At Design Observer, the third edition of my holiday card critique.
For 2012, I can identify four key trends that have trickled down from Brooklyn restaurants, across from Pinterest, and through the cloud from Instagram and Facebook. This may be the one time this year most of you buy stamps (I recommend these), and one thing is clear. By our holiday cards, you shall know our social media preoccupations.
And no, that’s not my kid. But it could be.
Spent the morning at an Art for Families program at the Noguchi Museum, on their first day open after Superstorm Sandy. The kids learned all about tools, related to the current exhibition on Isamu Noguchi’s working practice. Tools, studio photos, video and unfinished sculpture all tell the story behind the finished works.
The image was created by a group at Complex to illustrate the way that the changing actual political landscape can be seen in the nationality of villains in video games.
Geopolitics in First-Person Shooter Video Games » Sociological Images
Now I just need this remixed for a three-year-old, to explain why the villains in the Batman cartoons all have handlebar mustaches and/or Russian accents. It’s historic, sweetie.
(via murketing)
I know there are bigger problems in the world than unnecessary machine embroidery, but bear with me. It isn’t about the femininity — I know many a little girl who truly loves pink, sparkles and tutus, and I would never repress aesthetic choice — it is about the ornament. Tulle and ruffles, butterflies and hearts are like the tattoos of the under-one set, tribal markings to ensure that no one ever ever calls your daughter “he.” Loos offensively grouped the Papuan and the child as the only people who could acceptably be ornamented, but it is adults buying this clothing. There are larger lifetime messages in the color and texture and vocabulary of what we buy our babies.
Want to guess what the biggest word in the boy cloud is? A verbal addendum to this visual.
(via @harikunzru / via Word Cloud: How Toy Ad Vocabulary Reinforces Gender Stereotypes | The Achilles Effect)
I took my son to the Imagination Playground yesterday, at Burling Slip. All the press, and most of the photos, have emphasized architect David Rockwell’s movable blue foam blocks, designed to put the free play back in playground, along with the fact that the park would be staffed by “facilitators” to enhance its educational function. Somehow I imagined it as a stage for building, the children suddenly dwarfed by these new toys. How could that not engage differently than our round of neighborhood parks?
What I found was rather different. The blue blocks were over in a corner, unattended, but being out to good use as a raceway by three 7-year-old boys. They aren’t that big, two feet at the most. They don’t dominate the space. It was a hot day, so most of the kids were in the water area, a wading pool with spraying fountains at the east end of the oval. A few of the blue blocks had been brought into the water as dams and bridges, but mostly it looked like ordinary fun, less dangerous and less complicated than that at the new Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Pier 6. In all these new parks, I feel like I am searching for atmosphere, a designed quality above and beyond the ordinary spaces for children, and I am not finding it. At least they have put up a few umbrellas for shade here, and there is a breeze off the river. Otherwise the block play might feel like torture.
At the west end was a vast sandbox, with a running stream and a set of slings that could be used for sand flinging or swinging. The openness of the sand area, relative to its size, was great, turning it into more of a landscape than most of the contained boxes. I wondered about the fuzzy edges, though. How much sand is lost every day? And how many trip over the sand-colored foam edges of the area, where it is hard to see the difference between one surface and the next? Why only one slide, one change in level? My son had asked if there would be a climbing structure, and the answer was basically, no. Because it felt more ordinary, he had every right to expect the usual palette of things to do.
What my son gravitated toward was a shady area at the far east end, under the playground’s curving ramp. There a set of seafaring rope ladders have been installed safely over sand, and then accessorized with a series of knit and woven cloths, tied on to the deck and the ladders like hammocks. This was something new. But I wonder if it was intentional? The pieces of cloth were frayed and dirty and various (one was printed with palm trees), nothing like the precise polish of the showcased blue blocks. The attendants, all young women, congregated over at this end, tying the cloths on and spinning children. My son loved it, clambering (with help) from one to the other, chilling out and sucking his thumb, sticking his head in one and yelling at another kid. It was an entirely new landscape.
I wonder how long it will last. Are the cloths legal? Many seemed to be swinging awfully close to the steel ramp supports. One of the swinging attendants knocked my son flat in the sand, since she wasn’t watching her back. Only one seemed to have an idea about how best to tie them in knots. While the cloths seemed partly to make up for the lack of block drama, and were truly a new, soft, movable play element, they lacked some of the other qualities Imagination is supposed to possess. Most importantly, the kids couldn’t do it on their own.
Last week Tom Vanderbilt posted a photo of the Kiddee Drivette on his How We Drive blog, a product from the good old days when kids rode up front, had their own “not noisy” horns, and were restrained with one small woven strap. Heck, my mother spent her early years in the back of a Jeep so primitive my grandmother had to open the door to indicate turns with her arm.
But what attracted my attention was his “exasperated straining and stretching” as he transferred his infant car seat from car to car. Having just returned from a vacation where the logistics of the car seat were a primary part of trip planning, I have a plea on behalf of all parents, and a challenge for industrial and car designers: FIX THE CAR SEAT.
What I want is a universal docking system, across all car models, across all car seat manufacturers. Two mounts, in the seat of every car, that match to two “feet” on the base of every car seat, from infant to booster. To take my seat out, I push a button to unlock the mounts. To install my seat, I center it over the mounts, press down, and hear a satisfying CLICK. If necessary, a tether in back to a prominent metal loop.
That means, no hunting for LATCH mounts in every different car. No attempt to fit in your child car seat while feeding the seatbelt back into its hole. (Why don’t they ever fully retract?) No need for a sticky mat on leather seats. No need for a foam roll or two to get your infant at the correct neck angle while rear facing. No panicky attempt to figure out where to put your now-sleepy toddler after a six-hour flight while in the dark rental car parking lot as you figure out all of the above.
No debate about whether it is better to bring your own car seat as an extra piece of 15-pound luggage, because at least you know how to install it, rather than use one of the rental car seats (minimum $8.95 per day), which might be unfamiliar, or dirty, or the wrong size. I’ve had the 20-something male rental car attendants bring me two or three seats before we ended up with the right one, me reading the tiny print on height and weight restrictions, again, in the parking lot. They don’t help you install, because it is a liability issue.
I think my family would sign up with Zipcar tomorrow if we weren’t anxious about having to install the car seat in a different car every time. On vacation, my father couldn’t zip off with my son for ice cream in his car, because I didn’t want to move the seat from place to place. Once it is in, it is in for life. The infant car seat, the category-killing Graco Snugride, is actually easier than any of the others. For a blissful nine months, we could actually take a cab.
Parents spend so much money on stuff they don’t need. A car seat is something we do need. Designers need to make them better.
