This TED Talk is from November 2009. It shows some of the awesome possibilities of augmented reality—way beyond that of Nearest Tube or Yelp’s Monocole.

In the talk, Mistry says SixthSense will be open-sourced. Five months later, it’s still vaporware.

ONull is written in Java and uses Processing as a graphical engine. Awesome vector generator that rasterizes an image to give you a vector output file. You can choose the squares, crosses, circles, etc. or you can import your own vector to use as the “pixels.” Excellent tool.

This is a photo from Playboy, June 1961. It shows George Nelson, Edward Wormley, Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames, and Jens Risom casually seated next to their famed creations all in the same photo shoot. It’s just about 2010, which means nearly 50 years have come and gone from the time of that iconic photograph and nearly every recent architecture & design periodical I pick up is littered with Eames chairs inside, Bertoia chairs outside, and Nelson tables and clocks in every nook and cranny. They’re fantastic pieces and I am a staunch proponent of “timeless” design.

The image above has been passed around and passed around again. That’s not what this post is about. Instead, I hope some of the readers will post a comment with a punch list of designers that are our contemporaries. A group that you could envision sitting down for a photo shoot together. [If you’re reading this post from the main page, you’ll have to click on the post title to get to the permalink page for commenting.]

Hope you’ll take on the challenge.

Some great illustration work by Olly Moss.

It’s been about a month in a new apartment and I’m finally made a moment to unpack some last items. In the process, I grabbed some of my filled Field Notes and revisited some dog-eared pages.

I went to a good talk late last year where the person organizing this lecture series shared a list he keeps that highlights the building blocks of product development. I jotted them down and they’re transcribed below. If you’re aware of these points in your own projects and working to resolve them, you’re likely on your way to a rewarding effort.

Vision
Urgency
Honesty & respect
Competitive
Collaborative/communicative
Obsessive
Driven to leadership
Total commitment
Ownership
Constructive conflict
Drive for closure
Admist mistakes and move on
Pursuit of truth

The New York Times ran a slideshow of homes built by Dan Phillips. Mr. Phillips creates houses from salvaged materials ranging from branches to corks to wine bottles to picture frames. These are apparently low-income homes somewhere in Huntsville, TX but they look phenomenal. (Thanks for the tip, Molly.)

Photograph by Amy Sly

Honda’s Motocompo was a 49cc two-stroke scooter that was designed to fit into the trunk of the Honda City back in 1981-83. It folds up into a little rectangle and it really lovely. The ad campaign at the time featured London ska band, Madness, and the marketing photos are priceless.

I know it’s been quiet on the Perpenduum front for a bit but it’s only because we’ve been so busy that we’ve even forgotten our birthday! Perpenduum was registered two years ago on August 21st, 2007.

(Birthday Cake from Andreas’ Flickr photostream. Take a look at his fantastic online portfolio. Particularly liking his video showing the most used words in the Billboard Top 5 during the years of each presidential administration from 1950 to 2006. He’s incredibly talented and a real Gentleman.)