Open up your mind and say, ahh...

What’s This?

Some 10 billion business cards are printed in the U.S. every year, and yet 88% of them are discarded one week after they’re handed to a business contact, according to StatisticBrain. In response, developers have released apps, like Bump, that enable users to exchange information more seamlessly by tapping their phones. Still others have sought to make traditional business cards more effective by making them more engaging, emblazoning them with QR codes and embedding them with NFC chips to achieve a number of effects, such as smartphone-activated augmented reality displays.

One of the latest additions to the novelty category is CallingCube, a 3D business card that comes in the shape of a six-sided die. The hollow cube is just shy of 1″ x 1″ x 1″, and five of the six sides can be inscribed with text and/or simple graphics in a variety of basic colors. The cards are made using 3D Systems’ ZPrinter 650, a spokesperson for Ohio-based CallingCube tells us, and cost $299 for a set of 80. The company is planning to introduce additional forms, including the house-shaped one below, in the coming months:

The CallingCube cards are sure conversation starters, but there’s no guarantee, of course, that they won’t be discarded as quickly as traditional business cards. There’s also the difficulty of transporting them. Beyond a messenger bag or purse, CallingCard suggests keeping a few in a front pant pocket, or in the interior pocket of a sports coat.

Is this something you would consider using to share your contact information at a networking event? Would you be more likely to hold on to one if it was handed to you in lieu of a traditional business card?

The best kind of satire is ambiguous, within the realm of possibility–upsettingly real. Dutch jeweler Ted Noten‘s latest collection–7 Necessities–is all of those and a bit more.

Noten became famous for tongue-in-cheek (literally) jewelry like gold brooches cast from chewing gum, and a vending machine in Amsterdam’s red light district that dispensed red rings to thoughtful johns (“Be nice to a girl, buy her a ring”). Four years later, 7 Necessities builds on Noten’s heavily-gendered portfolio, offering up absurdist objects that “every woman” needs. The project stems from Noten’s self-described “quest to determine what every woman needs in a survival kit, under any imaginable circumstance, in order to ‘be her own man’ without forfeiting her femininity.”

Among the must-haves? A mask that dispenses Botox, molded to look like Nefertiti; a gun that holds a thumb drive, drugs, and a diamond; a chastity belt with an embedded video screen; and a helmet with a built in radar system for a “woman on the hunt.” A purse of wonders holds anti-wrinkle sperm whale oil, a wedding ring, lipstick, and a crystal ball (all women are witches, duh). The objects are 3-D printed in white and inlaid with a crust of diamonds and gold.

What does it mean for a man to tell a woman that “survival” is about looking young and “snaring a man?” Not that much, somehow. The male-driven vision of femininity perpetrated by the fashion world for decades isn’t all that different from Noten’s satirical vision, although 7 Necessities seems to be mocking third-wave feminism more than it mocks the fashion world. But the objects are beautifully designed if you can get past their cringe-inducing similarity to the real world. And really, what woman hasn’t had the thought as she walks out of the house, this outfit would really pop with a video-enabled chastity belt?

The model home at Taylor Morrison’s Ladera housing development in Bee Cave, Texas, looks like any other modern house when you approach it from the road. There’s a large front door, five windows and a few plants to bring the place to life. It’s more of the same when you walk through the door either. There’s the landing to your left, a room immediately to your right.

In fact, it’s not until you take a few steps inside the house that you notice things are slightly different.

“This, to your right, is the children’s nook,” Kristin France tells me as I turn inside the house. “It’s got a full-on kitchen.”

“Every kid who comes through here, this is where they stop. They’ll just hang out here while the parents look around the house. I have a two-year-old, and I can guarantee that she’d be in here—and I’d have a hard time pulling her out. ”

What I’m looking at is a doorframe that’s about three-quarters short of normal. It’s nestled into a wall underneath the stairs, and around it is a painting that’s meant to allude to cottages. This is the children’s nook, and on the wall someone has painted a sink and stove.

“This was actually first designed to be here for a dog,” France says. “But any kid would love it.”

