I’m helping conduct a workshop this week at local non-profit Apathy is Boring along with Montréal-based community builder Michael Lenczner. Come by if you’re interested in learning how to leverage social networking and web-based tools to support your art, non-profit, or business.

The info:

Some of you who know me in person know that I’ve recently gone through a rather large career shift. After years of computer-related technical work—designing and writing about design as a sideline—I’ve recently launched a full-time freelance design business.

I make websites for creative people and small businesses at reasonable rates. I make record covers, posters and business cards.

I’ve just launched a somewhat experimental portfolio page, which shows a selection of my work:

Visit my portfolio

Please, let me know what you think.

When summer comes around, I bike everywhere I can. It’s almost always the healthiest, fastest, and cheapest way to get around. The biggest deterrent for me personally are cars. Every spring I usually have a few close calls because drivers have not yet readjusted to having to look out for bikes. As my city develops a more bike-friendly culture, I have seen this decline, but it’s still there.

Bike lanes can help by creating a clear space for bikes, letting drivers know where to avoid, but they don’t often go where you need them to go.

Enter the Light Lane. It’s just a concept, but it seems like something that could feasibly be built.

“Our system projects a crisply defined virtual bike lane onto pavement, using a laser, providing the driver with a familiar boundary to avoid. With a wider margin of safety, bikers will regain their confidence to ride at night, making the bike a more viable commuting alternative.”

Via Spacing Montréal.

I have to give Rock credit for his great descriptions here. I’m not always a fan but he shows great wit and depth here.

Via Mir.

In an effort to keep older computer file formats viable, the EU is putting up over $5 Million to build a series of emulators to keep old software running and old file formats accessible.

Called Keeping Emulation Environments Portable (Keep), the project aims to create software that can recognise, play and open all types of computer file from the 1970s onwards.

. . .

“every digital file risks being either lost by degrading or by the technology used to ‘read’ it disappearing altogether”

Great idea. The BBC has more.

I stumbled across this article from the economist, which briefly outlines some of the mechanisms which collective animals like bees and cockroaches make decisions. An excerpt:

Another form of groupthink occurs when people are either isolated from crucial sources of information or dominated by other members of the group, some of whom may have malevolent intent. This too has now been demonstrated in animals. José Halloy of the Free University of Brussels used robotic cockroaches to subvert the behaviour of living cockroaches and control their decision-making process. In his experiment, reported in an earlier issue of Science, the artificial bugs were introduced to the real ones and soon became sufficiently socially integrated that they were perceived as equals. By manipulating the robots, which were in the minority, he was able to persuade the cockroaches to choose an inappropriate shelter—even one which they had rejected before being infiltrated by machines.

I think we can easily find parallels to this in our own society. Deliberate disinformation campaigns by the cigarette industry and the fossil fuel industry regarding the safety of smoking and global warming, respectively, delayed the progression of the debate on these issues by years, maybe decades.

Via Policy Economist.

Occasionally in design, things just go wrong without you even knowing. Here’s a silly example I found in Québec city a few years ago—an ad for a video rental store. The content is a classy message about film being an art form, but for an english speaker, there is a decent chance they’ll mainly see the word “Fart”.

See also, the now-defunct Creatifart (which sounds just fine in French).

Check out my Twitter account. I’m a little less strict about what I post there as compared to here, so expect some more local Montréal stuff, some more techy/computery posts, and more silly stuff along with the personal blathering.

Partially inspired by this talk from the Long Now foundation (don’t ask me how), I got thinking about concept cars, and in particular how they tend to shape the view of the public. While they may represent a far-off future of the automotive industry, I find it interesting to see how much attention they tend to get, despite their often blatant impracticality in the present.

Above is the Hummer O2, which was created as part of an environmental design competition in 2006. While its intentions may have been good, it will never become a production car. It’s designed to have algae-filled panels which turn sunlight into fuel on the go, opening like “a flower” to capture the sun’s energies. The stupidity of carrying around several hundred pounds of algae-filled water to make a tiny fraction of the fuel needed should be pretty obvious. It’s the sort of empty, glamourous design that doesn’t make any sense in the real world.

Yet it somehow—bafflingly—managed to win the environmental design competition.

This is the sort of work that gives design a bad name. It’s the sort of empty, far-flung futurism that lead people to mistakenly believe that biofuels or hydrogen or what have you are just around the corner, and that they can just keep on driving like oil isn’t about to peak, or global warming is not a problem. That convinces them they can still buy a wasteful house in the suburbs because technology will come to their rescue, despite the fact that there is little indication that we can or will make any such switch.

“Real artists ship” was something said by Steve Jobs when working on the original Macintosh. Apple almost never releases any design concepts (at least under Jobs). They stick to what they can ship. You can bet that their designers have some fantastic sketches filed away, but they don’t let that get mixed up with their products.

The car companies have been trumpeting biofuels, hydrogen, and electric cars for years, and I think it’s lead us to become lazy about the future of our energy system. We have to stop deluding ourselves into thinking Hydrogen is just over the horizon—it’s been “almost here” for the last couple of decades.

What we can and should do now is reduce our dependence on cars. We don’t have to stop driving, we just need make sure we live in places that allow us to walk, bike or take public transit.

In honour of the end of this year’s fantastic TED conference, here’s one of my favourite talks posted on their site in the last few months: Virginia Postrel’s excellent take on the true meaning of glamour.