The Designers Accord has just published a progress report which provides an over view on adopter growth and initiatives developing under its umbrella.

Recipients of our newsletter, The Occasional, may recall that Citizen Scholar “took the pledge” so to speak and is operating under recommendations adopted from The Designers Accord for integrating, improving and sharing sustainable responsibility in design practice.

If you didn’t get that update, you can sign up here and never miss a beat.

Fellow Brooklynites Urban Inks are opening a screen printing and design collaborative space in Long Island City. LIC happens to be my other ‘hood, so I’m especially excited about this.

Post Expose will house the work spaces of several designer and artist printers beginning in November.

Grand Opening
November 1 2007

Hours
M-F 10am-6pm
Sat 12pm-8pm

Location
21-36 44 Road,
Long Island City
Queens, NY

They’ve also invited Citizen Scholar to include a poster in the opening exhibition. Thanks, guys! You’re swell.

We hope to see you there.

37signals’ Highrise contact manager has become the scaffolding on which I build most of my daily interactions, both personal and business. Within days of creating an account I was putting the email-integration features to use. I’ve been using Mail Act-On to quickly forward emails and create tasks from Apple Mail when I’m at my desk.

On the go, however, I needed an equally easy answer. As of writing (June 28, 2007) I’m using a Nokia E61 with T-Mobile service. I can get descent load times on simple pages using Opera on the phone, but interacting with forms and heavy javascript seems unreliable, so I haven’t bothered trying to use Highrise through the browser.

Thankfully, Highrise’s email interfacing makes this dead simple: I just added address book entries for each of the Highrise email options (Dropbox, Task Today, Task Tomorrow, etc.). When I sync the phone with my address book, all of those “contacts” go into my phone, where I use them to start new emails and add to-dos while out and about.

It was just a few days ago as I was using Highrise to plan my iPhone purchase (see end of post), that I realized my mobile solution would work wonders on the iPhone (or admittedly, any email client) too. Since it syncs with address book just like my current phone and Highrise doesn’t care what device the mail comes from, I don’t have to do anything different. So, here’s how to set it up quickly and easily yourself:

Step 1
Grab this template vCard: HighriseTemplate.vcf

Step 2
Import it into your address book and replace “YourDropboxAddress” in each new contact’s email field with the string of numbers found in your Highrise email dropbox tab.

(you can also just open it in a text editor first and do a find-replace)

Step 3
Sync up your address book to your mobile device or iPhone and you’re ready to go.

But wait, you ask, isn’t this all a moot point since the iPhone has Safari and I could simply use Highrise there? It’s true, this may be an option, but I’ll still want to forward emails to the system or add to-dos that come to mind when I’m writing an email without switching over to the browser.

One last thing, Highrise has been helping me plan my transition away from T-Mobile and into AT&T service. Since I’m on a family plan and will continue that arrangement, with one iPhone and one non-iPhone, and with both numbers needing to be ported, I’ve had plenty of questions for customer service with both companies.

I created a case called Mobile Phone and have been documenting my calls with both customer service departments. (T-Mobile has a good why-you-shouldn’t-get-an-iPhone spiel that’s worth it’s wait in entertainment value.)

There it is, the start to a smooth transition into iPhone land tomorrow after 6pm.

If anyone has questions, feel free to shoot me an email.

UPDATE

#1 Nokia E61 (unlocked) for sale

#2 iPhone works like a charm. EDGE isn’t terribly slow here. Keyboard use is almost up to normal speed already.

#3 E61 sold, thanks for the contacts

My suite-mate Ryan held up this week’s delivery of Businessweek. “Innovation” is the only word in their vocabulary.” I had to laugh. I’m sure a number of their readers, even occasional ones, have thought the same.

“Innovation” has always been a word I’ve struggled with. Long before the innovation-everything frenzy, I got all tripped up when I read a marketing piece from a large consulting firm that espoused design as innovation. I can’t argue with the sentiment. Design is innovative right? Creativity too? Innovation sounds so…good. Who wouldn’t want to be inventive and new?