Ladera is not your traditional housing development. Rather, it’s a revolutionary social community—a series of what Taylor Morrison considers the interactive homes. For the first time in the history of homebuilding, a development company has decided to crowdsource the construction process. As France explains, every house on the Ladera lot will draw a certain semblance of inspiration from designs the company found on Pinterest.

If you haven’t heard of Pinterest yet, it’s likely that you don’t know any women. The site is the fastest growing social network on the Internet, a behemoth of beauty and inspiration that’s grown to more than 16 million users. The site has become the unofficial wish list for dreamers and believers alike—an online destination for one-stop window shopping. People pour through other users’ pinboards to find the objects they like most. When they find something, they pin it. Thus, their own pinboards become a vessel for the things they like and want.

And while we don’t have the cold, hard numbers to back it up, fromcircumstantial evidence, I feel safe in saying that a substantial amount of those users have filled at least one of their pinboards with a series of things they would like to see in their dream homes: lofty light structures, super modern kitchen constructions, cute little craft rooms and tiny nooks under the steps for their children.

France, a marketing manager at Taylor Morrison, is no different. She’s got a “My Next House…” pinboard with 77 different pins and says that’s how she got the inspiration to build these homes.

“We were doing our frame walk,” she remembers. “We always pick out of floor plans and what we’re going to build before anything happens.

“We were walking through this house and got to the steps, and I said, ‘We’ve got to make that a children’s nook under the stairs,’ because I knew that we had to make it a functional space. I pulled the image up on my phone, and everybody agreed.”

The kitchen design and craft room upstairs played out much the same way. France looked at the framework of the house and then consulted her pinboard. With the kitchen, she found a design that played to a long island and walkway. Upstairs in the craft room, she reverted to an old favorite: a two-sided desk that looks made for creative collaboration.

“We’re showing people that they can have these homes. I think that’s what Pinterest does,” France says. “Your hopes and dreams of what you could have or could create: We’re trying to make that a reality for people who can’t visualize it.”

France says Taylor Morrison is planning to build 260 different houses on the lot, with each pulling different dream designs from Pinterest. And while she laments the fact that the company can’t yet cater to personalized requests, the fact that she and her colleagues are able to show actual visualizations of room conceptions can be a legitimate boost for business.

“After years of hearing people say, ‘I wish you had done this’ or ‘I wish you had done that,’ this has helped create the solution,” France adds. “We’ve revamped a lot of our floor plans in the last two years basically to cater to all those requests.

“We made those decisions based on what’s popular and what these pinners are requesting. We could show that the room upstairs could be a study or craft room or baby’s room. These visuals help people move into them.”

In a nondescript central Los Angeles neighborhood sits a renovated warehouse, home to the Southern California Institute of Architecture, or Sci-Arc for short. The small graduate school, which is noted for producing architects who go on to work in highly specialized fields like digital animation, is run by a core group of LA architects who place special emphasis on advanced fabrication. The school’s new Robot House, for example, is a dedicated laboratory for students interested in, well, learning how to program robots.

Robotic arms, to be more specific. The Robot House (it’s more like a room) has five of them, Staübli-brand machines with “hands” that can be programmed to do just about anything. Initiated in spring of last year, the lab has already produced some pretty cool stuff. The latest is a complex acrylic sculpture called Hot Networks, authored by Brandon Kruysman and Jonathan Proto, the two young designers Sci-Arc appointed to run and teach the Robot House lab.

In Hot Networks, Kruysman and Proto have given each robotic arm a different task: one positions the work surface, a another picks up and places a plastic cylinder, a third heats up the plastic as it’s set into place, melting and deforming against the others. Another arm airbrushes the cooled pieces, and the fifth arm films the whole thing for posterity. It’s a bit like earlier robotic building experiments (like this one, in which an arm builds a brick wall), but about five times more complex.

