Call for Entries: INDEX: Design Challenge - Designing for Education

This looks like an amazing opportunity!

Via CORE 77:

INDEX: Design to Improve Life has just opened the doors to their 2010 challenge with the theme "Designing for Education," in partnership with the children's rights organization UNICEF. If you are a student, a recent grad, or faculty, you are invited to submit in the following three areas: improved educational facilities, sanitation and hygiene, and gender parity in education.

Here's an excerpt from the brief:

According to UNESCO's 2010 Education for All report (EFA), the number of children out of school has dropped by 33 million worldwide since 1999. South and West Asia more than halved the number of children not in school - a reduction of 21 million. But the latest numbers show that 72 million children are still out of school, and if the trend continues, 56 million children will still be out of school in 2015. Equally important, besides ensuring more children enroll in school, those children already in school must get a good education.

Literacy remains among the most neglected of all education goals, and millions of children are leaving school before acquiring basic skills. In some countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, young adults with five years of education have a 40% probability of being illiterate. About 759 million adults lack literacy skills today. Two-thirds are women.

The gender disparity in education is another problem in developing countries today. Even though the share of girls out of school has declined from 58% to 54%, and the gender gap in primary education is narrowing in many countries, the difference is still a problem. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, almost 12 million girls may never enroll. In Yemen, nearly 80% of girls out of school are unlikely ever to enroll, compared with 36% of boys.

Submissions are due by November 26, 2010. Click here for guidelines.

image: Cy Twombly

the gender and geography of (un)employment

The above employment map comes from Stuart Staniford, representing trends in the United States by county. Lot's of data and resulting questions regarding gender and geography in the US. Outstanding map design as well.



hat tip: Kevin Drum

New York City expands recycling

Great news for the Bad Apple.

New York City will soon move into modern times with an updated recycling program that will increase plastic recycling, place more recycling bins around the city and add drop off locations in the boroughs for household hazardous waste. The legislation has been written and that is left is for NYC Mayor Bloomberg to sign the law into effect, which is expected to take place on Earth Day, April 22nd. New Yorkers will finally be able to recycle many different types of plastic – even yogurt containers!

via: inhabitat

@

Apparently MoMA has acquired the @ symbol for its permanent collection.

from their blog:

Contemporary art, architecture, and design can take on unexpected manifestations, from digital codes to Internet addresses and sets of instructions that can be transmitted only by the artist. The process by which such unconventional works are selected and acquired for our collection can take surprising turns as well, as can the mode in which they're eventually appreciated by our audiences. While installations have for decades provided museums with interesting challenges involving acquisition, storage, reproducibility, authorship, maintenance, manufacture, context--even questions about the essence of a work of art in itself--MoMA curators have recently ventured further; a good example is the recent acquisition by the Department of Media and Performance Art of Tino Sehgal's performance Kiss.

The acquisition of @ takes one more step. It relies on the assumption that physical possession of an object as a requirement for an acquisition is no longer necessary, and therefore it sets curators free to tag the world and acknowledge things that "cannot be had"--because they are too big (buildings, Boeing 747's, satellites), or because they are in the air and belong to everybody and to no one, like the @--as art objects befitting MoMA's collection. The same criteria of quality, relevance, and overall excellence shared by all objects in MoMA's collection also apply to these entities.

For more on the story and history of the symbol. Read here.

via:CORE 77

urban field manual

Check out BEYROUTES from onlab. Fanatstic idea and design. Would love for a whole series of these exploring the different nature of urban environments around the world.

Beyroutes, a guidebook to Beirut, one of the grand capitals of the Middle East. Beyroutes presents an exploded view of a city which lives so many double lives and figures in so many truths, myths and historical falsifications. Visiting the city with this intimate book as your guide makes you feel disoriented, appreciative, judgmental and perhaps eventually reconciliatory.

Initiated by Studio Beirut
Supported by Partizan Publik, Archis, Pearl Foundation

minimalist television

These minimalist television show posters are so good I'm tempted to buy the whole set!

Designer Albert Exergian's TV show posters "created out of a love for posters, modernism, and television.

hat tip: boing boing

The High Line opens

At long last, the High Line is now open to the public. Very exciting.



Image: Joel Sternfield

another sign for changing times

Via: Kazys Varnelis/aggregat456:

951b130958bbf7ace9a02600610610781eba9df9_m.jpg (via Madsbjerg)

mapping U.S. migration flows

I'm guessing migration trends in the U.S. are heating up with the reshuffling of the economic order here at home. With foreclosures, immigration, major industry shifts and declines where are people thinking they can make a go of it?

