via Maximus Chatsky portfolio

Airparif recently deployed a giant helium balloon that will provide Parisians with an at-a-glance indication of both atmospheric and inner-city air quality. The balloon Aérophile is the first of its kind and will employ an innovative color-changing system to broadcast an important environmental message.
Situated in André-Citroën park, the Ballon Air De Paris is visible for a radius of 20 km and is seen by 400,000 people every day.
The tethered helium balloon will change colour to express air quality data collected from six sensors placed around Paris. Three projectors situated in the balloon’s centre display atmospheric air quality by changing the balloon’s color from green (very clean) to red (hazardous), and a high-powered laser sweeps the lower half of the balloon to display traffic pollution.

This diagram displays the 20 biggest cross-border sovereign wealth fund deals since 2005. Each line represents a deal, with thickness scaled by value of deal and color the nationality of the primary buyer. The diagram also highlights the financial advisers and lawyers who worked on more than one of the top 20 deals.

TODAY is an application that visualizes your personal mobile communication. It sits on the periphery of your mobile, monitoring your connectivity through the number and type of calls made and received, subtly displaying them back to you, in the form of a generative graphic. Here, the visual result is a figurative and seemingly abstract picture – the story of your day. Some days will be really colourful and wired, others quieter and more reflective, either way the resulting visuals will always be personal, unrepeatible and unique.
Each event (call or message) has a graphic symbol that appears on the screen immediately after it happened. The position of the symbols follows a chronological spiral structure, where the last event is displayed at the center of the spiral. This means that everytime there is a new event, all the graphic symbols move one position, the result being an ever changing and evolving image.
Based on your phone usage, the program generates a graphic of your communication, whereby each phone number used during the course of the cycle, is given a colour and each communication with that colour is measured in time and intensity. Intensity is given visual weight through the speed by which you attend the call: an urgent call being literally more colour saturated than an untimely unknown number.
You can download the mobile client to any S60 device and visualize your mobile communication for up to a week.

Josef Muller-Brockmann was a Swiss graphic designer and teacher, mostly recognised for his simple designs and his clean use of typography, notably Helvetica. His shapes and colours have inspired many graphic designers in the 21st century, and made him one of the main precursors of the International Typographic Style, also known as Swiss Style.
This visualization, produced by Quentin Delobel, is the result of his research on Josef Muller-Brockmann and the international typographical style.

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‘droog event 2: urban play’ exhibition at experimentadesign amsterdam 2008

‘traffic-go-round’ by mark jenkins
droog event 2: urban play (initiated by droog design and curated by scott burnham)
at: onder de brug, amsterdam
from: september 18 – november 2, 2008
this is a sneak preview of the experimentadesign amsterdam 2008. part of the new design event freedesigndom, venues are located between the dutch cities of amsterdam and utrecht starting september 18th and run until november 2nd, 2008 at various venues. experimentadesign is a cultural biennale which first debuted in 1999 in lisboa, now with four editions under its belt. the theme for this year is ‘space and place’ which explores the city as a landscape which we have shaped and continue to shape through engineering, architecture and design. three exhibitions will be held which investigate our urban spaces and how transforming our place is just as much about imagination as it is about building and constructing. the exhibition highlights recent projects which have been used to enhance public spaces within the urban environment. one of the exhibitions on show will be ‘droog event 2: urban play’, a project which was initiated by droog design and curated by scott burnham.
‘droog event 2: urban play’ will be a display of international unauthorized collaborations and urban design interventions. often seen as a form of vandalism, the public interventions which are part of this exhibition are the newest waves of projects to hit the streets, challenging public expression in our major hubs as well as altering the language of creativity which is generally spoken in the city.
part of the exhibition also includes the amsterdam route. droog design and scott burnham have assembled groups of innovative designers and architects from around the world to create thirteen urban interventions, tools, toys and objects which will temporarily be placed along a route on the central IJ-riverfront in amsterdam. the collection of objects and installations for the amsterdam route is an experiment in imagination, which is meant to invite public interaction and raise questions about the residents of a city and how much they influence decisions being made regarding the creativity of their town.

billboards by cutup collective

stenciled streets by roadsworth

‘anwohnerpark’ by office of subversive architecture photo courtesy of office of subversive architecture

‘PARK(ing)’ by rebar
photo courtesy of rebar
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via design boom

This collection of short expository, critical, and speculative texts offers a field guide to the cultural, political, social, and aesthetic impact of software. Computing and digital media are essential to the way we work and live, and much has been said about their influence. But the very material of software has often been left invisible. In Software Studies, computer scientists, artists, designers, cultural theorists, programmers, and others from a range of disciplines each take on a key topic in the understanding of software and the work that surrounds it. These include algorithms; logical structures; ways of thinking and doing that leak out of the domain of logic and into everyday life; the value and aesthetic judgments built into computing; programming’s own subcultures; and the tightly formulated building blocks that work to make, name, multiply, control, and interweave reality.

The growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural theory that can understand the politics of pixels or the poetry of a loop and engage in the microanalysis of everyday digital objects. The contributors to Software Studies are both literate in computing (and involved in some way in the production of software) and active in making and theorizing culture. Software Studies offers not only studies of software but proposes an agenda for a discipline that sees software as an object of study from new perspectives.
Matthew Fuller (Ed) is David Gee Reader in Digital Media at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (MIT Press, 2005) and Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software.

Published by MIT press June 2008 available at Amazon

Great video on NY times’ Post-Materialist column showcasing “5,000 Years of Chairs in 5 Minutes”

A report from our Berlin correspondent on design and society.
The more you love design, the more you enjoy seeing things a bit worn, battered and imperfect. The greater your obsession with seating, for example, the more you’ll notice it — chairs out there in the world, a bit tattered and torn, weird one-offs, big green sofas shaped like mountain ranges, piano stools without pianos, junked stools salvaged from the trash and painted pink.