A short list of upcoming design conferences from the American Institute of Graphic Art (AIGA).
Over the course of 2005, David C. Lovelace of UMOP.com expanded the 3 variable game of rock, paper, scissors into twenty-five gesture monstrosity. Behold. Enjoy.
Why do I love the internet? Because it's inherently spatial. The simple invention of a link turned linear text into an intricate web. A heterarchy which puts Bloom's Taxonomy within the same reach as bread tab taxonomy. I love nothing better than following one link to an other ending up in some tangle of ideas. With bookmarks, RSS feeds and allowing blogs to digest the internet for us, we can forget just how vast the internet is. I was delighted to stumble on Websites as Graphs; an applet that begins to remind us how spatial and complex single webpages are. Enter a URL and you watch the organization of a webpage unfurl and settle into a pattern of dots representing links, images, forms, etc. For example, the above image is the representation of this page. What the tool lacks in text, it makes up...
The CmapTools client is free for use by anybody, whether its use is commercial or non-commercial. In particular, schools and universities are encouraged to download it and install it in as many computers as desired, and students and teachers may make copies of it and install it at home.
In a piece titled, Fair Use Follies, Brooke Gladstone interviews two experts on the fair use issue. What can be freely reproduced? What snippets of song or text need to be paid for? In the case of the documentarian mentioned above, three words can cost upwards of $5000!
Visual Thinking: Tools for Mapping Your Ideas
by Nancy Margulies, Christine Valenza
This book is a dream come true for graphic facilitators. It supplies you with hundreds of symbols and simple drawings that you can immediately apply to your own work, expanding the effectiveness of your work and building new skills.
Declan Butler, a nature and science reporter, has compiled an example of the power that is now in the hands of individuals. Using commercially available software and data from an Excel spreadsheet and Google Earth, he has created an interactive map tracing the spread of Avian Flu in birds and humans from September 2003 - April 2006.
CooperationCommons is one of his virtual communities organized around the discussion, "What is true collaboration and what are the tools to enable it?"
GasBuddy.com is a great example of collaborative information gathering by local consumers on the ground in their neighborhoods, combined with real-time data rendering.
We lost a good woman this last week, urban thinker and influential writer Jane Jacobs. She detailed the patterns and plans that make cities alive and vibrant--and railed against the insane urban planning decisions that killed them.