In the book Massive Change, Bruce Mau and Jennifer Leonard focus on Urban sprawl and a so called tipping point. The year 2006 was the tipping point in how we live. From 2006 on half of the world population will live in cities. Cities grow together creating so called urban cores. This is a very interesting movement and will have effect on how we live and work.

The website 192021.org – a platform for research into the subject – tries to explain this phenomena by using a simple and beautiful animation. The makers have divided the information into small fragments. The story is still linear and doesn’t have a lot of interaction, but how they have cut up the information for digital storytelling is very good.

I love this subject. If you know media that explore this, please recommend me websites, movies, books or any other media.

The care for earth as our only habitat, source of food and storage for waste did get our attention over the last years. And as with every major cultural or political movement it had effect on visual culture as well. We look at the earth as a magic, fragile object. And when it comes to global warming we face universal problems.

Todays most widespread and popular outlet of visual culture is the user interface. I’m not a cultural expert, but I do think it’s rather funny we see representations of the earth and galaxy returning in todays most popular interfaces. Those images are carefully selected and could as well been renderings of little fish or exotic plants.

Below are popular interface examples. New media is making the world a smaller place ;)

1. The music-player in the Sony Playstation 3 shows moving images of the earth (video)
2. The new background-set in Apple Mac OSX Leopard has Earth images
3. And Earth is the Apple iPhone default screen
4. Google Earth turned around 180 degrees and now looks up the sky

Do you know other examples? Please share.

Waste is the worst functional design possible. A product designers nirvana is a product package that is hyper-multi-functional. The first function of product design is acting as an attractive container. It has to protect and promote the product. In the second phase this same functional design has to be easily disarmed or even better disappear while consuming.

Oh, and it should always cost less money and use less space.

The New York Times is running a series of articles about the energy challenge. A great example is one from last week where they talk about the old and new Coca Cola bottle, the old and new Mc Donalds hamburger box and Wallmart’s packaging scoreboard.

EcoIron designed a Low Wattage Palette that is an alternative to black. I guess hypernarrative-white is not really a sustainable option. Should Greenpeace re-design?

“On average, this palette uses only about 3 or 4 watts more than a completely black screen. White is included as an accent color.”

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link to the video (the pixels you are looking at is a deer)

We are regular beach visitors (it is just a few miles away). We are used to a certain amount of junk on the beach. Maybe it was because of the wind, but yesterday the amount of trash was overwhelming. The beach had a long line of trash with the length of a few miles.

I like plastics (my jacket, kite, sunglasses all plastic), I think most of western wealth and our current state of living is related to the invention of plastics. I also think new plastics produced from renewable energy sources like corn, etc. will eventually have the same qualities as oil based plastics.

Everything that is waste is useless and costs money, why make things you don’t use? It is commercially interesting to reduce or stop to produce waste materials. (Dutch/English documentary: waste equals food)

What really bothers me are the people that just dump trash/plastics everywhere. My parents would have kicked my ass if I even dropped the smallest paper somewhere – and parents should. I can’t understand that people think it is normal to throw your trash on the street, beach, forest, sea, e.d..

Here are af few pictures of the junk found on the beach, more on Flickr. In Spain they use this great ad to get attention for sea junk.

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Très cool, Wired about generating power from kites.