The problem lies in this mapping of design (still a word that is difficult to define) to innovation (even more difficult to define). This is akin to stating that emotion is spirituality or thought is truth. Such metaphors are the fuel of theoretical exploration, for which admittedly I have a liking, but they are not for making a legitimate and coherent arguments in your firm’s self-promotion or much less in dominant business press.

In Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle he posits, “Innovation is ever present in the production of things. This is not true of consumption, which is never anything but more of the same.”

I’m not sure I get innovation. I get design.

Core77, the wildly popular design site (much more than just industrial design these days) launched a series of podcasts in December 2006. Since February, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Steve Heller, editing and co-producing his contributions to the site—interviews with some of the most fascinating contributors to the contemporary sphere of design.

• Frank Luca of The Wolfsonian


• Maira Kalman


• Mitch Nash of Blue Q


• and most recently, Edwin Schlossberg

Of course, there are other contributors in addition to Steve, including our dear friend and client, Alissa Walker. Check out interviews by Alissa, Steve, and others (and some conference presentations, including Natalie Jeremijenko) at Core77.com/broadcasts.

I won’t miss this one: SVA design student Anthony Defranco has organized this Saturday’s (Marth 24th’s) Bubble Bath bubble-blowing event in Union Square. Anthony’s charming inspiration story is spot on.

Cheer 1
Huge congratulations are due to Bruce Mau for his receipt of the highest honor bestowed upon a designer by AIGA, the professional association for design, the AIGA Medal.

Cheer 2
Bruce Mau Design is opening an office in the fine city of Chicago. From BMD’s current hometown, the Toronto Star reports.

Cheer 3
For the future.

Last August we shared that we’ve been working with our dear friend on his recycling program in Monteagudo, Bolivia.

Ross is still in Monteagudo and is seeking funding that will allow himself, his team, and members of the community to implement a plastic recycling program that will create recurring revenue for some residents in the extremely poor region.

H.A.M.M. (Mayor’s Office of Monteagudo) has adopted a progressive waste managment campaign to eliminate all plastics from its city dump and other areas (in some cases rivers) where the plastics pile up and facilitate water born diseases. The keystone for H.A.M.M.’s campaign is to develop a self-sustainable recycling center that would solve the areas discarded plastic problem and supply locals with an option of a small income. The recycling program would operate in much the same way we know of in United States; Plastic bottles are purchase by the redemption center (in this case by the kilo) by anyone who collects them, processed at the center, then shipped in large volumes to the city where the bottles are sold to a plastics purchaser – and the revenue produced by the sale of the plastics would then sustain the costs of running the recycling center in Monteagudo. As well, 2 dozen steel cage containers will be fabricated and dispersed around the city in specific high traffic areas to provided the public with available areas where they can correctly dispose of plastics. Other strengths of this project include a cross media awareness campaign and environmental and recycling workshops for all local schools.

Although their commitment to the environment is stronger then most communities, H.A.M.M. is very much like the majority of Bolivian Municipalities – poor. This is in fact the first time that H.A.M.M. have invested so much into an environmental project and now requests support from Partner assistance, to help finance the rest of the building materials needed to construct the recycling center.

See the Peace Corps page to learn more and find a link to make a contribution to the project.

Tree Nation is smart project whose goal is to plan 8 million trees in Niger. On their site they outline the causes and negative effects of desertification. Beyond the necessity and worthyness of the action, the most exciting thing about Tree Nation is how they’re using technology to engage supporters. By tagging trees and using GPS technology, supporters can select specific individuals locations to help plant a tree and later track back to the tree. It’s poetic, really.

(via PSFK)

I must recommend Atypyk’s products, site, and general ethos. They’ve got the wit of Blue Q, the designer-yness of Experimental Jetset, the irony of Brooklyn, and the romance of France.

Their latest promo pokes fun at the sustainability trend, but boy is it funny. “Get your child busy on Sundays” it reads, followed by “A green idea by Atypyk.” The accompanying illustration is one of their “free for edition” Tricycle Lawn Mower which replaces the rear wheels/axle with a manual lawn-mower.