The highly choreographed network is made possible by a programming language the duo wrote specifically for the Robot House. Esperant.O, as it’s cleverly called, translates MAYA’s dynamic systems (like skeletons and moving parts) into a language that the mechanical arms can understand. “Esperant.O opens up an entirely new way to engage making through industrial robotics,” write the duo on their website. MAYA, an animation and rendering software that’s typically used to make stuff move on-screen, is being used to control real-time moving parts. For anyone unfamiliar with the software, a vastly over-simplified analogy would be a cartoonist who’s invented a way to control real-life people using his pencil and paper.

It’s funny that we never really get a good look at the morphing plastic sculpture. But the ambivalence the designers seem to feel about showing off the piece plays to the concept behind Robot House. The final product might look cool, sure, but it’s just a byproduct of the real work – the programming itself.

NASA astronauts and SpaceX engineers check out the seating inside the Dragon spacecraft. Photo: SpaceX

With the cargo version of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft waiting patiently at Cape Canaveral for its scheduled launch on May 19, its astronaut-carrying sibling received a thumbs up from NASA.

“This milestone demonstrated the layout of the crew cabin supports critical tasks,” said SpaceX Commercial Crew Development Manager – and former astronaut – Garrett Reisman. “It also demonstrated the Dragon interior has been designed to maximize the ability of the seven-member crew to do their job as effectively as possible.”

The latest step for the manned Dragon spacecraft from SpaceX centered around the size and layout inside the capsule. The seven seat vehicle was deemed acceptable after NASA astronauts and engineers evaluated the Dragon, including entering and exiting under normal and emergency scenarios, as well as reach and visibility tests.

SpaceX’s achievement was reached as concerns at NASA grow regarding lawmakers efforts to stop the NASA sponsored competition to develop a replacement for the space shuttle program.

The evaluation is part of the second round of NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev). The prototype of the Dragon had a functioning interior including seats, lights and life support systems as well as cargo racks and controls.

SpaceX is working closely with NASA on the development of the Dragon, something reflected in comments from the agency’s commercial crew program manager Ed Mango, “as an anchor customer for commercial transportation services, we are happy to provide SpaceX with knowledge and lessons learned from our 50 years of human spaceflight.”

Mango was one of the NASA managers who spoke out last week regarding the future of the CCDev program and its cargo equivalent, the Commercial Orbital Transportation System (COTS). Both programs include multiple private companies receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in development funding from NASA to design, build and test spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts and cargo to low earth orbit.

The goal of the competition has been to reduce the cost of delivering supplies and people to the International Space Station. With the retirement of the space shuttle orbiters, NASA currently pays more than $60 million a seat to hitch a ride on a Russian Soyuz rocket.

The current plan calls for NASA to continue the competition between several different private companies, each receiving between $300 million and $500 million during the next phase. SpaceX, along with Orbital Sciences are the two remaining companies working on the COTS cargo program, and SpaceX, Sierra Nevada Corporation, Blue Origin and Boeing are currently funded through the CCDev program.

A budget bill currently working its way through the House of Representatives would direct NASA to instead immediately choose a single commercial provider for the CCDev program while reducing the overall funding level according to Spaceflightnow.com.

Mango said going with a single company now dramatically increase the cost of the program in the long run.

“We need competition as long as possible. The price to go with one starting today, and then all the way through certification and into services, is at least twice what it would be if you had competition at least as long as possible,” Mango told a NASA committee last week.

Other NASA officials emphasized the need for continued competition saying it has already fostered innovative new approaches for space travel.

SpaceX’s next CCDev milestones for the Dragon include the further development of its pusher launch abort system. Compared with the traditional “tractor” type launch abort system that uses a small rocket to pull the crew to safety in the event of a launch or ascent emergency, SpaceX’s unique approach is to use the small rockets built into the Dragon for orbital maneuvering to push the vehicle clear of the rocket in an emergency. Assuming no emergency occurs, these rocket engines can also be used for a controlled, pinpoint landing in the future.

Voters checking out a politician’s website want a clean, easy-to-use interface that establishes an emotional connection with visitors and teaches them about the candidate — not links asking them to contribute financially to a campaign.

That’s according to a study that literally explored how we look at politicians’ websites — by tracking our eye movements.

