I need some space…

If you consider your apartment in New York tiny, or in Tokyo a closet, be ready to reconsider and to be shocked. Imagine living in a space as big as your king-size bed, or less. Meet the cubicle apartments of Hong Kong.

Apparently a single square foot of real estate in Hong Kong costs on average $1,300. As a result, whole families are constrained in 40 square feet apartments. That’s less than 4 square meters in metric!

Kitchen appliances are cramped under bunk beds and all of their belongings are stacked one on top of the other. Tenants don’t have enough space to take two steps, and any talk of ventilation or hygiene is science fiction.

These photos are part of a campaign by the  Society for Community Organization (SoCO), a Chinese human rights group as an effort to raise awareness about the inhuman living conditions city dwellers are facing.

via Inhabitat

See also:

• Behind closed windows
• A little urban living
• Where children’s dreams dwell

Guernica comes to life

Pablo Picasso’s Guernica keeps alive the memory of the bombing of this small town in the Basque region of northern Spain on April 27, 1937 and visual effects artist Lena Gieseke brings to life Picasso’s painting in a 3D tour of his work.

via Open Culture

See also:

• The world, what a bloody place!
• The world is not a peaceful place
• Creative truths

1984, A brave new world

How did the future that George Orwell and Aldous Huxley visualised turn out to be? The following infographic, created by Column Five for Akorn Entertainment, compares the concepts of 1984 and Brave New World to the current state of the Internet, as it has been evolved through the Internet censorship techniques of the East and the continuous stream of trivial information of the West.

via Visual News

See also:

• Free the internet
• If you can read this you are very lucky
• The Internet in 2015

Beauty is in the street

More than 40 years have passed since the French students occupied the streets of Paris, triggering one of the most important social revolts of recent history. I do not know what remains still alive from this era, except these beautifully designed posters, landmarks of political art and graphic design.

A group of art students, who called themselves the Atelier Populaire, produced hundreds of posters to encourage the protestors and to report on police brutality.

Beauty is in the Street is a visual record from May ’68 Paris uprising edited by Johan Kugelberf with Philippe Vermes (Four Corner Books).

via the Guardian

See also:

• The world, what a bloody place!
• The world is not a peaceful place
• People are open books: the Human Library project

The world, what a bloody place!

We already know that the world is not a peaceful place and that the reality of war counts million casualties. 100 years of world cuisine, a project by Clara Kayser-Bril, Nicolas Kayser-Bril and Marion Kotlarski, depicts, in an innovative, but shocking way, the last bloody 100 years of wars and conflicts.

Replacing blood with red liquid and using measured amounts, 100 years of world cuisine visualises 38.000,000 deaths caused in 25 conflicts from 1915 to present.See the graph after the jump

People are open books: the Human Library project

Do you have a library card? If so, go to the nearest library and check out a person. Not a book. A human being. A person to keep for half an hour or so, and talk to. A person, a history, a culture to discover. People “on loan” are from varied sexual, religious, cultural and ethnic backgrounds. The purpose? Breaking down prejudices with personal story-telling. This is the idea behind Human Library.

The idea originated in Copenhagen ten years ago but has now gone global. You can check whether there is a human library near you in this list.

photo credit: yonge street media 

See also:

• I was once blue, now I am pink
• The physical act of writing
• What should I read?

Ideas for a new city

Ideas for a more citizen-friendly city. It could be New York or any other city in the world.

50 ideas for the New City is a project of the Architectural League of New York to imagine the future city and explore the ideas that will shape it.

Posters designed by the Civic Center. 

via Urban Omnibus

See also:

• Invisible cities
• The strings of NYC subway
• Distorted cities
• Filling up the gaps
• A little urban living

Green typography

Anna Garfoth experiments with eco-graffiti and green typography. And I mean actually green: messages written with moss on walls.

She also uses leafs, garbage and tape on fences’ grids to spell her messages.

And my personal favorite, the edible poster made out of cookies.