Check out these these fascinating maps from Pew Social Trends which employ a clever and simple use of animation and stylized graphics.

Pew Social Trends:

"Who Moves? Who Stays Put? Where's Home?" [pewsocialtrends.org] is a set of geographical data visualizations that display patterns of domestic migration, that is movement of people among the nation's regions and states. They show gains and losses only from people who move from one state to another. The maps use estimates from the American Community Survey for 2005-2007, and from the American census from the 1980, 1990 and 2000 census.

via: information aesthetics

best t-shirt of '09

Brent at Heart as Arena scored one of these Andres Serrano shirts this past week at the Free Store. Jealousy abounds. Perhaps the artist can get some over to the Senate as they 'confront' the AIG bandits.

box of clouds

This is very cool.

Digital artist Kim Laughton made this cloud viewer out of an old keychain photo viewer. The backlight of the LCD screen was removed so you have to hold the box up to the light to see the clouds drifting by inside.

Go here for more cloud cycles.



via: Make

I LEGO NY

Check out these Lego analogy/sculptures by Christoph Niemann. Love that Greenpoint makes the cut.


via information aesthetics

beijing opens

The politics aside, you have to admit these opening night shots from Beijing are fantastic. Soooo much more advanced than the Disney type crud we usually get at such forums. Gursky be damned! Great tip from Jagers.

David Lynch and iphone

the mall that wasn't there

What sets the South China Mall apart from [other dead malls], besides its mind-numbing size, is that it never went into decline. The tenants didn’t jump ship; they never even came on board. The mall entered the world pre-ruined, as if its developers had deliberately created an attraction for people with a taste for abandonment and decay. It is a spectacular real-estate failure – but it is also, as I saw when I spent two days exploring the site in May, a strangely beautiful monument to the big dreams that China inspires.

The big attraction of the South China Mall was supposed to be its “foreign” design. Learning from Las Vegas, where replicas of European monuments and New York landmarks draw throngs of tourists, the Dongguan mall modeled seven zones after various exotic world locations. Its rooftops reflect at least twenty different influences, from Czech town halls to Turkish mosques. - The National (Abu Dhabi)

continue reading at BLDBLG.

Amnesty International takes aim at Beijing

The text reads: “In the name of ensuring stability and harmony in the country during the 2008 Olympic Games, the Chinese Government continues to detain and harass political activists, journalists, lawyers and human rights workers.

more here.

iPhoned

I'm not an IPhone owner, and have plenty of problems with the AT&T aspect of the device, but I got say reading this LA Times piece makes me shrug even more about owning one, in a lighthearted sort of way. Just listen to how one customer has enhanced his life and probably managed to irritate the hell out of everyone in the grocery store ...

Wil Shipley, a Seattle software developer, uses his iPhone at the Whole Foods fish counter to check websites for updates on which seafood is the most environmentally correct to purchase. He quizzes the staff on where and how a fish was caught. Because he carries the Internet with him, "I can be super-picky," he said

Oh I bet you are!

Note :Fewer than 1% of the 219 million cellphones in the U.S. are iPhones, according to M:Metrics. (One possible reason: An iPhone costs about $400.) That hasn't been enough to trigger a broader boom of Internet browsing on hand-held gadgets. The percentage of U.S. mobile phone users surfing the Internet over the last year has stayed flat at 13%, M:Metrics found.

image: LA Times

map of the internet

this is what the internet looks like - rather what it looked like in January '06. Quite nebular eh?


via Next Nature

mapping loss

The Times has this article on the new nature of mapping in a world of hyper change. Mapmakers have long been come accustomed to the ever shifting borders of post-colonial and post- Soviet states along with the lessoning addition to the new "discoveries". Lately there is a new challenge, keeping maps current with the changes wrought through environmental degeneration. Above is a picture of the Aral Sea from 1967 on the left and the current view on the right. It's an alarming change that parallels the radical changes in the arctic. At least in the case of the Aral Sea, steps are being taken to make up for bad engineering policies of the past, most sites like this are not that lucky. I can only wonder at what a map of West Virginia might look like in a few years after recent coal legislation is implemented accelerating the practice of "mountain topping".

Map makers certainly have their work cut out for them. Just as we reach a point where most of the world seemingly has been mapped, we essentially now have go back and re-present everything altered during the same period of the initial discoveries. That is an interesting and saddening reality. The notion that the "map is not the territory" has a new dimension it seems.

iPhone is sexy

So this is what supply and demand looks like? or rather Apple fetishism? This poor soul will get his iPhone but has endured some hellish NY weather this week. Be sure and give him a call...