What do Tolstoy, Hemingway and Kafka have in common? These may look like cigarette packs created to celebrate each author’s legacy but instead they’re wittily-designed miniature books; not abridged editions, but books in their entirety. Resembling a flip-top pack right down to the foil wrapping and cellophane shell, Tank Books are an innovation by the creative wizards over at Tank Magazine. They lend a je ne sais quoi to the quotidian portable books rampant everywhere and would look arresting on a bookshelf, bedside table or nonchalantly tossed on to a beach-towel. Some habits are easier to discard but regardless of whether you’re a member of the nicotine platoon or not, any self-respecting bibliophile or design aficionado will want to possess one of these.

However, I’ve a sneaky suspicion that Tolstoy will be far from tickled by this…

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Tank Books (via Feed Me Cool Shit)

Contrary to what we normally cover on our site, design isn’t about fancy furniture and funky gadgets. Design is about thinking and twin sisters Ellen and Julia Lupton have setup a site called ‘Design your life’ which they hope to use to collect ideas and stories about people using design theory to shape their lives. The collected content will be used for a future book. In the meantime, you can contribute by sharing your story or reading others.

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Design your life

MIT Press has an interview with Eric von Hippel, the author of Democratizing Innovation on their site. The electronic edition is available free for download:

Why does innovation by users matter?

Innovation by users matters for two major reasons. First, users that innovate-both individual consumers and user firms-have been found to be “lead users.” That is, relative to other users in their populations they are ahead of the majority with respect to an important marketplace trend and expect to gain relatively high benefits from a solution to their leading-edge needs. (The correlations found between innovation by users and these lead user characteristics are highly significant, and the effect sizes found are also very large.) This means that the innovations users develop for themselves will be of interest to many users. Second, it has been found that users that innovate often freely reveal what they have developed. This means that other users-and manufacturers-are able to imitate what lead users have developed. The net result is that manufacturers often do produce innovations pioneered by lead users. Indeed, these innovations are a major feedstock for the new products that manufacturers produce and sell to the general marketplace.

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Scifi writer Cory Doctorow points out Hugh Macleod’s “How to Be Creative” book that’s available online for free:

“His How to Be Creative is a meditation on creativity, individualism and commercialism, and it’s full of pithy, clear, no-nonsense advice. Now Hugh has expanded the piece into a short book, which is online in its entirety. He’s found an agent and the agent is shopping the book—I’d certainly buy a copy!

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How to be Creative (via Boingboing)

Metroplis Magazine recently interviewed Terence Conran about his new book, Design for Designers, which he co-wrote with Max Fraser:

“In Designers on Design, you highlight the “globalness” of design; in fact, you ask designers if their work is representative of their country. Why did you decide that was an important question to ask?

Terence Conran: Well, we once did an exhibition in the Design Museum called “National Characteristics,” and most of the designers there who answered said, “Oh no, we’re not worried about the national characteristics.” And yet I think, personally, it’s one of the most important things that happens in the world—that you can tell the nationality of a designer. I hate to think of a world where everything is global. To be able to recognize a national characteristic is very important, although none of the designers put it in on purpose. But it comes through, their genes show up.

Max Fraser: At the moment, I think it’s a dangerous idea, the globalness in the industry, because it doesn’t allow any niches to really mature and simmer, because things are picked up instantly and regurgitated.

I was really hoping that when I was interviewing designers for the book, a lot more would say, “Yes—national design characteristics are important to me, very important.” But very often the response was, “No—this is a global business, with global products. (continued)”

related links

The Book: Design for Designers
Terence Conran on Design’s Past—and Its Future

Looking to work with cutting edge materials? then take a gander at Transmaterial – “a catalog of materials, products and processes that are redefining our physical environment”, complete with manufacturer information and best of all, the whole book is available as a free download.

(via meta efficient, world changing and josh rubin)

You can’t have a weblog about objects and material culture without mentioning Fight Club. Okay, Maybe you can, but I can’t.

This release comes with extra material, including an introduction that should be worth the price of the book if you are as big of a fan of Chuck Palahniuk as I am. (Yes, I already bought the edition)

Funny Story- I have a friend who adored the movie and took the anti-consumer culture message in the second act to heart, to the point that he would unplug his television set and turn it around.

Needless to say, he could never finish watching the movie.

Id Magazine has a quick Q+A with Sharon Zukin about her new book Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture. Here’s an excerpt:

“Why is shopping such a compelling experience?

We shop not just because we must, but because it speaks to our inner dreams. Shopping has made abundance a novelty and novelty abundant. These are two of the greatest pleasures in a rich society-newness and plenty.

Shopping is creative. We are not simply mindless dupes buying what we see in commercials or craving what our neighbors have. But most of us today don’t make things. We are not designers, or artists, or craftspeople, so we create our lives when we go to a store.

Your book shows how shopping has changed over the last century or so, emphasizing the past 25 years. Tell me about the invention of “lifestyle.”

Market researchers developed the idea of lifestyle in the 1960s. These researchers saw that the old idea of social class no longer captured the different ways people shop. With so many cultural changes occurring at the time-feminism, civil rights, global youth movements-market researchers tried to come up with new ways to classify consumers.

They adapted the idea of lifestyle from books like David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd, a sociology classic from the early ‘50s. Lifestyle is determined not only by income, but by education, profession, generation, cultural background, and various behaviors and belief systems. Status has become more important than class, and status is expressed through the objects we buy.

[..]

You describe the store as a social space, where people come to “be with the brand.” What about the social space of the Internet?

When we shop online, we are in the physical space of home or work. It is hard to create a branded space and experience on the Web, where technology, navigation, flat images, and sometimes sound are the designer’s only resources.

EBay has provided a powerful new paradigm for shopping, however, by transforming shoppers into sellers. This can be transgressive, taking power away from professional sellers, and it can be creative. Selling can be financially beneficial to people who used to only shop. On the other hand, when the shopper becomes a seller, his or her critical distance from consumer society evaporates. People become addicted as both shoppers and sellers.”

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