See also:

• 10 + 1 ways to visualize lyrics
• You type, they design
• A brief history of title design

The human factory

We often consider our self as part of a mechanical work. That times has changed and we are nothing but a machine which work all the time to fulfill its ever emerging needs. But the idea of the human being as a machine was first conceived or at least illustrated by German physician, artist and writer Fritz Kahn in 1926. Fritz Kahn created Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace), a poster of the human body, which depicts the body’s complex functions, such as respiration, circulation, digestion as parts of a wider mechanical process. He ‘compartmentalized’ the body, creating different rooms, where workers carefully carried out the different works of our body.

Henning Lenderer, a German visual communication and animation student, has created an amazing and high detailed animation of Kahn’s poster, managing to eloquently explain the separate functions of a body, in the following video and an interactive installation for the audience to explore the different cycles of this human machinery.

via Visual News

See also:

• A tale of twins (or how to explain relativity theory)
• On faces
• The meme meme
• Make up your mind about  your mind

The world is not a peaceful place

As if you didn’t already know that.

Still, if you get caught up in Conflict History, a very interesting, google-maps-based website that puts all the wars known to mankind (from 4000 BC to now, sourced from Wikipedia) on the map, you can’t help but be amazed by the amount of conflict that went on at any point in time. You might know about the big ones, you know about the current ones, but, believe me, there has never been a peaceful moment on this planet.

This, for example, was the situation when I was born:

And it is not getting any better (2007-2010):

via forbes

See also:

• It’s a small world
• Where children’s dreams dwell
• Mapping the meaning

Read it elsewhere

Quick links:

• “If every single bee disappeared…humanity would also die out within four years” – good.is
• An ode to Japanese creativity – Core77
• The biggest egoists on Twitter – uproxx
• The emotion vending machine – The Creators Project
• When to drop Google and prefer some other search engine – Lifehacker
• The best April Fool prank: the cartridge that turns every film camera to digital – re35 via popphoto
• This is what the world would look like if every country’s area was proportionate to its population – I love charts

Minimal disorder

I never thought that mental disorders can be depicted in a poster, but freelance designer and art director Patrick Smith (aka Graphic Patrick) with his minimalistic vector-shaped posters proved me wrong.

Patrick Smith wrote on Adapt, his personal blog “I was doing some research about mental health and I came across a list of mental disorders. I chose a few, starting with OCD, and set myself the challenge of defining each in a minimal style”.

Time to think.

See more posters after the jump

Read it elsewhere

Some bad news, but mostly good news and a positive vibe:

• Where do the young and educated want to live? (infograph) – GOOD.IS
• Tragic irony: Japanese tsunami survivors sheltered in a nuclear power plant – boingboing
• In the mean time, it’s a new, carefree dawn for the wildlife at Chernobyl (audio) – gruenrekorder via boing boing
• TweetWhen is a web app that tells you when your tweets get the most retweets (we do on fridays around 5pm) – TweetWhen
• Kinda creepy: Google to launch app that scans a face and then finds the person’s google profile (including their contact details) – mashable
• Honest, down-to-earth, inspiring advice: “how to steal like an artist (9 other things that nobody told me)” – austin kleon via drawn
• Now I feel old. An exhibition to celebrate South Park’s 15th birthday – lost at E minor

Angry Birds do Libya

Disclaimer: I am annoyed by anything that becomes hugely popular and Angry Birds is no exception. However this video is good.

A mash-up of Angry Birds and the Three Little Pigs, it is the digital natives’ guide to the uprising in Maghreb, in escalating levels from Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, to Egypt and to the last level in Libya. With guest starring roles by the Twitter and the American Eagle Angry Birds.

Where children’s dreams dwell

As a child, I always thought that my bedroom was a kind of paradise, my own personal kingdom and it was. But I suppose not every child felt the same.

During the five years he spent crisscrossing the world, English-born photographer James Mollison captured images of children from all around the world -from the U.S.A., Brazil, England to Senegal, Cambodia, China and so many others– and their bedrooms. In his award-winning book Where Children Sleep, he reveals the different locations, where their own personal dreams dwell.

