Reference Page: March 2009

Virtue in Vice
Is there no end to eco-chic? First it was hemp T-shirts and cardboard chairs; now there are sustainable nightclubs. We hate to be curmudgeons, but it’s hard to imagine smart consumption at a nightclub, where the average customer is downing five shots of Patrón an hour. Club WATT, in the Netherlands, bills itself as “the very first Sustainable Dance Club in the world” as well as a great place for “coffee with coconut pie with grandma” (www.watt-rotterdam.nl). Weird! Dutch! New York’s Greenhouse (www.greenhouseusa.com) is much more focused on its green bona fides, as you’d expect from a LEED-registered club. Tour the inside—complete with organic booze and faux hedge animals—with Pouell Brien, an event planner, who says, “The best thing about it is that you’re not just spending your green; you’re actually partying green” (search YouTube for “Greenhouse nightclub”).

Golden Yicket
To promote Helvetica, Gary Hustwit’s documentary about the ubiquitous Swiss font (www.helveticafilm.com), the PBS series Independent Lens recently featured a Cosmo-style quiz that assigns a typeface to various character types (search for “What Font Are You?” on www.pbs.org). Snobs tend to be Times New Roman, hipsters are Courier, and misanthropes lean toward Bier­garten. But with Objectified, Hustwit’s new film about industrial design (www.objectifiedfilm.com), he pushes into Wingdings territory. The graphic designer Michael C. Place created the film’s logo from familiar objects: O is an iPod scroll wheel, B is a pair of Marc Newson sun-glasses, and J is a toothbrush (www.wearebuild.com/blog; search for “what’s in a logo”).

Rekindling the Book
There’s something quaint about how Amazon’s Kindle and its e-reader brethren blindly mimic print books. You read with an inklike interface and flip pages on a device that is often the size of a trade paperback. This misses the point. Digital media is replacing print in part because it has infinitely more to offer. For all the doomsday predictions about the New York Times, the newspaper’s Web site is actually quite successful, with as many as 20 million visitors a month. The reason: www.nytimes.com exploits its medium with an endless raft of links, blogs, and videos that amounts to an unrivaled information portal. Why can’t books do the same? Imagine Lolita with clickable annotations, or an interactive bodice ripper. Eat your heart out, Fabio.

All-Steel Drive
Parking, as Katharine Mieszkowski writes on Salon.com (search the site for “We paved paradise”) has been one of the great economic and environmental scourges of the modern age, the product of esoteric 1920s zoning laws. Architects and urban planners have done their best, avoiding vast blacktop surfaces where they can and sexing up parking garages elsewhere. (Google “BusinessWeek” and “Incredible Parking Garages” for some ambitious examples.) Perhaps change is afoot. The auto industry is clearly in a bind, and the only long-term solution, to hear Emma Rothschild tell it in the New York Review of Books (www.nybooks.com/articles/22333), is to shift Detroit’s resources to public transit. Thus would begin a new era of efficient buses, high-speed trains, and walkable streets. Dependence on cars would cease, and parking would become a relic of 20th-century excess, allowing architects to return to their truly important work: designing beautiful buildings.

Good Argument
As if cute computers weren’t enough, the One Laptop per Child initiative also has a Web site filled with adorable children (www.laptop.org). Kids stare at their green-and-white portables, and seven-year-old Zimi tells us in a video that the XO laptop changed her life. So why also broadcast an ad featuring a digitally resuscitated John Lennon (search YouTube for “John Lennon” and “OLPC”)? Is the nonprofit trying to attract kids, or their technology-challenged Boomer parents? In any event, some XO fans have already started thinking about a One Laptop per Grandma initiative (www.olpcnews.com; search for “grandmother”).

Redefining Design
According to received wisdom, a lack of resources often fosters creativity. For example, if you needed an antenna during the collapse of the Soviet Union, you might have made one with forks, as we learn in Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts (Fuel Publishing, 2006). The same by-the-bootstraps gumption can be found elsewhere. With $200 and years of toil, a resident of North Grosnevor Dale, Connecticut, created his own solar-powered barbecue from a radar dish and thousands of tiny mirrors (search for “­energy-efficient barbecue” at www.popularmechanics.com). DIY innovations might thrive in hard times, but is a recession actually good for design? Michael Cannell recently suggested as much in the New York Times, writing that “the design world could stand to come down a notch or two” (www.nytimes.com; search for “Cannell” and “design”). No way, argued Murray Moss in a response essay on Design Observer (Google “Design Hates a Depression”). In defense of contemporary design, Hella Jongerius’s $10,615 sofa is much cheaper than the disgraced former Merrill Lynch chairman John Thain’s $35,000 antique commode.

Products For a New Age
Design that Matters: what a curious name for a nonprofit. It makes you wonder if its founders believe that most design does not, in fact, matter. Not so. “The idea in the beginning was a positive definition,” DtM’s CEO, Timothy Prestero, writes in an e-mail. “It’s a promise. Invest your time with us, and we’ll do everything we can to see that it matters.” Still, can you imagine another profession brandishing the same ethos? Law that matters? Dentistry that matters? DtM, of course, is awfully serious about its mission. Visit Designthatmatters.org to peruse its projects, its blog, and its YouTube channel (number of subscribers: six). Sadly, the Web site is something of an aesthetic misstep, with a dull blue-gray background and an ersatz WordPress interface. Some might wonder why design, in this case, didn’t matter just a little bit more.

A Call to Arms
One result of increasingly efficient prosthetic limbs is that more amputee veterans are returning to active duty (www.huffingtonpost.com; search for “amputee soldiers”). At the same time, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is spending millions on ChemBot, a caterpillar-inspired creature that might reduce soldiers’ risks during combat (Google “LiveScience” and “ChemBots”). Also known as “chemical” or “squishy” robots, ChemBots will be able to squeeze into tiny spaces, defuse explosives, gather information, change shape, and self-destruct. The Massachusetts-based company iRobot, which won a DARPA ChemBot contract, also makes Roomba, a vacuum-cleaning robot, and Scooba, his floor-­washing cousin (www.irobot.com). It makes fighting dust take on a whole new meaning.