Usabilla, a usage-tracking organization, asked 50 voters to navigate the websites of Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich. Their eye movements were tracked and they were asked for their impressions of different features on each site.

Many participants reported that they responded well to sites that tugged at their emotions. Some reported that
they connected with pictures of Romney’s family, for example — which is evident from this eye-tracking analysis:

“I always like to know a little bit about a candidate and whether he is a good dad or husband because it tells a lot about his moral character,” wrote one participant.

Many of the respondents also highlighted the easy navigability of Romney’s site. When Usabilla asked participants to find out about candidates’ backgrounds, Romney’s prominently displayed “Meet Mitt” section made the task easy to achieve.

“I’d want to “Meet Mitt” and get to know him,” said one participant of Romney’s site. “I like right off the bat at the top of the page there is a bar that will take me to the page with the info I want to know,” reported another.

Others said that finding similar information was more difficult on former candidate Rick Santorum’s site, which chose the title “Why Rick?” — a prompt some users found confusing and unclear.

So what did the participants dislike about the candidates’ sites? Many took issue with websites that feature “donate now” buttons littered across every page along with stores for candidate-themed merchandise.

“The importance of receiving money is really obvious on this site,” reported one user regarding Romney’s site. “Is this a campaign website or retail store?” asked another.

For Romney, who is often accused by critics of being excessively wealthy and out of touch with ordinary Americans, this issue is particularly salient. A handful of respondents took issue with an image of a large, expensive house used on a Romney page asking supporters to get involved with the campaign. Some wrote that the house image reinforced those critiques of the former Governor.

“This is depicting an upper class home in a wealthy neighborhood,” said one participant of the page. “That is not the life I lead.”

What do you want from a politician’s website? Sound off in the comments below.

Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, sjlocke

There’s work that makes you jealous, and work that inspires you, and sometimes both at the same time. This simple-yet-over-the-top corporate promo, by Swedish creative agency House of Radon, falls into that third category. The brief they got from Ericsson would make even an actuary’s eyes glaze over: “Show how a multi-purpose, multi-technology network node enables operators to meet their three priorities in relation to data traffic explosion: differentiation, control and monetization.” Radon’s solution? Go big: They designed three dozen touchscreen UI concepts to visualize Ericsson’s message and filmed them in 30 different locations in just three days. The result:

The designers here know that, sometimes, “too much” is just enough.

This video is a great example of the changing nature of what advertising clients like Ericsson need, and how agencies like House of Radon deliver it. The big companies who make our ubiquitous digital infrastructure work, like Ericsson (or Google, or GE) aren’t peddling products so much as ideas. That gobbledegook brief that House of Radon got isn’t describing a thing that can be lit nicely and filmed, like a car; it’s outlining a (barely intelligible) concept about how Ericsson moves data around, and why it matters. House of Radon’s job isn’t to make sales out of that concept; it’s to make sense out of it. Much like the Eames Office used to do for behemoths like Westinghouse and IBM back in the mid-20th century.

And the key to “making sense,” as Charles and Ray Eames understood and House of Radon clearly does too, is in that second word: sense. As in, “appeal to the senses.” Data, nodes, operators, differentiation–all of these ideas in Ericsson’s brief are just so much insubstantial vapor. House of Radon’s video translates them into snappy factoids, which helps. But the idea of embedding them into physically appealing touchscreen interfaces–and then embedding those into a series of viscerally evocative first-person live-action scenelets, where just a hint of sound effects and out-of-focus background action instantly tells your five senses everything they need to know about what’s happening outside the edges of the frame–that’s what makes Ericsson’s brief make sense.

Data is everywhere now, and these zillion interfaces make you feel that in your bones.

This creative concept could have worked fine even if House of Radon didn’t go overboard with it. But the fact that they did makes sense, too. Data is everywhere now–and watching this video, with its zillion interfaces in a zillion different (but vividly rendered) places, makes you feel that in your very bones. Just like the Eames’s multiscreen propaganda film “Glimpses of the U.S.A.” won Nikita Kruschev over by showing America’s industrial prowess from seven viewpoints at once, House of Radon’s relentless cutting from new interface/location to new interface/location, three dozen times, is an essential part of getting the message across.

