74. Open phone booth

In Brazil, phone booths are simple and colorful. Their spheroidal shape gives them a well-established identity in the vibrant Brazilian urban landscape. The demise in the use of public phone booths due to the extended use of cell phones, has transformed our perception of these urban objects. But their main design condition, the fact that they are inhabitable, small-scale, enclosed spaces within the larger, public space of the city, still remains unexplored. The questions could be: what could we do with phone booths now that their communication function is not necessary? How do we recycle a whole urban network of truly public individual micro-spaces? If we understand phone booths as man-made public spaces, we could assign them new functions: they provide shelter, temporary refuge and, most importantly, a very special type of privacy and individual isolation (this idea of privacy is clearly manifest in the image above, where the inner surface of the phone booth is used to discretely advertise sexual contacts). The privacy of phone booths is specially unique, one in which the individual is not completely hidden, but somehow visible, yet separated from urban life by a thin layer –sometimes glass, in this case the shape of a thin fiberglass shell, etc. In Maine, USA, there is a proposal to revitalize phone booths by making them free of charge. Looking at the beautiful Brazilian booths, I say the opportunity is to bank on their spatial qualities in a more creative way.

73. Coin-operated, itinerant phone booth

Another good example of Indian resourcefulness and the wisdom of recycling creatively (and profitably). Hyderabad, the capital of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, is the IT capital of India, home to the campuses of companies such as Microsoft, Oracle or Motorola. At a time when cell phones have taken up the world, there are still plenty of business opportunities in recycling old public phones. Specifically, providing the service of bringing phones to users, rather than the other way around, which used to be the norm not too long ago. The deal is this: a patron buys old coin-operated phones from telecommunication companies at low price (the two in the picture cost $170) and hires an operator to move them, in itinerant phone booths, around the city. The phones are battery-operated, and the operator gets half of the mobile booth earnings, plus the opportunity to sell other items to customers while they are talking on the phone. Ad-hoc commerce at its best. With millions of mobile phone users just wasting minutes (my favorite is to observe all those businessmen calling home as soon as the plane lands just to say they landed OK), recycling old coin-operated phones and making it profitable enough to make a living out of it is simply brilliant. Similar initiatives are happening all over the world –phone bikes in Kampala, mobile phone booths in Nairobi- and teach us that communication is not a privilege of the wealthy.

72. Change purse

Customers rarely give out coins in their everyday retail transactions. I have observed that consumers dislike using change to approximate the amount due when paying for their lattes or Sunday bagels. They usually pay with bills only and gladly receive a few coins in return, which they use to fill up their coin glass jars at home. Nobody likes to carry change in their pockets. Cashiers dislike change even more. Particularly when customers retort to that terrible habit of giving extra coins with their bills in order to get exact change back -usually quarters. Most cashiers have forgotten their basic arithmetic in this age of intelligent cash registers, and the challenge of having to add or subtract while there are customers waiting in line makes them really nervous. The change purse is a wonderfully designed pocket object as well as a transaction facilitator. It was a very common male accessory in Spain years ago, when every man carried his black monedero (change purse) in his pocket. As a kid, I did have several toy change purses and proudly used them to learn the basics of retail transactions and coin identification. A few years ago, I received a change purse as a gift and I carry it in my pocket with me ever since. It is not only that it makes coin management easier: it dignifies change and its role in everyday life. Coin jars full of unwanted change are just plain wasteful.

71. Bum bag

The bum bag is back in vogue, I hear. Designers and marketeers now call it belt bag, waist pack or body pocket. The concept is the same than thirty years ago: back in the 80s, the bum bag was rather unassuming and deliberately anonymous as an object. It was an eminently practical solution for those who needed a safe, lightweight pocket to carry their personal items: travelers, sports people and urbanites, the first bum bag users, preferred function over fashion. Unlike in architecture, where bringing back the past is always a decadent sign of cultural weakness, revivals in design are peripatetic: they are part of the nomadic and dynamic process of giving new twists to old things, and bringing back what is likely to become trendy. These days, logo-heavy brands such as Gucci, Coach or Louis Vuitton are turning a peasant object into a sophisticated accessory that is all about style. Regardless, the relevance of a bum bag today seems greater than ever. The number of personal objects we carry along is too high for the pockets in our trousers and coats: cell phones, ipods, car keys, digital cameras and Altoid boxes require a larger pouch, a true unisex accessory that is both functional and fashionable. I had a black, nylon, bum bag years ago –it would seem prehistoric and authentic these days. I used it a lot until I lost it. But again, today’s expensive bum bags probably come with RIFD tags.

