Reference Page: May 2009

52 Walk This Way
David Gibson’s book may be the first, last, and best word on environmental graphics (the fancy term for way-finding, which in turn translates to “signs” for laymen). But designers looking for still more information might check out the discipline’s professional organization, the Society of Environmental Graphic Design (www.segd.org), or wander around the Web site of Gibson’s own firm, Two Twelve: www.twotwelve.com. For practical tools, head over to the AIGA (www.aiga.org) and click on “Society and Environment” to view a complete set of 50 passenger/pedestrian signs developed by the organization—and available on the Web free of charge.

58 JETRO, Culled
If you’re secretly dreading this month’s Interna­tional Contemporary Furniture Fair (www.icff.com), as some seasoned designers and journalists no doubt are, might we suggest stealing away to the JETRO booth? Shorthand for Japan External Trade Organization, JETRO (www.jetro.go.jp) this year has more than a hundred products, many tailor-made for your leisure. Here at Reference, we’re partial to Naoto Fukasawa’s polypropylene humidifer (www.pmz-store.jp/html/category/001/001/8/category8_0.html), which press materials claim takes the form of a water droplet; we say it looks like an oversize doughnut. It comes in an array of sugary colors too: chocolate, straw berry, glazed, powdered sugar—yum! Sanyo will be showing a rechargeable pocket warmer (jp.sanyo.com/eneloop/lineup/kairo.html), and Ginza Tanagokoro will display a bundle of white, odor-eliminating wood charcoal (www.tanagokoro.com; let’s hope you don’t need it). Sliding down the scale of absurdity, one company has repackaged Japan’s equivalent of moonshine in a round-bottomed bottle of pretty white porcelain. The name of the hooch, Yaoki, means “fall seven times, get up eight times”—great barstool wisdom! The one object you really mustn’t miss, however, is Paro, a stuffed-animal automaton that’s believed to have the same curative effects as a live pet. Billed as “the World’s Most Therapeutic Robot (Certified by Guinness World Records in 2002),” Paro is ideal for anyone suffering from severe psychological trauma, which you’ll know plenty about after being cooped up in the Javits Center for four days.

62 Exquisite Detail
It may have taken a while, but once Apple fans noticed the similarities between the work of Jonathan Ive and Dieter Rams, blogs and bulletin boards lit up. “Thief!” some cried, while Harry Jones, a defensive devotee, dismissed any resemblance as coincidence on www.jonathanive.com. Huh? Take a look at the Braun ET44 calculator and the iPhone’s first calculator side by side. Or the Braun T3 Taschen radio and the iPod. Or the Braun LE1 Speaker and the iMac G5. Hardly an accident. Gizmodo (www.gizmodo.com) more plausibly called the likenesses an “homage” and “evolution”—a view furthered last November in the exhibition Less and More at the Suntory Museum in Osaka, Japan. If you’d like to see the products together before weighing in, you could be in luck. Rumor has it that the exhibition may still arrive Stateside before wrapping up in 2010.

66 Hero Worship Can Be Strangely Satisfying
Jenny Holzer is an artist from Ohio. You can read about her at www.pbs.org/art21/artists/holzer. A little knowledge goes a long way. Her new exhibit is called Protect Protect. It is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. See www.whitney.org/www/holzer. It is full of one-sentence aphorisms. For instance: “You are too depraved to reform, too treacherous to spare, too hideous for mercy.” We agree. It has declassified documents from the Iraq war too. Find a sample at www.aclu.org/safefree/torture. With perseverance you can discover any truth. Twitter has a Holzer imposter: www.twitter.com/jennyholzer.“Romantic love was invented to manipulate women,” the imposter says. “The desire to reproduce is a death wish,” the imposter says. The imposter is perhaps Valerie Solanas redivivus.The most profound things are inexpressible.

90 Harvesting the Wind
Before winning this year’s Next Generation competition with an innovative wind-power project, the French design duo Encore Heureux (www.encoreheureux.org) had more experience with poetic public art than energy infrastructure, installing fake herbs over Parisian subway grates and creating floating stages for river concerts. Its Next Generation proposal, devised with Raphaël Ménard, an engineer from Elioth (www.elioth.com), was much more ambitious. Indeed, Wind-it plans to “fix our energy addiction” by adding vertical wind turbines to electrical pylons. This way, the team writes, “pylons will become renewable energy producers directly plugged into the power grid.” This sounds great, except that the American grid is under attack: we just learned from the Wall Street Journal that cyber spies were able to penetrate it. Ack! The worst part is that the hackers left behind software tools that could later be used to destroy parts of the infrastructure. To learn more, Google “electricity grid” and “spies.”

112 Just One Word: Bioplastics
Puzzled by the headline to this month’s story on bioplastics? You must not be a movie buff. We have just two words for you: The Graduate (www.imdb.com/title/tt0061722). In one of the most famous lines in film history, Ben Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is advised by a party guest to stake his future on plastics. Though that was pretty good advice in 1967, nowadays synthetic polymers are the scourge of environmentalists and public-health professionals alike. The latter helped get Bisphenol A, a chemical widely used in plastic containers, banned in Canada; a Long Island county recently followed suit, and several states are considering similar measures (Google “BPA ban” for the latest). Meanwhile, environmental crusaders are trying to determine just how big the Great Pacific Garbage Patch really is; search online.wsj.com for “plastic gyre” for a thorough analysis. But aimless college grads should take note: plastic
pollution is not without entrepreneurial potential. As John Colapinto detailed in the April 6 issue of the New Yorker, the banking heir David de Rothschild decided to build the Plastiki, a sailboat made of plastic bottles and recycled waste products, after reading about the floating garbage patch. The Plastiki embarks on its 12,000-mile scientific-voyage-cum-publicity-stunt this summer; read all about it
at Adventure Ecology, www.adventureecology.com.

122 The Color and Texture Forecast
Dying to know more about the designers and manufacturers mentioned in this month’s Productsphere but too lazy for all that Googling? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. In order of appearance: Baccarat, www.baccarat.fr; Jaime Hayon, www.hayonstudio.com; Nanimarquina, www.nanimarquina.com; Ann Sacks, www.annsacks.com; Benjamin Moore, www.benjaminmoore.com; Brookside Veneers, www.veneers.com; Móz Designs, www.mozdesigns.com; Sicis USA, www.sicis.com; Pantone, www.pantone.com; Chantal, www.chantal.com; Carnegie, www.carnegiefabrics.com; Innovations in Wallcoverings, www.innovationsusa.com; Stone Source, www.stonesource.com; Sherwin-Williams, www.sherwin.com; Ceramic Tiles of Italy, www.italiantiles.com; Impronta Ceramiche, www.impronta.it; SilverState Textiles, www.silverstatetextiles.com; DuPont Corian, www.surfaces.dupont.com; Amanda Levete Architects, www.amandalevetearchitects.com; Melissa, www.melissaplasticdreams.com; Zaha Hadid, www.zaha-hadid.com; LG-C Design, www.lgcdesign.com; Shaw, www.shawfloors.com; Luna Textiles, www.lunatextiles.com; Tile of Spain, www.spaintiles.info; Architectural Systems, www.archsystems.com; Kohler, www.kohler.com; Abet Laminati, www.abetlaminati.com

Compiled by Kristi Cameron, Suzanne LaBarre, Claire Levenson, Paul Makovsky, and Martin C. Pedersen