As more and more innovative companies find themselves “selling” invisible-but-essential ideas, this kind of advertising-as-sensemaking becomes more valuable than any glib “Got Milk?”-style product campaign ever could be. Does every spot need to cram in 30-odd interfaces and locations to make its point? Of course not. But the designers behind this House of Radon spot know that, sometimes, “too much” is just enough.

Watch House of Radon’s promo for Ericsson

Via FastCoDesign: http://www.fastcodesign.com/

It’s an unforgettable sound. A slow scrape against the wall punctuated by a high-pitched clank. The broom didn’t stay balanced where you’d left it. Now you’ll have to pick it up and attempt to balance the broom again. It could stay put for six months. It could stay put for six seconds. No one knows.

Poh Liang Hock is in the process of building a better solution that’s already won a Red Dot award for its concept. His idea is a self-standing broom.

“My friends and I rented a house a few years ago. Like every other tenant, we had to clean our house from time to time. A broom, dustpan, and mop were all necessary tools in the process. However, amidst the cleaning process, the broom kept falling to the ground whenever I leaned it against the wall for some fresh air,” Hock tells Co.Design. “As a result, I came out with the vision of solving this problem once and for all: how could I keep the damned broom from falling down?”

His solution is decidedly simple and, in hindsight, painfully obvious. Rather than locking a broom’s pole to its bristles at the base, Hock’s broom pivots, repurposing the bottom as both a platform for the broom to stand upon and a weighted anchor to keep the broom vertical. While the precise implementation is still in development (and, we’re told, in need of considerable refinement), Hock has brainstormed a better broom that will likely need either no or very few additional components to realize. In other words, Hock’s broom has the potential to be a premium product through clever design alone.

“I just cannot believe my luck because such an idea is so simple that I believe even a normal guy would be able to devise such broom,” Hock writes. But the thing is, a normal guy clearly couldn’t. If he could, none of us would still be dropping brooms in 2012.

Unlike many Americans, Ziad Dalal doesn’t have fond childhood memories of pouncing on a plate of freshly baked Nestlé Toll House cookies. Though he didn’t spend his formative years eagerly anticipating those first warm, chewy bites, this Lebanese native sniffed out a sweet business opportunity.

More than a decade ago, Dalal approached Nestlé about opening a dessert-themed franchise of cafes featuring the Toll House cookie. A year and half of negotiations and agreements would follow before Dalal could realized his vision and opened the first location of Nestlé Toll House Café by Chip. The cafes are owned by Dalal’s company, Crest Foods, which licenses the branded products from Nestlé. From there, he says the brand took off. Franchises selling Nescafe coffee, soft drinks, and a full complement of homestyle baked goods popped up across Lebanon. International expansion quickly followed.

Now, Nestlé Toll House Café by Chip has more than 100 locations serving upwards of 60 million customers per year in the U.S., Canada, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Dubai, with plans to open additional cafes in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Dalal estimates net sales hovered between $35 and $40 million last year. That’s a heck of a lot of chocolate chips, but Dalal hungers (literally and figuratively) for more.

Just before he jetted off to Dubai to supervise the opening of another Nestlé Toll House Café by Chip, Dalal sat down with Fast Company to discuss his journey from real estate rags to chocolate chip riches. 

Early Lessons

Dalal came to the U.S. in the 1980s to attend college. He laughs, admitting his parents wanted to see him become a doctor or an engineer. Though he excelled in science and math and got a masters in engineering, Dalal also pursued an MBA, which came in handy when he got his first business idea. “When I was in college and eating nasty food, I thought it would be a good idea to have a healthy fast food concept,” Dalal explains. Unfortunately, even as a newly minted grad student, he still had plenty to learn about real world business. Dalal says his smoothie chain Frullati got caught in the real estate crash of 1987. “I lost my shirt. I was too young and too stupid,” he confesses.