>7 Everyday navigation (objects 61-70)

The pocket as a survival container for personal use; the Braille embosser as a tool for improved awareness and readability in environments designed for the visually apt only; the barcode, in its multiple and increasingly sophisticated contemporary versions, as a passive communicator and a symbol; the credit card as a transactional facilitator with simplified materiality. It is not easy to find links among the 10 last objects published in this blog (61 to 70). If anything, they have to do with everyday navigation, portability and enhanced efficiency derived from their single functionality. Everyday navigation implies reducing design to solving one problem only, and doing it really well. This is a heroic feat in a moment when multi-functionality and hybridization are, increasingly, the protagonists of design publications and events worldwide. Multi-functionality addresses increasingly complex sets of demands. In our capitalist world, we have managed to create a multitude of disposable needs in order to justify the production and commercialization of new, disposable objects that feed the process of buying and selling; objects that we have been convinced to consider essential in our interaction with our everyday environments. The beauty of the pocket money brailler is that it is truly essential. It is also inexpensive, reliable and user-friendly, qualities that need to be part of the design of an object that eases the limitations of those who are not able to see the world we so readily take for granted. That is alternative design.

70. Pockets

Pockets have generated their own universe of custom-designed objects. There are pocket books and pocket knives; pocket watches and pocket flash-lights; handkerchiefs, keys and key chains, wallets, coins, cell phones and ipods; wrinkled notes and special pocket pens. Pockets are responsible for the miniaturization of our lives, the gift of enabling us to be self-sufficient and operational by being able to carry what we need to have with us at any given moment. A few things. Only what fits within. Pockets store, protect and carry our own daily survival kit, no matter if we go trekking or we go to work. They reassure us in our ability to operate in our own terms, in different environments. They are essential to trouble-free living: we lose our car keys, and we’re doomed; somebody picks our wallet from our pocket, and the day becomes simply catastrophic. Pockets are functional in their own chaotic way. They are part of our clothing (word is that the great Max Bill had special, custom-sized pockets added to his coats, to carry his drawing implements). Pockets hide. They keep things out of sight. Shy people keep their hands in their pockets, a habit that I have never been able to understand fully. Hiding the hands is an imposed paralysis that limits the free-flowing propensity to expression that extremities have: it reduces communication to verbal enunciation and suppresses complexity at many levels. What is the form of pockets? How does it predict our lifestyle?

69. Pocket money brailler

The function of the money brailler is to stamp a relief number in bills so that they can be read tactilely by those who cannot read them visually. I suppose this product is designed for the United States market, perhaps for other countries where bills of different value have the same size. In Europe, for example, the size of Euro bills varies according to their value, and this solves the problem of them being readable by the visually impaired. If dollar bills were designed for tactile recognition, this object would not have any reason to exist. But it exists and, after reading about it, I mail-ordered one for just about $12 (9 Euro). I soon realized that it is an inconsequential object, at least in terms of presence and integrity: two sheets of plastic riveted together, leaving a gap where the bill is introduced for stamping (it reminded me those ready-to-assemble toys kids get with junk food meals). But it is also rather empowering: I quickly started stamping all the bills in my wallet, thinking that I was adding a second, tact-based language to them. Suddenly, the object started making sense. I asked my friends if they would let me stamp their bills, and they did. After a while, I was proficient at brailling dollar bills and thought the pocket money brailler was a pretty inexpensive way to add (non monetary) value to bills, and thus mitigate their significant design shortcomings.