See more photos after the jump

Read it elsewhere

Jeff Koons gets the video game treatment, Time Zones get analyzed and religion falls out of fashion:

• Jeff Koons Must Die, the video game – Hunter Jonakin via boingboing
• What if Angry Birds were an action movie directed by Michael Bay (video) – the curious brain
• The fascinating and often absurd convention of Time Zones – BBC
• Rare Beatles photos – npr
• Since Radiohead published a newspaper (The Universal Sigh), Guardian writers are challenging them at their game, by covering Creep – Guardian
• Are symmetrical faces more beautiful? – toxel via holykaw
• 50% of tweets come from 0,05% of users – mashable
• Is religion falling out of fashion? – Discovery news
• Sex is no accident (MTV’s safe sex campaign) – buzzfeed
• This blogger asks his favorite authors to sign their books. The twist? Instead for dedications he asks for insults – insulted by authors via flavorwire
• Read it horizontally, read it vertically; the genius of Lewis Caroll – i love charts

Read it elsewhere

Pure randomness today:

• What do Liberia, Myanmar and the United States of America have in common? They are the only 3 countries in the world not to use the metric system – Gizmodo
• Our sense of smell might be explained by quantum physics – BBC
• The end of the telephone? – The New York Times
• An argument against earth hour – good.is
• 8-bit deaths (video) – Vulture
• Google.uk’s Think Quarterly: the data issue – Think Quarterly
• Types of typsos – Rosscott, Inc.

The bad guys (in video games)

Do video games create a world of fiction? A world where imaginary characters fight each other in fictional battles? Or do they reflect, to some degree, the existing relationships between countries and continents?

The following world map highlights the origin of the really bad guys that threatens us in video games over the past decade. Terrorists, guerillas, mercenaries, or just insane leaders come, most of the times, from the so-called ‘axis of evil’ nations, from corrupted governments or countries with a history of Islamic terrorism.

You can see the full map in order to understand how politics and international affairs affects the gaming industry after the jump.

I was once blue, now I am pink

Well that was a surprise (although I should have learned by now not to be surprised by human culture). Once the default color for baby boys was pink and for baby girls blue. Pink being derived from the regal red (red for kings, pink for princes). Only after WW II were the colors reversed. Initially for reasons of political correctness, they eventually became exactly what they were before, only reversed. Because humans need these stereotypes.

Gender roles are more an issue of nurture than nature. Baby furniture, clothes and toys are the earliest tools of gender assignment society uses (together with names and various grammatical rules). In my experience, dressing a baby in gender neutral clothes creates waves of embarrassment to people who are uncertain how to address your little bundle of joy. Babies that are a few months old are subject to stereotype behavior, like “boys don’t cry”, encouraged to conform to gender norms, and punished for the opposite behavior.

And gender sometimes can be suffocating. That’s why a couple in Sweden have decided to raise their child gender-free, avoiding all language and cues that would give away its biological identity, even to the child itself. Although such an idea gives me the creeps and I do believe that gender roles should be acquired by imitation, allowing of course for all those particular manifestations that make humans so unique, it is also true that gender stereotypes can be scary.Case in point: this series of photographs by South Korean visual artist JeongMee Yoon. Fascinated by her daughter’s obsession with all things pink, she started digging deeper into the issue. The photos she takes of children with their most cherished possessions (pink for girls, blue for boys) have this intimidating quality and really underline the fact that gender is imposed by society in the cruelest ways. Consumption being the number one culprit.

Update: more parents choose to raise their children genderless

See also:

• The art of collecting (or collecting the ephemeral)
• Women overanalyze, men oversimplify
• Color & gender

Read it elsewhere

A bitter-sweet mix of links:

• Too close for comfort? Portraits by Martin Schoeller – live journal
• Love is like an app store – diesel sweeties
• The facebook you vs the real you – comical concept
• Civilization has something similar: a video of all the major historical events (according to Wikipedia) in 100 seconds – ragtag
• In the same vein, an infograph of every person who has ever lived – la femme belletrist
• Nuclear boy suffers from gas (video) – youtube
• David Lynch’s hair compared to art masterpieces – world of wonder
• The answer to the burning question: “what is better, a facebook like or a tweet?” – mashable
• Meet the world’s busiest extra who’s credits include tv shows like , glee, curb your enthousiasm, arrested development, and movies like the social network, catch me if you can and spiderman (video) – vulture
• Despite recent criticism, more designers have created art inspired but the recent disaster in Japan – design for japan tumblr
• But none as strong as these radioactive cherry blossoms on the cover of New Yorker – kottke