What he had left were two Frullati locations and a strong desire to keep going. Six years and a lot of sweat equity saw Dalal through a growth phase that culminated in the move to franchising. Dalal quips that at the time he didn’t even know how to spell the word franchise, but he hired some talented consultants and grew the concept to 100 locations. “I had to go through this fear of not knowing, but once we had the talent,” he says, everything fell into place.

Taking On the Mother Of All Cookies

All good things must come to an end, but Dalal says even though “it was like selling my first born,” he eventually sold the Frullati chain to invest in a new idea. Ironically, Dalal’s first foray into the dessert cafe landscape came through Mrs. Fields, the juggernaut chain that’s been peddling cookies since the 1970s. 

Thanks to his time in real estate, Dalal’s Frullati occupied some prime locations and he was eventually approached to open a Mrs. Fields. He became a franchisee, but when he asked the company to open additional locations at Dallas-Fort Worth airport, for example, Mrs. Fields declined, saying that those outlets would remain company-owned. 

Dalal saw this as a challenge. “I started to ask myself, ‘What is the best brand that can compete with the 800 pound gorilla?” he recalls. It wasn’t long before he thought of Toll House. “It is the original chocolate chip cookie,” he enthuses, “it was the only brand we could use to take it to a different level.” Dalal was convinced that consumers’ collective memories of baking at home would propel the cafes beyond the Mrs. Fields cookie kiosk experience. 

He was right and in time, he says, Nestlé Toll House Café by Chip has been offered opportunities to replace underperforming Mrs. Fields locations. 

Branding Challenges

Making the transition from a bag of chips on a grocery store shelf and a bake-at-home snack proved to be a bit more challenging. Dalal says the cafes were able to pull it off by leveraging the one thing that was associated with baked goods that could be duplicated anywhere–the fragrance. All the bakery items sold at Nestlé Toll House Café by Chip are made on the premises, so every time the oven door opens, out swirls the unmistakable smell of sweet treats. 

But Dalal says the cafe couldn’t stop there. “We have a much bigger menu for all age groups,” that includes smoothies, frozen yogurt, soft drinks, coffee, and ice cream. “We have a strategic alliance with Haagen Daaz and we offer the best coffee brand globally–Nescafe.” 

Going Global

Speaking of Nescafe, Dalal rushes to point out how easily what could be perceived as an all-American brand was received in the Middle East. As a Lebanese native, Dalal understood that his global customers wanted a much more indulgent environment. “Middle Easterners are much more coffee-oriented so we had to expand the offerings and present the desserts differently.” Latte artists and table-side drizzling of chocolate sauce followed on furnishing the spaces with comfortable chairs that invite lingering. “We had to sex it up and keep the costs down. It’s a fine balance.”

As for the coffee and chocolate, Dalal says that in Iraq the word for chocolate has become synonymous with Nestle. “I think they took it out of the dictionary,” he says adding that Nescafe is a top global brand, too. “I grew up on Nescafe black. If you cut me, I probably bleed Nescafe.” 

And the Winning Location Is...

Dalal says the number one location in the world is a cafe in–wait for it–Kuwait. Before the location opened its doors, Dalal spent a lot of time worrying. “It was on an empty street. I just didn’t want the franchisee to have a bad experience.” He needn’t have lost sleep. When Dalal called the owner during Ramadan to offer good wishes for the holiday, he was hustled off the phone. “He couldn’t talk because he had a 45-minute wait just to get in the doors!”

Still Serving

As a leader, Dalal sees himself as a servant to his team. He in turn, asks his executive team to serve their field managers, who serve the franchisees, who serve the customers. Ultimately, though he says every day is a day he feels like he can’t do it, the thrill of meeting the challenge keeps him going. He plans to open 50 more locations next year, and 75 in 2014.

To keep going, Dalal says he thinks of his father’s wisdom. “When I was young my dad used to tell me a story about Napoleon burning his ships so his men couldn’t retreat from the enemy. They won. I have nowhere to go but realize my goal to be the premier global dessert cafe. I want to make history and I think we can do it.”

Image: Flickr user Ginny