Auschwitz). They finally ask him to shoot with few alien guns, using his transformed harm, the one that will do the job correctly. He still do not accept his new nature, but when they ask after a pig to shoot a “prawn”, he refuse.
Here I have seen the emergence of a new kind of empathy, the dynamic of the torturer that become a torturated, just now the empaty with the “prawns”is manifested: “I will shoot a pig, I’m not shooting that prawn, hear me?” he says.
We guess here an important problem of the modern philosophy: for example Hegel  argues that a big part of human history have be read like the working out of a logic master-slave .
People in power need a more vulnerable “other” who will be manipulated, excluded, abused, dominated. Hegel said that Masters need slaves and slaves in their own way need masters, working both for a dysfunctional logic.
Wikus is here the protagonist of this logic and his trasformed, alien hand will change his role from master to slave,  an “inhuman” character that becomes human after the contamination with another entity (sooner he will want to cut his arm adopting a cruel stereotype where the part must be sacrified for the whole).
Although when it escapes from the hospital at the home of Christopher Johnson the “prawn” kid say watching Wiktor’s hand that they are the same, naturally he refuse this confusion but is like that, the mutation is already a fact and he is a kid of a new species human and “prawn”.

Elysium

Noting to say, just what happened to you Neill Blomkamp?