Orangutans Play Video Games

From Forbes.com via Associated Press:

Four-year-old Bernas isn't the computer wizard his mom is, but he's learning. Just the other day he used his lips and feet to play a game on the touch-screen monitor as his mom, Madu, swung from vines and climbed trees. The two Sumatran orangutans at Zoo Atlanta are playing computer games while researchers study the cognitive skills of the orange and brown primates.

The best part? Zoo visitors get to watch their every move.

The orangutans use a touch screen built into a tree-like structure that blend in with their zoo habitat. Visitors watch from a video monitor in front of the exhibit.

The computer games, which volunteers from IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) spent nearly 500 hours developing, test the animals' memory, reasoning and learning, spitting out sheets of data for researchers at the zoo and Kyle Frantz's team at Atlanta's Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, a partner in the project.

paraSITE: Inflatable Shelters for Urban Bedoins

This piece about installation artist/activist Michael Rakowitz is amazing. It serves as a case study in problem solving (shelter for the homeless); product design (portable inflatable dwellings); and systems thinking (waste energy from HVAC units recycled as life-giving heat and humidity for the homel

From Worldchanging blogger, Sara Rich:

paraSITE is an exploration of temporary urban living spaces, with an historic point of inspiration, and a more utilitarian/humanitarian purpose.

Michael Rakowitz traveled to Jordan in the mid-90s on a study program where he focused in part on the nomadic tradition of the Bedouins, and the architecture of their tents. When he returned to Boston, where he was a student at MIT, the presence of the homeless population in the city triggered a quandary for him regarding the contrast of a nomadic lifestyle by tradition versus by necessity. The nomadic patterns of the urban homeless, particularly in the cold months, were dictated by the location of heating vents releasing exhaust from HVAC systems inside houses and buildings. Many of these systems had been designed like boxes, such that a person could sleep on top of the vent and stay warm; but viewing this as a problem, the city had begun installing vertical vents which slanted downward off the building, making it impossible to rest on them.

ECO-LA Driveby Art Gallery

from Worldchanging LA local blogger, Eliza Thomas:

ECO-LA’s driveby art gallery brings me so much joy. Officially opening on Earth Day, the exhibit, “Off the Wall 3,” will feature original paintings on reclaimed vinyl billboards. These 14’ by 48’ works of art will display both inside ECO-LA’s Gallery, and outside on the buildings exterior. But curator and founder Peter Schulberg is most stoked by the space LA billboard owners have donated — five billboards in choice spots around the city on which he’ll display several of the pieces during the months of April and May, before the paintings are taken down and sold to art lovers in a “Back to Earth” event at the gallery.

Brand New

Brand New is a Speak Up spin-off displaying opinions, and focusing solely, on corporate and brand identity work. It is a division of UnderConsideration. The blog compares older brand identities and their recently updated versions. The deconstructions of the logos is sharp, educated and catty. Kind of like a carload of really smart designers, home for the holidays, driving around their hometown riffing on all the strip mall signage.

Posted on Jan.20.2007:

I have never eaten at Hardee's or Carl's Jr, mostly because I rarely eat at fast food burger places but partly because if you asked me to name five Quick Service Restaurants (QSR for short) focusing on burgers I would have a hard time getting past McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's. In fact, it wasn't until today, while googling around, that I finally made the connection that the faux hot commercial with Paris Hilton soaping up a Bentley was for Carl's Jr. And for Hardee's. Apparently my brand neurons never made a full synapse between these two places and Paris. Or that Hardee's was the crazies that were pushing the 1420-calorie burger earlier this century. Perhaps the reason is that I'm not their target audience: Young, hungry guys. I guess I am the three things: Relatively young, sometimes hungry and genderly a guy. But when put together, I prefer to disassociate from my brethren. And, hopefully, this too explains why I can't bear the sight of these new logos and much less comprehend how "research showed that the new logos were seen as classier, more unique, more appealing and more attractive overall."

Fake Model Photography

from Receding Hairline:

With a very little effort, you can take existing photographs of everyday scenes and make it look like they're actually of miniature models.

It doesn't take much to fool the mind of the viewer, but there are a few basic rules you can follow to help convince your audience that they're looking at a railway set rather than the real world; see the section on picking the right photo at the bottom of this page. You'll need a copy of Photoshop CS or later to follow this tutorial.

