Brain Pickings

Product Design Spotlight: The Little Bottle That Could

Why the key to revolutionary innovation is being completely incompetent.

UPDATE: Thanks to reader Kimmo for pointing out that we (as in our source) had gotten both the designer’s and the product name wrong. Thanks, AdAge, for the always-reliable information…

Is it possible to create a plastic bottle that isn’t just a despicable hallmark of human wastefulness? According to Finish designer Stefan Lindfors, yes.

Linfoss has created PLUP, a donut-shaped plastic bottle that not only revolutionizes the aesthetics of beverage manufacturing, but also solves some of the industry’s largest functional and environmental problems.

One of the biggest shortcomings of traditional bottles is that they can’t be stacked. Which means they take up too much space to store, they tip over on the table, and they’re a nightmare to transport. With PLUP, a waiter can put several bottles on a stick and take them to the table, and you can use the string that comes with the product to attach it to your belt when you go for a run on a hot day or just roam around town.

I think it’s very important that you don’t have too much knowledge of the industry as a designer, because it prevents you from flying high enough. If you do have a lot of knowledge, you have to have the ability to let go of it in the creative process.

But here’s the best part: PLUP is made of a modified PET polymer, which is not only highly recyclable, but also extremely durable, making the bottle as reusable as your average Nalgene, but without the carcinogenic connotations. At the same time, the design — pure aesthetic brilliance — is “cool” enough to actually encourage such reuse, transforming the bottle from a functional aid into a lifestyle accessory.

Okay, we lied: The real best part is that in every country where PLUP is distributed, a major share of the profits from each bottle sold goes to a charity fighting a major local environmental problem. (In Finland, for instance, donations go towards cleaning up the Blatic Sea, which is the world’s most polluted natural water resource.)

See the interview with Stefan and watch as PLUP transforms the packaging industry’s sorest spot.

via 3-Minute AdAge

Monday Music Muse: Dan Auerbach

Resurrecting rock, or what Southern porches have to do with Brooklyn hipsters.

Every once in a while, we wonder what happened to rock. Real, gritty, sung-from-the-back-of-a-smoky-bar rock. When did it stop being “in”? When did it steal candy from Brooklyn’s hipsters and get reported to the uncoolness police?

Luckily, we don’t subscribe to such regulations. Good music is good music. And Keep It Hid, the solo debut of Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach, is pure rock indulgence, good music supreme.

You can just see him pouring himself a somber glass of whiskey, sitting out on a Southern porch with his old guitar and a half-smoked cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, trying to unravel the paradox of melancholic anger while thinking of your sister in ways you don’t want anyone thinking about your sister.

With sound that’s part Johnny Cash, part Gnarls Barkley, part Lenny Kravitz’ infamous guitar, Keep It Hid takes real rock by the grimy collar and drags it out of its pop culture slump.

via Very Short List

The World of 100: Our Global Village

The real minority report, or what the world would look like if it were a village of 100.

From data visualization to infographics, we’re big on the power of smart graphic design to covey big concepts that are otherwise hard to grasp in their raw numberness. Which is why we love designer Toby Ng‘s poster series The World of 100 — an experimental graphical representation of statistical information about the world, based on the allegorical scenario of reducing the world to a village of 100 people.

The series is pure design crispness — simple vectors make the shapes clean enough to make their point, with vibrant, solid colors making those points all the more visceral and impactful.

In a weird way, we were the most shocked by the least consequential ones, our daily entitlements that we take for granted — somehow, PSA’s and the general sense of social responsibility have made most of us aware of severe problems like hunger, deadly disease, and the lack of clean drinking water. But computers? Not something we’d given much thought to, and yet:

We wish we could show you the actual posters — some of the web images are too small to read the text, which is a pity as the information is nothing short of humbling. For instance, in our proverbial village of 100:

48 can’t speak, act according to their faith and conscience due to harassment, imprisonment, torture or death.

And some of it, although common knowledge, makes some of our societal ironies particularly salient. Like the notion of “minorities” — in public policy, in employment recruiting, in education quotas. It’s never been this evident that the ratios of power are not contingent upon the ratios of numbers.

Check out all 20 posters here. And enjoy that computer of yours — the other 93 villagers can’t.

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