This is what you want to find under your Christmas tree – the hypercool Roadrunner trike, “designed to ride on the tarmac [and] that can carry up to 25kg of load.” It’s pedal-powered with a secondary electric motor rear wheel. [Link]

Farewell to Jeanne-Claude, who with her husband and collaborator Christo produced high-concept major-scale aesthetic works in public places. [Link to the artists' web site] [The Umbrellas] [The Gates]

Andrew Lippman on “open architecture products,” and viewing customers as partners who will contribute to the evolution and design of the products they buy and use.

The stability that we associated with products is gone. And so if you try to base your business on a product that you think will last a long time, then I suspect you’re likely to be in trouble — because society will change more rapidly….The young are not satisfied with products. They’re satisfied with things they can build into their own products. And so the challenge is to build those as open-architecture products. (From MIT Sloan Review)

www.hsmglobal.com

Geographers are researching buzz, according to this New York Times article (thanks to the phenomenal Oliver Markley for the pointer). They’re creating a study and an exhibit, both called “The Geography of Buzz,” and in the process finding that buzz is hard to define explicitly. “Rather, like pornography, you know it when you see it.”

As a digital guy, I looked for the tech implications:

… the geo-tagging represents a new wave of information that can be culled from sites like Flickr and Twitter. “We’re going to see more research that’s using these types of finer-grained data sets, what I call data shadows, the traces that we leave behind as we go through the city….They’re going to be important in uncovering what makes cities so dynamic.”

“People talk about the end of place and how everything is really digital. In fact, buzz is created in places, and this data tells us how this happens.”

The geographers have some very cool buzz maps.

Constructal law can predict patterns in living sysems. [Link]

“Our finding that animal locomotion adheres to constructal law tells us that – even though you couldn’t predict exactly what animals would look like if you started evolution over on earth, or it happened on another planet – with a given gravity and density of their tissues, the same basic patterns of their design would evolve again,” [Penn state biologist James] Marden added.

The law, which [Adrian] Bejan started describing in 1996, is the principle that flow systems evolve in time to balance and minimize imperfections, reducing friction or other forms of resistance, so that they flow more and more easily in time. He is fond of using illustrations to make his point. For example, he has used images ranging from the branching symmetries of the lungs, river basins and trees touching top-to-top.

Added Bruce Sterling’s “Last Viridian Note” to the Viridian Design web site and to Worldchanging. It’s kind of like simple living/voluntary simplicity, but that’s not what he’s thinking:

Do not “economize.” Please. That is not the point. The economy is clearly insane. Even its champions are terrified by it now. It’s melting the North Pole. So “economization” is not your friend. Cheapness can be value-less. Voluntary simplicity is, furthermore, boring. Less can become too much work.

It’s not so much about how to live in the new economy as how to live despite the economy, which is a wonky abstraction tethered to an unstable and unsustainable conceptual base, a manifestation of a centuries-long bubble that’s exploding slime on every main street parade. Despite that, we find energy and volition and keep on keeping on. As we move from a linear supply model to a network supply model, from resource extraction from knowledge extraction, we transform and are transformed, and move on.

And get good tools. In fact,

…get excellent tools and appliances. Not a hundred bad, cheap, easy ones. Get the genuinely good ones. Work at it. Pay some attention here, do not neglect the issue by imagining yourself to be serenely “non-materialistic.” There is nothing more “materialistic” than doing the same household job five times because your tools suck. Do not allow yourself to be trapped in time-sucking black holes of mechanical dysfunction. That is not civilized.