(Credit:
Design Policy)
Design is not the answer to everything, but it certainly has an important role to play in almost everything that holds a society together.
In light of the current economic crisis, several U.S. professional design organizations (AIGA, IDSA, and others), design education accreditation organizations, and Federal Government officials have seized the historic opportunity and joined forces to launch an initiative to shape a U.S. National Design Policy. In a moment of great global uncertainty and an erosion of national confidence, designers are perfectly positioned to take on a leadership role in "Re-designing America's Future," and the proposed policy is supposed to give them a more effective platform. "Design is the world remade in human form," the initiative's Web site states. And there's a lot of remaking to do these days. We know that "beautiful things work better." These days, however, only "meaningful" things make a real difference. And collective action is required.
As a result of a November 2008 meeting in Washington, the initiative has published "Redesigning America's Future: Ten design policy proposals for the United States of America's economic competitiveness and democratic governance." The document strives to demonstrate how design "improves policy success by making it relevant to the People." As stated in the document: "Design serves to advance the goals of the United State's economic competitiveness by saving time and money and simplifying the use, manufacturing, and maintenance of goods and services. It enhances democratic governance by improving the performance and delivery of government services."
More details can be found on the U.S. National Design Policy Initiative Web site, including a downloadable version of the "Redesigning America's Future" report.
National Congresspeople received the publication in their mail boxes January 20. If you support the initiative and want them to act upon it, you can write them directly.
In addition, you can take part in a viral video campaign that asks supporters to record a brief "I Pledge" endorsement to be uploaded to the initiative's YouTube page or the Facebook page.
(Credit:
Gino Rossi)
We Feel Fine is “an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.” The site, created by Brooklyn-based artist Jonathan Harris and Stanford computational math professor and former Google employee Sep Kamvar, looks like exactly the result of these two minds combined: emotional data mining with a human touch and an artistic interface -- a particularly beautiful application of moodgraphics.
The site is driven by a huge database that browses the web for emotional expressions around the globe and maps them graphically: “Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases ‘I feel’ and ‘I am feeling.’ When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the ‘feeling’ expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.).”
The result is a recording of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 to 20,000 new feelings per day. Sounds Orwellian but it is actually pretty touching. Like the congenial PostSecret, We Feel Fine provides viewers with a voyeuristic act in mutual consent. Seeing other people’s feelings is emotional; seeing other people describe their feelings is comforting.
Since it launched in 2006, the site has been written up exhaustively. The Pop!Tech blog (hat tip) recently rediscovered it -- in the light of the strong collective emotions around Obama’s election and the rise of the new We Generation, “what we feel” is suddenly back on the map again.
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