Just wondering how many of you who run a small consultancy (or other) send out holiday cards or gifts to clients or contacts?…I’ve seen pretty much everything across the board from email PDFs to custom expensive gifts. Just wondering what you might be doing and what you’d like to get and the impact it would have if you received one as a client or potential client.
Did you know that in North America, we consume 58 billion paper coffee cups a year, most of which are not recycled and end up in landfills? And that reusable coffee mugs, the only alternative, have an adoption rate of less than 2%? These mugs are designed to travel with coffee from place to place (usually your home to work), not for on-the-go coffee consumers that order from a counter every day—they’re bulky, hard to clean and inconvenient to carry around.
To address this problem, Toby Daniels and product development firm Mutopo founded Betacup, an open innovation challenge that asks designers to rethink the reusable coffee mug with the goal of eliminating paper cup wastage. The challenge will launch in 2010, but in the meantime, they are working hard to raise the money to fund a $20,000 prize, large enough to “attract and incentivize the world’s best designers.” You can help them out on kickstarter: contribute $2 (the equivalent of donating a cup of coffee to the cause), $20 and receive a commemorative betacup, $200 and get tickets to the award ceremony, or $2,000 and join the panel of judges.
Motorola’s Consumer Experience Design Team (CXD) is searching for passionate designers to help pull the company towards our inevitable future of highly connected social experiences. Our ambition to make Motorola a recognized leader in digital design is bolstered by our technologies which provide us with a palette for creating richer, more cinematic experiences that are adaptable to a world of diverse users.
Antenna Design is looking for an interaction designer with good analytical and visual design skills. Candidates should have an interest in information, service, industrial and user experience design. Candidates will be involved in everything from research, observation and analysis to storyboarding, making flowcharts, click-through wireframes, visual design, demo-making (Flash or equivalent), design documentation. We are looking for someone who is enthusiastic, a good thinker and a fast learner, thorough and precise. Projects range from product interfaces (both hardware and screen interfaces), touch-screen kiosks, information displays in the environment to interactive installations.
I attended the first day of the “Business of Design” conference. The conference presentations were delivered by Chinese/Hong Kong; French (co-sponsors); and Americans. All of them used Powerpoint to deliver their visuals and nearly every presentation went down in flames because they entered “Powerpoint Hell” for one reason or another…How do we break our dependency on Powerpoint and still communicate visuals?
It’s the first really cold weekend in many parts of the country, and we’ve got the perfect gift for the many snowbound weekends to come. The Northern Brewer Starter Kit comes with everything you need to start brewing your own beer at home, keeping you busy during those frigid indoor months. Plus, there’s nothing better than getting soused with your friends in February on what started as a sack of grain in January, not to mention the cost savings, long shelf life, reduced emissions (from not shipping a bunch of water across the country), and the B-vitamins provided by unfiltered brew.
The intern’s role within the product department is primarily to support all areas of design with specific tasks including; document layout and production, research (with image gathering), preparation for presentations as well as conceptual sketching / ideation and model-making.
The lead interaction designer is a visionary thinker, an innovator, and a natural leader with a proven understanding of interactive technologies and storytelling techniques. As a core part of a project team, the lead designer will define the projects’ creative trajectory, including early strategy and concept development, and will create documentation that defines and articulates the experience design through to execution of visual design and overseeing design production.
It’s nice to support a cause, but getting a one-of-a-kind drawing of a robot or monster along the way is even better. Illustrator Joe Alterio has rounded up an all-star cast of artists who will trade original work in exchange for a donation that supports water.org (and, in the future, other causes). You submit a few words to inspire the creators, they make an awesome picture of a robot or a monster just for you (or your lucky giftee), and a good cause reaps financial benefits.
Instead of adopting a highway, consider the opposite and ditch that guzzler instead. This pair of beautifully written texts covers all the angles. In addition to revolutionizing pop music in the early 80s, David Byrne has spent the last 20+ years riding his bike through New York City and dozens of other cities, and Bicycle Diaries, his recently published book, is crammed with graceful odes to the joy and sensibility of urban cycling.
Once inspired, move on to Chris Balish’s step-by-step instruction manual for living a car-free life, How to Live Well Without Owning a Car. The book includes some convincing statistics about the true costs of auto ownership and tips on getting just about everything done sans combustion engine…from commuting to shopping to dating.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