68. Braille slate, stylus

The Braille slate and stylus are the basic tools for brailling (process of writing in Braille). The slate is a set of two hinged plates, usually made of plastic or metal. Its function is to hold the paper while the writer guides the stylus to create Braille cells that are properly aligned and consistently spaced. Smaller, portable slates have, approximately, 20 cells per line. Larger slates, required for use with 11 in. x 11 in. paper (the official paper size used in Braille documents), may have up to 40 cells per line. Braille cells consist of six holes, arranged in a three-hole by two-hole matrix. In Braille, letters and numbers are represented by cells in which some of the dots are embossed and some left blank. The back plate of the slate has shallow holes. The front plate has a series of rectangular openings, each with six indentations along its sides to guide the stylus into the corresponding shallow holes on the back plate. When the paper is placed between the plates and the stylus is pressed into it along one of these indentations, a raised dot is formed on the other side of the paper (the shallowness of the holes on the back plate avoids the perforation of the paper by the stylus). Like in printmaking, brailling is done in reverse: the punctuated sheet has to be turned around to be read: writing has to be done from right to left.

67. Braille embosser

How different is a Braille embosser than a Dymo? They are very similar in size and mode of operation. Both of them position the letters in a circular moveable piece to allow for easy identification and selection of the right letter, both visually and tactilely. Tactility is a way of comprehending the world, just as visuality is, but the way tactile letters are found in the Braille embosser demands a different kind of involvement from the user. That is the first difference between both objects: they look similar, but are used very differently. Yet, their mechanisms are comparable. This poses the question of whether one of them should be radically different in form to the other, since their users operate in radically different ways. Perhaps having the letters in relief is not enough to make the Braille embosser a well-designed tool. That seems to be the other important difference between both objects: the Dymo embosser is an object, while the Braille embosser is a tool. The first one is much less necessary to its user than the other, since labeling for a visually impaired individual is a way of way finding rather than a method of organizing. A good friend and colleague spent three days blindfolded to experience how the world is comprehended tactilely. He assured me that the test entirely changed his understanding of design. A Braille embosser might be an essential object for its users, although its form might not show it.

66. Dymo

The company Dymo was founded in 1958 to commercialize personal label makers. The notion of neatly typed, adhesive, customizable, labels was an important innovation at the time: according to the company’s web site, Dymo´s first product, the Embosser, “quickly revolutionized the way business and individuals organized and identified their offices and surroundings.” A deeper reflection on such statement might suggest that organizing one’s work environment is not so much a matter of neatness as it is a way of increasing productivity. Dymo’s label makers were small contributors to the search for enhanced efficiency and task streamlining, essential aspects of mid 20th-century, capitalist, industrialized, societies such as the United States. Labeling everything in a consistent way introduced the notion of normative environments: the individualistic task of hand labeling was suddenly suppressed, and the adoption of the same labeling system for all the fellow workers became a metaphor for the unified, collective, effort that corporate management saw as essential to high profit-making. Dymos as instruments of corporate oppression? The paradox is that the first embossers were highly imperfect instruments: anyone who has used one knows that the same word embossed three times by three different individuals would look slightly different, depending on the force applied to embossing each one of the letters, or the way the space between the letters is set. The mechanical nature of Dymos insured a crafty, somehow personalized way to labeling, something that Dymo’s Embosser hardly conveys as an object.

65. Passport

Aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart forgot to take her passport in her first solo flight over the Atlantic in 1932. She had to obtain one during her stop in Paris. In it, she listed her profession as flyer. Earhart’s leather-bound passport embodied her identity and aspirations. But it also proclaimed the ideas of jurisdiction and nationality and the prerogative of nations to approve or deny the access of individuals to their territories. Passports are the result of a highly regulated world and have always reached maximum importance in times of conflict: in the early 20th century, Europeans could travel throughout the old continent without the need of a passport. Passports and identity cards were re-established in the Western world only after World War II, when the world developed hermetic and unfriendly national boundaries. Today, in our fear-ridden world, with countries crushing immigrants at the borders, passports have become e-passports, and incorporate a 64 Kb chip loaded with individual information about the bearer. And, yet, despite this new addition, passports have kept their essence as objects intact: same format, same size and configuration, similar appearance from country to country, other than variations in color and in the stamped national identity in the front. It is said that the first passport was a letter that a Persian king issued for one of his officials circa 5th century BC. Today, not much has changed and passports are still instruments of control in our increasingly segregated world.

