read more: the duty of design

"It is enough for good design to be things we cherish because they are beautiful, well made, or a pleasure to use, but it seems to me that our daily lives are dominated by barely competent and sometimes downright sinister works of industrial design, and I do not understand why designers don’t spend more time chasing down these opportunities.

The whole infrastructure of security and surveillance that dominates our experience of the city today (to take just one example) has gone untouched by the field of product design in any meaningful way. These are works of design that take justice and trust as their topic, and they make it pretty clear how those in power think of us as citizens."
- Kieran Long, On the Civic Duty of Product Design for Dezeen 

read more: form follows... distribution method

"You can buy a Coke pretty much anywhere on Earth. Thanks to a vast network of local suppliers, Coca-Cola has almost completely solved distribution, getting its product into every nook and cranny where commerce reaches. There are places in the world where it’s easier to get a Coke than clean water. In the 1980s, Berry was an aid worker in Zambia, and when he looked at Coke’s success, he saw an opportunity."
- Tim Maly, Wired 

design is in the... big picture

[Image from The Society Pages]

I recently started working on a very exciting, unfortunately top secret, project with an amazing company called Goldie Blox. While I cannot get into specifics, it tackles several issues very close to my heart. Goldie Blox's mission is to encourage young girls to be engineers through designing a way show girls their potential.

Young girls today are told that they can be anything that they want. This is the message I grew up with,  the message that inspired me to work hard and pursue my dreams. It is an incredibly positive thing, and one that should be a given.  The problem is that while girls are told they can be anything they want to be, we are not always inspiring girls to look at the broad array of things that they could be. This is particularly troubling in comparison to the things that boys know they can be and the things that boys already have role models in place to admire.

How does this relate to design? The messages that girls receive are typically subtle and unintentional. Even when the decision was intentional, the resulting message was unintentional. For instance, think of the books you were assigned in school. Many of those books had male protagonists. Teachers know that girls are able- perhaps through conditioning- to relate to male characters, while young boys have difficulty relating to female characters. As a result, girls read stories in which the male characters achieve much more than the female characters. Design is a process of recognizing a problem and working to create solutions. We can design products, stories, and educational systems that change the message that girls receive. That adapt to the differences in development and learning styles in young children without dividing. Or defaulting to pink and purple.

What excites me most about Goldie Blox, other than its massive big mission, is the consciousness of the founders to the role of design in the process- from the details up to the big picture. I get to play a teeny part and am so excited to watch this project grow.

designer spotlight: mariana tocornal

Mariana Tocornal is a Chilean designer who started in graphic design but has since moved to experiemental product design. "The designer's idea is to confront people with the challenge of finding a way to relate to an object of recognizable form but untypical material, in order to make them reflect on it," according to Treehugger.com.

[Beecups]

According to the designer "Beecups have been interpreted as decorative objects, flower vases, candle holders or as containers for jewelry, dice, seeds, sand, sugar, and even warm tea. Some less conventional uses range from determining the position of the sun, to more aggressive drives such as fulfilling the need to bite them, melt them or cut them in slices. There is no correct use for these objects, they are meant to be ambiguous so that each person can claim though physical or conceptual customization."

[left: 100 plasticina; right:Pluck Bowl]

The designer has other playful, confusing designs including bowls made out of play dough that never dries, allowing the owner to choose to leave the shape as is or mold it, called 100% plasticina. Pluck Bowls, also shown above, are a study on "functionality, materiality and memory, according to Tocornal."

Designer's website and first photocredit. Originally found on Treehugger, photocredit for other images.