CB2 offers a number of Buddha-themed decorator items, presumably for a broader audience than just Buddhists, who might regard this as a religious symbol. For others, it’s simply chic (or kitsch).
Why is it okay to do this with Buddha, but not Mohammed? Or even Jesus (who is kitschy, but not chic)?
I managed to avoid this cold through months of work stress and travel. And it got me today, 5 days after getting off the plane from India.
If I didn’t work at home, I’d be staying home from work today.
I just got a brand-new elliptical trainer, the Lifefitness X1. It’s in the bedroom and although it’s the smallest model they make, it’s absolutely huge. There’s this giant metal techno design thing sitting next to the bed.
Every time I walk into the bedroom I’m reminded of some memorable sci-fi movie apparati.
BusinessWeek describes a curious design research initiative. A UK home builder has a family living in a sensor-filled concept house, where the people are all RFID-tagged. They’ll collect usage data for six months and then use the resulting who/where/when/how-long data to improve the home’s design. Just like using weblogs to redesign a website – you know what people have been doing, but you have no idea why. Unless you ask. And the families in this project will be extensively interviewed by a “consumer researcher” so we figure they’ll get that piece of the puzzle too.
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A while back Virginia Postrel wrote about Wireless Glamour – the absence of wires from the glam photos of technology used in advertising, etc. I found these pictures in a Target advertising circular called Room Solutions. I was amazed to see pictures of messy rooms, where people own lots of stuff, it’s messy, askew, and yes indeed, there are wires – cables, cords, the whole real deal.
Sure, the pictures are entirely stylized and sort of hyper-real, but somehow it’s relieving to see a significant move away from the more idealized and yes glamourous consumer images that advertising is so fond of. I was at an annoying deisgn conference a couple of years ago and was struck when someone from IKEA showed fieldwork photos – messy homes overflowing with stuff. Of course, it wasn’t the photos that I was struck by – in doing ethnographic research, I’ve taken a million of those “real” pictures myself over the years but I was struck by the reaction – laughter. Designer after designer showed luscious product pr0n but one person showed realistic images and were met with ridicule. Now Target is using the mess of real life to help depict their ideal world – where consumers’ homes are messy and overflowing with stuff – stuff purchased at Target.