64. Credit card

Many have claimed lately that designers should design services rather than products, to alleviate our increasingly contaminated planet. Some felt that way too back in mid 20th century, when the first credit cards appeared. They began as charge accounts offered by individual stores. The Diner’s Club offered the first credit card that could be used at multiple locations in 1950: issued to only two hundred customers, it was accepted at twenty-seven restaurants in New York City. Today, credit cards such as Visa or MasterCard are networks of financial institutions, and credit card companies are unscrupulous macro empires that base their businesses on building debt in their customers. Few people stop to consider such predatory practices when they rely on the convenience of handing out a piece of plastic to pay for most anything, most anywhere in the world. I have to admit, that is quite a service. The future of this macro-service? In their quest for having customers spend more and more, credit card companies will have to be increasingly creative in their reward offers. Some claim the next big thing will be to reward their customers with gifts of virtual currency such as Second Life’s Linden dollars (in 2006, $100 million worth of transactions flowed through the virtual world of Second Life, and that amount is only increasing). The material future? Perhaps not as ambitious and far more predictable: same shape and size, different materials, such as metal sheet, instead of plastic.

63. ColorCode

Another readable symbol, this time in full color. ColorCode is the next generation of code. A ColorCode is a small multicolor square that allows you to go places, that is, through the lens of your cell phone camera. Say you see a poster for an intriguing movie. In the corner, a small multicolor icon. You point your mobile phone at it. The camera in your phone reads the ColorCode symbol printed on the poster. The ColorCode contains information provided by a server. The server then sends data to your phone in the form of content, perhaps a movie trailer, MP3 or image files, etc. This all happens instantly, in a zip. Bar codes reinvent themselves quickly these days, but scanning is slowly becoming obsolete. Taking out your cell phone and focusing your camera on a small splotch of color at the corner of a magazine article, or a TV program, to access up-to-the-minute information or media content is the way in Japan and Korea these days, and will probably be in the rest of the world soon. So it claims the ColorZip company website: its home page is surprisingly dull and under-designed, and offers just three links: Korea, Japan and South East Asia. That is the geography of ColorCodes so far. ColorCodes can be designed, breaking away with the tyranny of the black and white lines of standard bar codes or the duotone circularity of ShotCodes: customization of individual experiences through the lens of a mobile phone.

62. ShotCode

Two U.S. students –Silver and Woodland- invented the barcode in 1948. Their first barcode was called bull’s eye because it was a series of black and white concentric circles. They were granted a patent in 1952. The barcode system made it to the commercial arena in the 1960s and by the 1980s it had become widespread worldwide (the barcodes of variable black and white bars as we know them today did not appear until the 1990s). Forty years from invention to ubiquitousness. In 1999, a particularly innovative version of the barcode returned to the system’s initial circularity: ShotCode is a circular sequence of black and white blocks that represent an Internet address. They are designed to be read by mobile phone cameras. ShotCodes differ from matrix barcodes in that they do not store data; instead, they store a number. This number is linked to a server that holds information regarding an Internet website which the reading device can connect to in order to download said data. Users download ShotCode software on their camera phones and then use their mobile phone cameras to scan the circular symbols; the software recognizes the server and identifies the right Internet address. The compelling logo-like graphic of ShotCodes takes the barcode system to the realm of personal mobility and flexible networks. It also takes it to a more whimsical realm beyond the strict inventory-like uses associated with the red-beam scanners one can find in supermarkets and distribution centers.

61. RFID tag

Radio Frequency IDentification technology (RFID) is not new, but it is quickly finding new applications. An RFID tag has a small microchip with radio antennas that carry a small amount of data and have a unique identification number. The tag transmits the ID number, via radio signals, to the RFID reader, which needs to be in the vicinity of the tag. The reader is linked to a computer with a database; that is how the information is stored. In principle, RFID tags can be attached to anything –objects, animals, places, people- and some readers are so powerful that make the transmitted information accessible from all over the world via Internet. To give a macabre example of the use of these devices, Wal Mart is planning introducing RFID tags in all its supermarket products in order to precisely trace customers’ routes through the shop, as well as their shopping habits, so that special personal offers can be made to customers with a specific profile in real time. There are less Orwellian applications of this technology in passports, public transportation payment systems, libraries or human implants -certain nightclubs embed RFID tags in their VIPs’ hands so that the process of paying for drinks is reduced to the wave of a hand. Any technology has the capacity of morphing into the sublime or the irrelevant. In the case of RFID tags, the irrelevance of most of their present applications reminds us of the shrinking value of individual privacy.

