DoGooder: Do Nothing, Change Everything

How to bypass annoyance with slick design and serious dogoodness.

UPDATE: DoGooder is now available for Chrome, the Brain Pickings browser of choice. Perfect combo of performance and purpose.

This week, a new report found that the average American guzzles more than 34 gigabytes of data per day. And anyone who’s ever been online can attest that a hefty portion of this comes from advertising, which, with the exception of the best-curated sites (ahem…), can be anything from a distraction to a nuisance. This has led many to the infamous Adblock Firefox plugin, eliminating ads altogether. But why take your negative experience and turn it neutral, when you can turn it positive?

Enter DoGooder, an ingenious new browser plugin for Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer that turns your ordinary browsing into donations supporting sustainability initiatives and movements — with no cost to you and no change in browser performance.

Here’s how it works: DoGooder hides all the ordinary ads and swaps them out for simple daily green tips, health and wellness ideas, and well-designed messaging for meaningful initiatives from the LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) category. Half of their profits then go to a thoughtfully curated list of charities and nonprofits — which means DoGooder has the potential to generate thousands of dollars a month for good causes.

If you’re a publisher, there’s nothing to fear — DoGooder doesn’t block ads from being served on your site, it just changes the end-user experience, so your CPM earnings remain unaffected. (Think of it as slipping a nice cover over a questionably designed couch.) If your run a charitable or sustainability-related site, you can even drop DoGooder a line and they’ll whitelist you and “exempt” your site from ad-blocking.

This is what a couple of popular sites look like goodified:

In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, you can even keep track of how many ads have been swapped.

And if for some reason you’re particularly enamored with the regular ads on some site, you can always disable DoGooder there simply by right/ctrl-clicking on the site and selecting “Show Original Ads.” The right/ctrl-click is also the way to let DoGood Headquarters know about a good cause they should consider featuring — just select “Suggest a Cause to Support.”

Genius, or what?

Thanks, Andy

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Uncovered Gem: Bono Reads Bukowski’s “Roll The Dice”

“If you’re gonna try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start.”

Today, we’re doing a short-and-sweet on the convergence of two cultural icons — Bono reading Bukowski, easily the most influential and most imitated contemporary poet.

“Roll The Dice” comes from the brilliant What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire, Bukowski’s second posthumous collection spanning 200+ poems from the 70′s through the 90′s.

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The Bookshelf Rethought: 5 Innovative Designs

Earthquakes, minimalism, and how to reconcile your inner bookworm with your design fetish.

We love books. We love design. And we love the intersection of the two. Some time ago, we looked at five examples of public library innovation. But what about the personal library? Today, we’re turning to five gorgeous bookshelves that put a twist on your home library with ingenuity and design innovation.

DISASTER

Order and chaos converge in Mexican designer Victor Barish‘s brilliant Disaster — a cleverly designed bookshelf that looks like it belongs in a swanky LA loft, post-shake.

If the “sexy librarian” fantasy-stereotype had an interior design equivalent, Disaster would be it.

LILI LITE

Bookreading can be broken down to three key components: Storing, bookmarking and lighting. Enter Lili Lite, a bookshelf that combines all three in one brilliantly intuitive design.

One side lets you stack your reading list, the other offers a nifty corner to bookmark your current read as you prop it open.

Bonus points for making the light an energy-saving LED.

TREE SHELF

From Korean designer Shawn Soh comes this lovely, makes-you-glow-when-you-look-at-it Tree Bookshelf.

The concept was inspired by Soh’s early memories of sticking letters on tree branches.

Each bookshelf takes a week to produce, as she does all the welding and bending by hand. It’s made out of recyclable metal rather than wood, in order to avoid the rather ironic cutting down of trees.

via Swiss Miss

ECCO

Minimalist and seamless, the Ecco shelf from Parisian furniture manufacturer Artelano and design studio ora ito is made out of timber-based honeycomb wafer materials, taken from certified sustainable forests.

OutIKEAing IKEA, the slick Ecco is assembled without any screws, by the simple interlocking of components.

via designboom

SELF SHELF

Now that we’ve seen a few bookshelf divas that draw attention with quirk and design goodness, how about one that shies away from the spotlight and remains, quite literally, invisible?

Enter the Self Shelf, which some may recall from a long, long time ago.

This bold assault on gravity is actually a clever and simple trick: The “shelf” is a fake book at the bottom of the stack that attaches securely to the wall, titled — equally cleverly — Ceci n’est pas un livre (This Is Not A Book).

No place for a physics textbook, this one.

BONUS

And for the hardcore bookshelf-lover, here’s some pretty impressive behind-the-scences timelapse footage of the construction of a custom floor-to-ceiling bookshelf for a DC condo. The organic curved surface was created with 3D software, then built out of 17 sheets of birch plywood.

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