Sean Starwars

From our friends at Yee Haw Industries:

The UTK Print Club is happy to announce the visit of Outlaw Printmaker Sean Star Wars. Sean Star Wars will be giving an artist lecture as part of the visiting artist series at the University of Tennessee. His lecture will be at 7:00pm on Tuesday, March 27, 2007 in room 111 of the Art and Architecture Building on the UT campus.

Sean Star Wars received his M.F.A. in 1999 from Louisiana State University and has taught printmaking at several universities including University of Southern Mississippi, Tulane University and has conducted a relief print workshop at Frogman's Print Workshop in Vermillion, SD. Star Wars has been included in many group exhibitions as well as solo exhibitions and his work is in permanent collections including Amity Art Foundation, Philadelphia Print Center, and New Orleans Museum of Art. He currently lives in Laurel,
Mississippi.

http://seanstarwars.com/

Social Software Montage

LOGO2.0 part I, originally uploaded by Stabilo Boss.

Like a coral reef filled with brilliantly colored tropical fish, this montage shows a mere snapshot fo the number of social web apps in the Web 2.0 aquarium.

Design = Business Catalyst or Financial Drain?

Stretching back in time before the era of the printing press or the pyramids, there has been a war raging within the human race--a war between accountants and designers.

From the FastCompany blog:

No Accounting for Design

Is market share a meaningful measure of design's financial performance? You'd think so, judging by the number of design consultancies that use increases in sales and market share to trumpet the "success" of their redesigns. The Industrial Designers Society of America even uses market share and sales as two important metrics for its prestigious Design & Business Catalyst award, which recognizes "market and financial performance" so as to demonstrate to executives "the value of design."

But while market share might be meaningful to designers, it has far less resonance with CFOs, the ultimate arbiters of design investments. Julie Hertenstein and Marjorie Platt, two Northeastern University accounting professors who've attempted to quantify the contribution that design makes to the bottom line, argue that market share, by itself, doesn't really mean much. "Market share is just that, a share˜it's measured as a percentage," says Hertenstein. "If you can't measure it in dollars, it doesn't show up on the accounting statement." read full post>>

Changing the World is Not Enough

The Skoll Foundation, started by Jeff Skoll of Ebay, is focused on changing the game for social change and entrepreneurism.

In fact, the label "social entrepreneur" is the nom de guerre in the current war on poverty, disease, conflict and intolerance, with the long-time foot soldiers finally gaining popular acclaim.

Last year, the man who is oft cited as the prototype of the modern social entrepreneur was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize: Muhammad Yunus, founder and manager of Grameen Bank and its growing family of social venture businesses in Bangladesh.

Fast Company has dedicated entire issues to celebrating Social Capitalists who've used business savvy and social conscious to create successful ventures that reap an ROI tracked in the new gold standard of success: The Triple Bottom Line. Business school students are emailing their parents, declaring that they are going to take their $200,000 education and start a business selling eyeglasses to Haitians. Oh, and make a ton of money doing it.

Heck, even the Oscars were declared green this year! [details]

With all this good press, an very self-reflective and worried conversation is taking place on-line at the Skoll Foundation's project site, The Social Edge. Social entrepreneurs are having a moment of doubt as to the depth of this perceived global change.

As the topic itself becomes more popular, more mainstream, more Hollywood, will this spotlight yield practical leaders who can effectively leverage the emergent power of social media to mobilize decentralized activity in combination with true political will to lead change in policies and regulations on a global scale?

Changing the World is Not Enough
Is social entrepreneurship ready for the real challenge?
by Social Edge

As a social entrepreneur, I worry. Changing the world through the work of one social entrepreneur at a time is not good enough. Improving life for even one person is worthy. It changes the world…one heartbeat at a time. And sooner or later, as life for enough people is changed for the positive we will reach a tipping point beyond which the entire world will change itself into a better place. I believe this will happen, given time.

But what if it doesn’t happen soon enough? What if we don’t have the time it will take? What if the world tips the other way first? Some days, for every tip toward a better world there is an opposite and greater tip toward a horrific world. What if those days overpower the good days?

A new wilderness is engulfing us. How we see this forest for its trees and who leads us through it could make the difference between life and death for civilization as we know it.