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.

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).

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.

I really like these glasses made out of used bottles. It’s such a simple idea, and I think they look great. A little expensive, but a great idea.

Buy them on Etsy.

Via Lake Jane.

John Gruber is best known for his Apple Computer-centric blog Daring Fireball, but he’s also a pretty astute design critic. In this 15 minute talk he makes a link between auteur filmmaking and the software design process.

In film, directors like Kubrick, Hitchcock, and Kurasawa were able to have extreme levels of control on their work, creating extremely personal and opinionated films.

The most prominent example of this in the design world may be Apple Computer, which reportedly follows the whims and desires of CEO Steve Jobs. As a friend who works for Apple’s rival Microsoft once put it: “Microsoft tries to please everybody, but Apple tries to please one person: Jobs”. If one happens to share Jobs’ tastes, a Mac will be perfect for you, if not, go somewhere else.

The following image and caption were found while browsing through microfilm in Montréal’s main library—a simply amazing artistic rendition of a Montreal “of the future”, published just after the turn of the century. Who knows, if we end-up seriously seeking a truly carbon-neutral society, these predictions may end up coming true, in a sense. -Neale

If the steady march of technological progress continues, the caption says, airships such as these will fly across the Atlantic Ocean every two days, while nine-masted schooners ply the waters of Montreal harbour, and buildings of forty storeys tower in the background. Interestingly, in pointing out the artist’s inclusion of the Union Jack on the airship, the caption asks, “In twenty-five years’ time, will we be under the same flag?”

Some details:

Obama is, by some accounts, a bit of a nerd. But let’s be thankful he has not adopted PowerPoint for his speeches. Above is a mock-up of what the accompanying PowerPoint might look like for his famous “Yes We Can” speech.

Taken from a post on Boing Boing where author Steven Johnson actually suggests that Obama should use PowerPoint.

Neale and I have discussed, briefly, how we both admire design work that makes a genuine difference in people’s lives. A case in point would be Josh Silver’s adjustable eyeglasses. Stripping the problem down to its essence (millions of people lack corrective lenses, expertise and manufacturing facilities are scarce), the former Oxford physicist came up with a low-tech solution that requires minimal *cough* oversight and that can be marketed at around 1$ per unit. Brilliant.

Via Core77

I just finished reading Janine Benyus’ Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, which is the sort of book that places itself very firmly on the optimistic side of the environmental debate. It is almost 300 pages of possible solutions to many of our problems based on the designs created by natural selection in nature. It covers everything from using shape-changing proteins to store digital information, to mimicking a natural prairie in our agriculture by using perennials instead of annuals.

So many of the ideas presented in the book are inspiring. Who can help but be impressed and humbled by a spider who is able to create a substance with a tensile strength greater than steel, in water, at room temperature, out of the flies and gnats they eat. Our methods of material creation ( toxic chemicals + heat + pressure ) seem so clumsy and wasteful in comparison.

Still, after a lengthy string of breakthroughs and observations presented in the book, I couldn’t help but be a little weary of this overly-technocratic look at our environmental issues. Technology is going to be extremely important in combatting our numerous environmental problems, but it’s only a small piece of the puzzle.

The sort of changes we need go well beyond simply swapping-out our incandescent bulbs and installing programmable thermostats. We need a fundamental shift in the way we live, in the way we move, the way we eat, in our economy and in our social norms. The book argues that we need to find a balanced existence not predicated on depletion of resources and unlimited growth. It’s going to be bumpy, but solving these problems is going to need real, deep social change.

At the very end of Biomimicry I ran across an observation made by Wendell Berry which touches on just one small element of social change. In Benyus’ words:

Berry argues, for instance, that shoddy workmanship is a much greater threat to our forests than clear-cutting. Only when we come to value the well-made chair or table that lasts a lifetime will we begin to value and save the source of these things, whole forests instead of trees. When the product of that forest is a durable idea, as it is in biomimicry, the same valuing of source will occur.

In short, we need to reject the whole notion of a commodity-based, disposable culture. We need to start buying things to last instead of to throw out. This often means putting-up more money up-front, but saving more in the long term. It also means being more careful and selective about the things we buy.