ShantiNiketan is known as “little India”—it's a small cluster of retirement homes in Central Florida that was planned for Indian Americans. It's meant to be a space for people who cannot grow old in their homeland because their lives are rooted in the United States. “Because of the very unique culture, food, and religion, Indians find it very difficult to retire in a mainstream retirement community,” says Iggy Ignatius, who was born in India and founded ShantiNiketan in 2008. “But for those who want to come here, I can tell you this is heaven for them.” We went inside ShantiNiketan to speak to the Indian Americans who live there, and to understand the appeal of moving to a place that's steeped in the culture of your birthplace.
Johnson Banks has unveiled seven potential brand identities for Mozilla, as part of its ongoing “open-source” rebrand.
The search for the not-for-profit software company's new identity was first announced in June, and it has been taking feedback from the Mozilla community and members of the public since then.
Seven initial themes were created by Johnson Banks, all exploring different facets of Mozilla's advocacy for shared and open-source internet access and software.
After further refining these themes in response to feedback that suggested “upping the positivity and doing more with the whole principle of ‘open'”, seven visual identities and their accompanying assets have been made available to view on the Mozilla Open Design blog.
The designs include everything from a simple typographic mark to a modern version of its former Dinosaur logo, and public comments on them are already coming thick and fast.
“Our work on the narrative has changed a lot as we learn more about them,” says Michael Johnson, founder and creative director of Johnson Banks.
“It's debatable whether some of our other clients, either blue-chip or not-for-profit, could handle this but this is unprecedented as an approach. Perhaps it will push others to be more open.”
We outline all of the proposed design concepts below.
This abstract eye design plays on the not-for-profit's former Dinosaur logo, which is still used internally.
The consultancy has experimented with Mozilla's name, using intertwining letters inspired by circuitry and tribal patterns.
3) The Open Button
This button pictogram is designed to represent Mozilla's commitment to making the internet “open to everyone on an equal basis”.
4) Protocol
Alluding to the not-for-profit's longevity, this symbol is intended to show that the not-for-profit is “at the core of the internet”.
This concept highlights Mozilla's place within “the enormity of the internet”, forming an “M” symbol out of a series of 3D grid systems.
Another simple typographical mark, this “impossible” design gives a nod to computer graphics and optical illusions.
As an extension of the former dinosaur logo, this visual identity builds a character out of isometric shapes, also spelling out the name “Mozilla”.
The post Johnson Banks reveals first designs for “open-source” Mozilla rebrand appeared first on Design Week.
At the Museum of Skateboarding, Russian artist Kirill Savchenkov turns the urban skater into a rōnin-style warrior engaged in a boys-only martial art
London has a new Museum of Skateboarding. But before you dust off your Vans, be warned: this is not a public institution on the South Bank dedicated to outsize shorts, broken wrists and the unseasonal wearing of beanie hats. It's in an art gallery.
The work of Russian artist Kirill Savchenkov, the “museum” opened at London's Calvert 22 last week. Addressing the deathlessly hip sport mock-anthropologically, it's an exhibition that gazes back, as if from the near future, to a fantasy New Skateboarder culture in which the urban skater is a kind of warrior monk or rōnin on wheels.
Related: Bristol skateboarders take on 'skatestopper' defensive architecture
Related: Skating on the South Bank: my nights getting wrecked in the undercroft
Continue reading...London-based Mettle Studio has created Proximity Button, a wearable device worn by dementia patients to alert their carers if they wander further than a safe distance.
Wandering is a common side effect of dementia, and Mettle's design aims to instil confidence in patients' carers. The device works using radio signals emitted to a carer's phone via the Proximity Button app. The signal is lost if the patient wanders, and an alarm is raised as a warning.
The look and feel is simple and lightweight, with a focus on comfort and discretion, using a magnetised fastening to snap onto the wearer's clothing. “We didn't want anything to look too explicitly medical, we wanted it to be a bit more towards the agnostic tech end,” says Mettle Studio creative director Alex Bone. “That's why it's more plain, and we wanted to have all the places and weight on the inside, to make it less noticeable.”