>6 De-materializing (Objects 51-60)

Arguably, one of the main attributes of progress is how it shifts the materiality of things around us. Progress brings along the de-materialization of things: lighter objects, artifacts and machines, replace their heavier, bulky-looking, user-unfriendly predecessors in a seamless cycle that manifests itself only when we look back at how things were. Designing invites us to look through a rear-view mirror. Things evolve along time-based evolutionary sequences capable of morphing what we know, use and love. The history of computing presents a good example: from imposing, heavy processors with limited computing capabilities, to smaller portable devices with ever-versatile features and capabilities: from the Salamis table, or the quipu, to the pocket calculator. Objects 51 to 60 are an eclectic mix of ancient and contemporary moments capable of showing how things around us change in material, cultural and social ways in a non-stop ongoing process. From the lightness of nets to the repugnant and oppressive nature of teenage deterrent sound emitters, objects have the ability of telling their story within larger sets of parameters: the ultra-cane puts research to the good purpose of expanding social progress by enhancing individual lives -just as the clay table or the Salamis table do- while the teenage deterrent puts research in the black list of things that go against the human condition by oppressing individual lives. It would be simplistic to talk about good and bad objects; perhaps we can talk about objects with positive or negative social repercussions.

60. FOLED

A Flexible Organic Light Emitting Diode (FOLED) is a display that can be rolled up, folded or worn as part of a wearable computer. It is a portable, durable and light alternative to ubiquitous silicon-based LCD displays, the glass displays we have in our computer monitors nowadays. The great promise of this technology, first developed in 2004 at the University of Toronto, is embeddedness: it can be incorporated into car windshields and dashboards, walls, clothing, partitions, windows, cell phones, watches, etc. According to experts, FOLEDs are almost ripe for market, having gone through a fast research and development phase since 2004. Today, corporate mammoths such as Xerox, Lucent and DuPont, are pursuing FOLEDs at full speed, trying to lower the cost of production to where they want it to be. It is ironic to imagine a world where the person walking in front of you would have a screen sewn into her coat, but I am sure many people also thought electricity was such a silly thing back when. Following the mandate of this blog, my main question is how relevant is this particular technology –and new technologies in general- to our immediate future. Will FOLEDs make a better world, or just make better profits for the few? Will they help us pay attention to what is important, or distract us from it? Will they be catalysts, or social sedatives? In any case, the sole presence of the name Organic in the acronym is valuable.

59. Public poster board

Public poster boards are neither prominent, nor anonymous; they are neither interesting nor boring. They have such low design ambitions that it is hard to say anything about them, to praise or criticize them. Like most urban furniture elements and/or public objects we find in cities, they are numb in terms of design principles, form and public presence. What is the real role of these objects? Are they effective communicating devices? Is their low-tech nature deliberate, adequate? should it be more complex and feature-oriented, to better perform the object's function? The public poster board in the image is from the Italian city of Bardolino. Sited at the entrance of the city’s largest public park, its function is to display local information about cultural activities and social announcements. It works from the top down: this object is the medium that municipal authorities and/or cultural institutions use to keep citizens and visitors informed. As an object, it is rather meaningless: a structure of bent metal tubes embedded in the sidewalk, supporting a surface that holds paper posters, notices and announcements. Its dark grey color swiftly dissolves into the urban background, per se chaotic and rather incomprehensible. I did not see anyone stopping by to read any of the announcements. Perhaps the effectiveness of this object is directly related to the graphic quality of the materials presented in it: would people really stop to look at high-quality posters? I am pretty sure they would not.

58. Mosquito teenage deterrent

A few British companies are now commercializing the Mosquito ultrasonic teenage deterrent, an object designed to disperse groups of teenagers from areas where they are not wanted. Believe it or not, the object is legal and, according to one of the companies that sell it, “acclaimed by the police forces of many areas of the UK.” Another marketing blurb claims that this object is “the solution to the eternal bane of shopkeepers and Mall owners around the world, who are troubled by small crowds of anti-social teenagers who have nothing better to do than loiter outside their shops and stores deterring older customers who want to go into the shops to purchase goods.” This wonder thing is packaged in a die-cast alloy box in a vandal-proof casing, and works by emitting ultrasounds at a high frequency only audible to teenagers. Anti-social teenagers? Smart teenagers, rather. At least capable of turning an oppressive technology into a subversive tool for peer-to-peer communication. Even if the initial intention was that teenagers aware of this device would move away from the area, this remarkable social subgroup soon realized the communication possibilities of this technology: they sampled the sound –now called Teen Buzz- and turned it into a ring tone to be used over Bluetooth and text messaging to communicate with other teenagers at school without their teachers knowing -the oldsters can not possibly hear the phones ringing when they do. A true design lesson.

