Entrepreneur Nora Abousteit: '“I think building and making things are part of human nature.”

'Coolness is Everywhere': Josh Rubin, Cool Hunting Founder

Back in 2003, Josh Rubin started Cool Hunting as a personal outlet to share inspirational content he found around the web. Today the site gets nearly 4 million page views per month and produces a lot of original style, design, and tech content.

We heard Josh speak at the Portable Curators Conference on the topic of curation and what is “cool.”

Defining and discussing what is “cool” is probably the least cool thing anyone can do. Any attempt to formulate a complete curatorial process to theorize on what cool is will often sound stiff, square—downright uncool. But Rubin’s open-ended analytical approach toward that exploration and discovery is most decidedly, if pragmatically, cool.

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DESIGN: The World's First Living Buildings by International Living Future Institute

This video about “living buildings” reminds me of the lower income apartment building called Hunderwasser Haus that I visited in Vienna. Designed by Austrian artist Hunderwasser, it features sloping floors, undulating walls, and “tree tenants”—trees planted inside the building that grow out through windows and walls.  It was the artist’s intent to design the building in harmony with nature.

The International Living Future Institute is taking a significantly more scientific approach to creating buildings integrated with nature. For their Living Buildings work, they have won the 2012 Buckminster Fuller Institute’s annual “The Buckminster Fuller Challenge,” which awards one winner $100,000 to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.

Says International Living Future Institute board member Dennis J. Wilde, “Much of the change that we now need to navigate is a process of changing our framing stories. One of the most important and one of the powerful ways of changing our framing stories is through demonstrations. Showing people what’s possible and that’s exactly what you’re engaged in with the Living Buildings work.”

DESIGN: Inspiration for the Logo-less

(C) 2010 Thomas V Hartmann (Click to view full-size)

I’m wandering off of my patch a bit, I know, but logo design has been on my mind lately. Hardly a day goes by, it seems, when I don’t find myself coveting the clever abstraction on someone’s business card or filled with envy over the cool symbol or mascot they use as their Twitter avatar.

When I made my debut in the Twitterverse, I struggled over what I could use to replace that newbie’s egg. I didn’t have a logo (my business cards were the templated variety from MOO, and I wasn’t crazy about using a photo of myself as my avatar (alas, like many other photographers I am camera-shy). I could have cooked up a simple type treatment of my initials, but I didn’t want people to mistake me for the element Thorium, and another photographer, Tomas Van Houtryve of VII (@TomasVH), was already using a simple, dignified “TVH”.

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DESIGN: Debbie Millman's 'Look Both Ways' at Chicago Design Museum

(Image via Chicago Design Museum)

Debbie Millman—author, designer, AIGA President Emeritus, President of the design devision at Sterling Brands, host of the Design Matters podcast, Chair of the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts, and past featured stated artist—will show her work, Look Both Ways, at the Chicago Design Museum, June 1-30.

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