FusePercentage

AdAge is reporting (registration required) that agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky has bought a stake in Fuseproject, the industrial design consultancy headed by Yves Behar. I don’t often hear of these sorts of deals. The last one I recall was Plantronics taking over frogdesign. Hard to miss as that got plenty of press.

Of course in many parts of the world – especially Asia – design firms are joined at the hip with large partners; usually factories. Whether that kind of thing will become the norm in the U.S. I’m unsure. It might be worth keeping an eye out for more of these relationships.

Now Playing Elsewhere

Here are links to some recent posts on other blogs should you be inclined to want to read them:

I’m now also blogging on the Core home page:
Cure for Depression? Colorful Reporting
BW on MoMA’s Safe Design Show

and here’s a few on their Software&Technology page:

Modding the Bod
More Dreams, Less Sleep
The Move to Micropayments
If It’s Good Enough for Football…
Pics of a Moovie
Behold, the NanoTube Telly
The Golden Age of Wireless
From T-Squares to T-Splines

And over on the SL Future Salon blog:

Avoiding A Short Shot (still waiting for someone to ask what a “short shot” is)

Future Blog

I’ve been asked to give some indication of what’s in store for this blog and whether it will be continued. The short answer is “Yes”. However, the next incarnation will be at a different URL… though still within the rebang.com domain.

Further, because blogspam is such a bandwidth ripper and because I’d rather leave this ad-free, comments and trackbacks will likely not be permitted. I’m instead looking at other options for discussion and hope to have some way to facilitate it. Trackbacks will likely not be opened as it’s simply too ripe for abuse. Perhaps if I wanted to dedicate more time to deleting the spam and/or keeping up with extensions to control it, but I don’t; it might be of interest to those of you who visit this site that after all this time I still have zombie PC’s pinging to try to post their worthless messages on outdated entries. That’s the net.

Also, while I’d like to have my new website up and running by 1 Oct, the truth is that what I’m doing goes well beyond just a blog. This incarnation of the weblog was really an overly-successful test… never intended to be permanent. If you recall my focus, then you might get some hint of where I’ll be taking this website. Unfortunately that means stretching out into a lot of seemingly unrelated areas. I hope that when I’m done you’ll appreciate what can only be a modest effort.

Brown on Design

Just read the Fast Company article “Strategy by Design” penned by Tim Brown, IDEO‘s vocal and oft-quoted CEO. While informative, it probably succeeds best imo as an example of how words alone (for some people) can sometimes fail. A shame. The Industrial Design profession could use someone today able to communicate as effectively in word as with imagery. So far I’ve not found a design writer that rises to the task. Then again, I should probably read more.

WorldChanging 3000

In the event you’re visiting this site and not regularly stopping over on the WorldChanging.com site (a highly recommended visit), the good folks at WC asked me to contribute an entry. I did and you can read it here. Obviously, as soon as I set up the dropbox, I’ll be taking donations to send me to writing class. Hopefully the message gets out in spite of my limitations.

[Edit from the future: As the WorldChanging site is now long gone and I have no idea what I wrote for them, here’s a link to something I suspect is related: “Making the Virtual Real”]