57. Olyset net

John Singer Sargent painted The Mosquito Net in 1912. The painting depicts a woman resting peacefully, her head protected by what seems to be a deployable (foldable) mosquito net made of semicircular ribs. History goes that it was Sargent’s sister Emma who designed the net, which, as an object, and despite its voluminous presence in the painting, seems somehow sophisticated both formally and functionally. It is possible that in the past, personal mosquito nets were a trendy accessory for the well to do, although today their use is less romantic and more humanitarian. In developing countries, particularly in Africa, mosquito-carried malaria kills a child every 30 seconds. This explains why UNICEF is today the largest buyer of mosquito nets in the world, spending around $75 millions annually. A few international companies lead the research against malaria through the production of increasingly sophisticated bed nets. One of them is Sumitomo Chemical. Some years ago, this company pioneered a revolutionary technology to develop a net that effectively prevents mosquito biting, lasts for a long time, and resists both washing and tearing formidably. It is called the Olyset net, and it is made of a durable plastic weave with the insecticide permethrin incorporated into the fibers of the net. Permethrin is a non-toxic molecule obtained from a certain species of chrysanthemum, which makes this insecticide ideal for the protection of children. Olyset nets slowly release their insecticide over as many as seven years, and are extremely durable.

56. Fishing net

This photo from Peñíscola (Spain) makes me wonder what kind of object a fishing net is. Is it an object at all? How could we define its formal qualities? An object that is a surface -a very specific type of permeable surface- is certainly worth reflecting upon. An object that is light and invisible to fish, and is functionally flawless, is certainly worth examining. Is a fishing net really an example of great, anonymous, timeless design? I am still surprised at the delicate relationship of proximity that fishing nets have with their users and/or owners. Shortly after I took this photo, a couple of women in indigo aprons brought their stools by and began mending the nets, a slow process that I am sure ended up taking the best part of their day. I stayed around to see the beginning of that process and I was deeply taken by its timelessness: seeing these women at work assured me that it did not matter to them how long they had to be mending those nets, as long as the job was done properly. Patience as a design force was the lesson I took home that day. I am aware that the fishing net might very well be one of the oldest objects ever used by humans and, yet, seeing those women treating their nets with such love and care seemed to me an exceptionally intense and contemporary way of interacting with objects, one I had rarely seen before.

55. Quipu

Quipus were logical-numerical recording devices used by ancient Andean civilizations to store massive amounts of information. Some anthropologists believe that quipus were highly sophisticated devices capable of conveying thousands of units of information. Regardless, some of the design qualities of quipus have remained timeless and would make them award-winning objects today: they used ad-hoc, natural, renewable materials –llama or alpaca thread; they were lightweight, collapsible, portable and waterproof; they were color coded and each thread represented what it counted: yellow for corn or gold, white for silver, black for time, etc; they were easy to repair and reconfigure; and they were user-friendly, with a marvelous interface that took full advantage of the material properties of fibers. Quipus were also multi-functional: Quipucamayocs -the Inca administrators of quipus- used them both to store numerical data and to perform the four basic mathematical calculations. The structure of a quipu is extraordinarily simple: the closer the knot was to the top of the cord, the higher the number, and vice versa. At the top of the cord, the highest number represented ten thousand. At the bottom, one. Between one set of tens and the next, there was enough space for nine knots representing all single-digit numbers. It is not easy today to speculate about the design of this object, or the ways in which it was used. In many ways, it could be a very contemporary object, one that suggests great spirituality and a complex culture associated to it.