Mettle Studio was approached by Proximity Care to work on the project in November last year, and created the hardware designs and the accompanying app. The UX and UI were created to be as simple to view and use as possible. Bone says, “The UI and UX was heavily geared towards simplicity. We stripped a lot of features out to make it more simple, as the target user wasn't necessarily expected to have a smartphone as standard. We had to assume no prior knowledge, so the app is designed with a step-by-step tutorial and allows you to see pretty much everything on one page.”
According to Bone, the device is currently in production and should be released in around November this year.
The post Mettle Studio creates wearable “button” for carers to find wandering dementia patients appeared first on Design Week.
With a new design studio and a communal house in a Japanese village, Airbnb has announced its ambitions to change the way we live, travel and share space. Some say the company are venturing into urban planning are they?
Since its inception, Airbnb the website that allows people to rent out their homes for holiday accommodation has been a contentious issue in cities. It's a cost-saving convenience for travellers and a money-making opportunity for homeowners, yet a source of ire to scores of traditional hotels and guest-houses.
Some have accused the global home-sharing initiative which operates in 34,000 cities of playing a part in gentrifying neighbourhoods, as more Airbnb listed properties means fewer available homes to live in, thus pushing up prices. Mark Tanzer, chief executive of the Association of British Travel Agents, has also criticised Airbnb's contribution to growing tourism numbers as a threat to historic cities around the world. Meanwhile, a number of city governments have implemented restrictive permits and regulations to curb the practice and its negative impacts.
Related: Which cities have the oldest residents?
Continue reading...Not to give away the average age of our design studio but we think our deep-seated love of cult 1980s movies could make an amazing visitor attraction. Who doesn't want to fly on a bike with ET in front, go Back to the Future in a DeLorean or shrink in size to meet Gizmo face-to-face?
Just think how great it would be arm yourself with proton packs to fight the Marshmallow Man or journey through the labyrinth to the goblin city.
With strong cinematic plots, iconic music and amazing special effects that live on in our memories well beyond they should for grown adults, this decade of movie magic could translate into an experience with mass appeal.
I would translate horse racing game Escalado onto a local high street, get people riding large fibreglass horses while groups of volunteers turn a giant cog which makes a giant plastic sheet vibrate and the horses move forward.
This will mean nothing to 95% of people reading this, but for those of you who have never played one of the greatest toy games ever, get onto Ebay and buy yourself one in full working order. It will cure your Pokemon Go habit, period!
It will make our high streets much more vibrant. Town centres need giant Escalado to take up the Woolworths and BHS slack.
A book I read recently that would be a cool visitor experience is David Egger's The Circle. It's about how a young woman finds a job in Silicon Valley with a company like Facebook or Apple (perhaps The Circle refers partly to Foster's new building for Apple).
The visitor experience is a kind of digital journey from ordinary small town life through a series of transformations to a crazy world of total digital connectivity, where every piece of information has to be shared and every experience is transformed into data.
The data is endlessly churned by algorithms and represented by an almost obligatory social media.
As a visitor experience it would start with an ordinary home from the 1980s and end with an immersive digi-scape where data surrounds you, weaving into your life and shaping a strange and often unwished for destiny. Like Dave Egger's book, it would be strange but all too familiar.
The post What work of fiction do you think could inspire a great visitor experience? appeared first on Design Week.
A new study shows that Neptune's exotic clouds and violent storms are driven by a combination of cosmic rays and sunlight
It is the last stop before Pluto and 4.5bn kilometres from the Sun, and yet Neptune has some of the wildest weather in the solar system. Winds of over 2,000km per hour (nine times faster than Earth's fastest winds) whip up extreme storms, and exotic clouds (made of ammonia, methane and hydrogen sulphide) come and go. The methane in Neptune's atmosphere absorbs red light and makes the planet appear blue to us. Meanwhile the high-level cirrus-like clouds, made of frozen methane, give the planet its ever changing pattern of bright white dots and dashes.
Related: Neptune's first orbit: a turning point in astronomy
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This week we will be looking at fascinating examples of urban planning - a major focus of the Where We Design chapter in our new book “Overview”. To start off, here is one of our favorite shots of the radiating streets that surround the Plaza Del Ejecutivo in Mexico City, Mexico. If you have examples of other cities that you think might look particularly mesmerizing from above, please let us know in the comments!
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