Lone Gunman

The major­ity of the world’s design­ers focus all their efforts on devel­op­ing prod­ucts and ser­vices exclu­sively for the rich­est 10% of the world’s cus­tomers. Noth­ing less than a rev­o­lu­tion in design is needed to reach the other 90%.
—Dr. Paul Polak, Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment Enterprises

Design For the Other 90% is a design exhi­bi­tion aim­ing to get peo­ple think­ing not of the oppor­tu­ni­ties that lie in design­ing prod­ucts for the rich­est 10%, but for those under the water­line of the ‘poverty iceberg’.

Brand­Builder talks about the oppor­tu­ni­ties this men­tal­ity can cre­ate, giv­ing the $100 lap­top as the obvi­ous example.

After sur­vey­ing thou­sands of peo­ple around the world and online, artists Komar and Melamid pro­duced a series of paint­ings por­tray­ing the respon­dents’ results. The project was dubbed People’s Choice and con­sisted of the 30 most and least ‘wanted’ paint­ings for 14 coun­tries and the web as a whole.

Inter­est­ingly, the Dutch (and the Ital­ians, to some extent) were the only ones included in the sur­vey that ‘pro­duced’ a piece of abstract art as their favourite.

The artists also pro­duced an even more tongue-in-cheek work: The People’s Choice Music, con­sist­ing of ‘The Most Wanted Song’ (a love song with low male and female vocals, of mod­er­ate dura­tion, pitch, and tempo) and ‘The Most Unwanted Song’ (an oper­atic soprano rap­ping over cow­boy music fea­tur­ing bag­pipes and tubas).

via Cog­ni­tive Daily

Could work­ing for free be one of the best pro­mo­tional tools avail­able to an indi­vid­ual or SME?

37signals believes so, say­ing that their 37Better Project was “one of the best pro­mo­tional things [they] ever did”. To illus­trate their point they also take a look at R.BIRD’s excel­lent con­sumer pack­ag­ing pat­terns, stat­ing:

If you’re look­ing to hire a brand design firm, wouldn’t you want to con­sider a com­pany that likes this stuff enough to do it for free?

And doesn’t this apply to much more than just design (I’m think­ing of open source projects, etc.)?

Ben Cas­nocha goes one fur­ther, say­ing that if you’re look­ing for work why not reach out and offer to work for free with an idol/hero?

In design­ing the Fal­con XT, Ford engi­neers set out to dis­cover the anatomy of a car crash and found that the acci­dent is typ­i­cally over before we’re even con­sciously aware of it happening.

This is a recon­struc­tion of a crash involv­ing a sta­tion­ary Ford Fal­con XT sedan being struck in the driver’s door by another vehi­cle trav­el­ling at 50 km/h [30 mph].

0 mil­lisec­onds — An exter­nal object touches the driver’s door.

1 ms — The car’s door pres­sure sen­sor detects a pres­sure wave.

2 ms — An accel­er­a­tion sen­sor in the C-pillar behind the rear door also detects a crash event.

2.5 ms - A sen­sor in the car’s cen­tre detects crash vibrations.

5 ms — Car’s crash com­puter checks for insignif­i­cant crash events, such as a shop­ping trol­ley impact or inci­den­tal con­tact. It is still work­ing out the sever­ity of the crash. Door intru­sion struc­ture begins to absorb energy.

6.5 ms — Door pres­sure sen­sor reg­is­ters peak pressures.

7 ms — Crash com­puter con­firms a seri­ous crash and cal­cu­lates its actions.

8 ms — Com­puter sends a “fire” sig­nal to side airbag. Mean­while, B-pillar begins to crum­ple inwards and energy begins to trans­fer into cross-car load path beneath the occupant.

8.5 ms — Side airbag sys­tem fires.

15 ms — Roof begins to absorb part of the impact. Airbag bursts through seat foam and begins to fill.

17 ms — Cross-car load path and struc­ture under rear seat reach max­i­mum load.
Airbag cov­ers occupant’s chest and begins to push the shoul­der away from impact zone.

20 ms — Door and B-pillar begin to push on front seat. Airbag begins to push occupant’s chest away from the impact.

27 ms — Impact veloc­ity has halved from 50 km/h to 23.5 km/h. A “pusher block” in the seat moves occupant’s pelvis away from impact zone. Airbag starts con­trolled deflation.

30 ms — The Fal­con has absorbed all crash energy. Airbag remains in place. For a brief moment, occu­pant expe­ri­ences max­i­mum force equal to 12 times the force of gravity.

45 ms — Occu­pant and airbag move together with deform­ing side structure.

50 ms — Crash com­puter unlocks car’s doors. Pas­sen­ger safety cell begins to rebound, push­ing doors away from occupant.

70 ms — Airbag con­tin­ues to deflate. Occu­pant moves back towards mid­dle of car.
Engi­neers clas­sify crash as “complete”.

150–300 ms — Occu­pant becomes aware of collision.

Mind Hacks cor­rob­o­rates these con­clu­sions, stat­ing that the start of con­cious aware­ness is typ­i­cally found to be around 200–300 ms.

The archives of Char­lie Rose are avail­able on the offi­cial web­site and this past week­end I watched these excel­lent conversations:

• An excel­lent talk on tech­nol­ogy and inno­va­tion with Marc Andreessen, a man with impres­sive Val­ley cre­den­tials: co-founder of Ning, co-author of Mosaic, founder of Netscape, investor in Digg and Twit­ter, and board mem­ber of Face­book and eBay.
• Con­ver­sa­tions on the finan­cial cri­sis with Nancy Pelosi, War­ren Buf­fett, Henry Paul­son, and more…
• Writ­ers on writ­ing; includ­ing con­ver­sa­tions with Ian McE­wan, Salman Rushdie and David Fos­ter Wallace.