54. Salamis tablet

Although the earliest recorded counting device was the abacus, the oldest surviving calculation tool is the Salamis tablet. This object is named after the Greek island where it was found in the 19th century. The Salamis tablet was no pocket calculator: a marble slab measuring 150 x 75 x 4.5 cm. (59 x 29,5 x 1,7 in.) and weighing 130 kg. (286 lb.), it was used in Babylon as early as 300 BC. As an object, the tablet has the extreme simplicity of the raw material: a stone piece with etched elements, it was originally thought of as a gaming board. Gaming is, after all, counting. The tablet’s two sets of grooves –and spaces in-between them- are used in conjunction with pebbles or beads, and the symbols in the periphery, to create a well-determined system that allowed users to consistently perform the four basic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The Salamis tablet offered rigor and permanence to the important act of counting. The selection of durable and monolithic marble and the effort of etching a system in it to allow for the same process to take place over and over again, represent in itself a major proof of design evolution. Durability and predictability allow a spectacular process of innovation –over the centuries- from the ad-hoc system of temporary markings in clay surfaces, to a well-designed object that insures an established protocol and the consistent repetition of the same action.

53. Babylonian clay tablet

There is evidence of mathematic activity in Mesopotamia as far back as 3,500 BC. Mathematical calculations were done in clay tablets. Clay was abundant in the fertile banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers, where today's Iraq is situated. It was readily available, easy to gather, and extremely easy to mold with the bare hands. Babylonian students used clay to make notebooks for their mathematical calculations. As long as the clay remained wet, the embossed signs could be easily made and then erased by simply rubbing the surface of the tablet or adding moisture to it. This process could be repeated over and over again, until the clay dried out under the heavy Babylonian sun. The tablets were then recycled as construction materials in building foundations and walls –this is how some have been preserved in an immaculate state until today. One same material –clay- was useful for most human needs, from buildings to vases, from tableware to calculating tablets. This Babylonian clay tablet displays, as an object, many of the ambitions of design today: recyclability, use of natural, renewable, local materials, user-friendliness or customization, to name a few. Clay tablets were highly tactile objects that reminded users of their closeness to Earth, and the directness of using the hands as complex activators of mental discourse. In a world of excess and redundancy like ours, the freshness of this ephemeral object that exemplifies life cycle design without intending it, becomes especially inspiring.

52. Outdoor carpet

The Dutch company Carpet Sign bv commercializes carpet designed for outdoor use. It is water, UV and fungi resistant, described in the online catalog as a fully synthetic product ready to withstand outdoor conditions. The notion a carpet designed for the public space is certainly intriguing. It is a much more ambitious concept than the one behind this product, which is simply the adaptation of a regular carpet that uses weatherproof fibers. And, yet, ultimately, this product is capable of suggesting a whole new understanding of the public domain. The red carpet that leads to a restricted event is a direct precedent to this idea, although red carpets are conceived as ephemeral, available only for the duration of the exclusive event they lead to. But, what about a permanent carpet designed for sidewalks and plazas? What would it mean as a surface treatment within the city? Would it be a landscape operation, a micro-urban operation? Would it be an art installation? The dislocating effect of thinking about an object with a very clearly prescribed function –to provide comfort indoors- and subverting it according to a whole new set of parameters –what would happen if the sidewalks would be carpeted and warm, instead of neutral and hostile?- has always been a good design method. The product above might not be it, but it is certainly very close to radical innovation, however we may understand the meaning of the word innovation these days.

51. Ultra Cane

The Ultra Cane was developed in 1998 to help visually impaired users navigate their surroundings. Its interface is in its handle, designed to provide enough information about the user’s immediate environments and to help her or him negotiate them more naturally. The principle behind this object is simple and quite similar to that of the sonar: the handle of the Ultra Cane emits ultrasonic beams to help identify nearby obstacles. The rebounding beams are collected back and translated to the user by virtue of a series of vibrating buttons situated in the handle of the cane. The strength of the pulse of those buttons determines how far away the obstacle is; their position in the handle announces whether the obstacle is on the left or the right of the walker. Impossible for us to understand the world the way blind people do. I think it is unclear whether the Ultra Cane truly improves the lives of the visually impaired significantly more than its low-tech cousin, the white collapsible cane that so many blind people all over the world have been using so successfully until now. The promise of Ultra Cane, though, is the idea of tactile communication, the poetic notion of perceiving the world through the hand. That is, in itself, a valid alternative to the rhythmic motion required from the user to explain the world through a collapsible white cane. We all have that image in our heads. And the sounds that go with it.