Navigate With Your Ears

Opensound

 

Take an audio tour of New Orleans via the Open Sound project. Residents have recorded various sound clips that capture a particular niche of the city—with the help of project directors Heather Booth and Jacob Brancasi— and upload them to an interactive map of New Orleans. From interviews to random street noise, the recordings add a level of intimacy that transcend your average Google map. 

Listen: Clip from the map...
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...and an interview with the project founders: 

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Stock Within Reach

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Yesterday the high end furniture store (with the misleadingly plebeian name) Design Within Reach filed with the SEC to delist its stock from NASDAQ. According to the store's blog, this was a smart way for management to cut spending (by eliminating administrative costs related to the listing) without firing staff or jeopardizing product quality, especially considering the handful of existing shareholders didn't trade their stock. According to others, this is a first step toward the company going private. 

And let's not forget the little NASDAQ requirement that a listed company's shares must trade above $1, which wasn't happening for much of 2009. Design within reach, indeed!

The Uniform Project

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I got an email from a style savvy friend this weekend about The Uniform Project, an inspiring sustainable fashion exercise cum fundraiser started by Sheena Matheiken. In May Matheiken began a year-long stint of wearing the same versatile, reversible dress designed by her friend Eliza Starbuck. According to the project statement:

"Every day I will reinvent the dress with layers, accessories and all kinds of accouterments, the majority of which will be vintage, hand-made, or hand-me-down goodies. Think of it as wearing a daily uniform with enough creative license to make it look like I just crawled out of the Marquis de Sade's boudoir.

The Uniform Project is also a year-long fundraiser for the Akanksha Foundation, a grassroots movement that is revolutionizing education in India. At the end of the year, all contributions will go toward Akanksha’s School Project to fund uniforms and other educational expenses for slum children in India."

Matheiken documents her outfits daily, and after trolling through the first 66 days, I am left to conclude that if you wear the same dress every day, it gives you a lot more room in your closet for amazing hats.

More about The Uniform Project here: www.theuniformproject.com

Video interview with Matheiken here: http://www.dailycandy.com/video/70107/Same+As+It+Ever+Was

 

 

Water, Water Everywhere

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via korwater.com

The options for reusable bottles have come a long way since the glory days of the classic Nalgene. Case in point these new BPA-free bottles from Kor, which feature snap-top lids, a smooth, thread-free drinking spout and transparent sides. Finally a bottle that will pass muster in certain posh environments where the Nalgene/Sigg/Klean Kanteen fears to tread...

For more: www.korwater.com

$ + £ + ¥ + € = ?

My favorite financial blog, Planet Money, posted a story yesterday on the IMF's decision to issue a massive amount of bonds as a way to generate cash in our current non-liquid global economy. The bonds will be issued in Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), which aren't a currency but were initially created as an alternative reserve asset to gold. Today the SDR is the IMF's "unit of account" and its value is based on the collective value of the US Dollar, Pound Sterling, Yen and Euro.
 
HOLD up! I thought this was a blog about design? Yes it is, and here's the connection:
 
At some point in their education, most graphic designers (including me) have probably been tasked with redesigning an existing currency or creating a symbol for a nonexistent universal currency. The IMF's SDR-based bonds make us one step closer to the latter becoming a reality. According to the Planet Money story, which was expanded further on "All Things Considered" last night, China is advocating that the SDR be adopted as a global currency. This brings up a whole host of financial questions, but I immediately thought back to the ubiquitous typography assignment and all the ruckus a new currency would generate in the design world.
 
So I'm going on record here: In the next 9 years, there will be a global currency. There will be a global RFP and a random design firm (I'm guessing European or Asian) will be chosen to create the symbol, which once revealed will generate all sorts of commentary and criticism amongst designers and doom a generation of typography students to a new version of an old default homework assignment.
 
 
Read the Planet Money post here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2009/07/imf_bonds.html
 
Listen to the "All Things Considered" story:

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