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"And so it is with a great many things. We can wait until the lifestyle that is killing the planet and is making us crazy and sick is no longer physically possible, or we can opt out of it ahead of time. And what we replace it with can be difficult at first, but quite a lot better for us in the end."
Monthly archives of “November 2008”
Clearing the tabs
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"For example, in cities, the degree of criminality is affected by liberty of movement; it’s higher in culs-de-sac. And high-rises are culs-de-sac: two thousand people jammed together in the air…"
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"Attached to the top of each bottle is a cylinder. This cylinder is a cartridge that contains a concentrate. When you get the bottle home, you fill it with water and then attach that cartridge to the top of the bottle. Now when you squeeze the trigger you get a spray that is made up of tap water mixed on the fly with the concentrate in the cartridge."
Thanks Mayo for the link.
Armand Hammer himself was an intriguing person by all accounts…as I understand it, it amused him immensely to buy stock in Church & Dwight who made the baking soda and toothpaste, so that when people asked him if he made the products (kind of) bearing his name, he could say yes truthfully. -
Adam Richardson, frog design
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"Mr. Peñalosa's solutions may work in the developing world, but is North America ready for his happy revolution? Consider the advice he gave to planners in Los Angeles last year: Let traffic and congestion become so unbearable that drivers voluntarily abandon their car habits." Thanks Charles for the link
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"We have done a fantastic job on usability of passwords. They’re so usable that anyone will type their password anywhere they see the word “password”…" (via Boing Boing)
Design and Behaviour : A new discussion list
I’m pleased to announce the launch of Design and Behaviour, a new discussion list / Google group:
The design of products, services and environments can be used to influence behaviour, and there’s a growing appreciation of the possibilities for social benefit, especially in environmentally sensitive design, health, safety, security and crime reduction. This group aims to bring together people interested in this emerging field: interaction designers, product designers, graphic designers, engineers, architects, ergonomists, computer scientists, sociologists, psychologists, economists, philosophers, researchers, strategists, policy-makers and anyone else with something to say, or an interest in learning what others are doing.
Run, initially at least, by myself with help from Debra Lilley, the group’s intentionally got a pretty broad scope. Please, if you enjoy this blog (or even if you don’t enjoy it but are interested in the field!) sign up (there’s also a Facebook group if that’s your thing). How the group develops is up to the members, so I can’t give you a definitive high/low traffic indication. But we will endeavour to keep it usable.
P.S. Both designandbehaviour.com and designandbehavior.com go to the same place.
P.P.S. My apologies for the few weeks off the blog’s had. I’ve been very busy. Thanks to everyone who’s sent interesting items in the meantime – I hope to get round to posting them as soon as I can. It’s intriguing though, looking at the statistics that (aside from one-off spikes such as when we’re Boing Boing’d) the number of unique daily visitors to the site itself (i.e. not via RSS) remains fairly constant Monday-Friday regardless of how stale the posts on the front page are.