New School Soul

Just stumbled upon Mayer Hawthorne who has this refreshing old school soul and jazz sound with a little of pop mixed in there.

Despite not having a record out yet, he's been featured on BBC radio and is starting a multi city tour in May. There is something very clean and honest about his music and it might have something to do with the retro vibes that comes from it. More info about him here.

The New Pose

Remember all the non-nonchalant, over the head angle pictures that people used to take for their Myspace profile? In Russia, women are doing the "Vilena" pose. A woman named Vilena took a picture of herself in the pose first for a social network and everyone started copying it.

Controlling a Robot with Gestures

Thanks to our newfound hatred of buttons, Japanese researchers have developed a robot that can be controlled with gestures - Minority Report style. The robot is outfitted with cameras that detect human movements. It looks at the movements and detects the gestures that are commands.

Killer Shower Curtain

People waste a lot of water when they shower, so Elisabeth Buecher designed a shower curtain that slowly inflates to let you know when it's time to stop. Pictured above are two variation, one that squeezes you out and one with spikes. Her design philosophy is "design for pain and our own good" which is much different than what's vogue right now.

No matter how much education conservationists use to educate people about reduce waste and consumption, we still have a massive environmental problem on our hands. Al Gore can give the most passionate speech ever and people will still be to lazy to recycle. This design seems to be a reflection of cynicism in our fellow man's ability to change their damaging habits and sometimes we need to save ourselves from ourselves.

via http://hrrrthrrr.tumblr.com/

Microjobs in Africa

Txteagle is like Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk and ShortTask which are online marketplaces for short, uncomplicated tasks that users take up for a small payment. The difference between txteagle and the other examples is that the tasks are sent through text message - it's mobile crowdsourcing. It also means the nature of the jobs are smaller and simpler, like translation.

This idea makes this marketplace reachable for those in Africa especially, where a lot of people have mobile phones but not computers. It's great that they can turn mobile phones into an income source and it brings to life the opportunity cost of leaving a mobile phone idle.

Latrines and Anti-Nostalgia

Check out this blog from an IDEO engineer who is taking a sabbatical to design better latrines for people in rural Cambodia. He meticulously documents the entire design process from the ethnography all the way to the brainstorming session with the locals.

An interesting bit in their research was that some people hated dry pit latrines because that's what they used during the Pol Pot regime. Now this was really interesting because I think this is something that slips us when we think about our relationships to objects and certain behaviors - the historical context around them. Now, I understand that comes in the form of nostalgia, but that's related to positive emotions. This is like "anti-nostalgia."

Anti-nostalgia seems to occur from shared catastrophic events or else they would be too varied to study as a group. Looking at recent America history some of those events can be Hurricane Katrina, 9-11 and the Wall Street Fallout and the scars are pretty obvious. But what I'm wondering is what are the not so obvious scars? Hurricane Katrina for example, it's obvious their trust in the government has waned considerably. But say during that time, did they develop an affinity or hatred for any product or process?

It might as well be a rhetorical question as I can't give an answer. But I think this gives us another wrinkle to try to capture when thinking about people and how they relate to things.

You can download a report of the research here.

What Planet Do You Live On?

A study from Ohio State University showed that conservatives didn’t understand that Stephen Colbert is joking. They rationalize it by saying that Colbert is pretending to joking but genuinely means what he saying. What planet are they living on?

A while ago, my friend was working with an idea about how information creates communities. Before media fragmentation (I know, that concept is so 2000), it would be one or two large homogenous communities because there would only be that many media outlets. Now of course you can bury yourself in own little world because there would be the media to support it.

The consequence is that everyone lives in his or her own self-defined bubble and no one can agree on a shared reality. Isn’t that ironic? The vehicle that brought us closer together is driving us farther apart as well.