MOMA have established a seriously inspiring online exhibition to accompany ‘Design and the Elastic Mind‘. It explores the impact that technology, science and (increasingly) digital media has had on all aspects of design, from visualisation to bio-mimicry.

The interface is richly packed with content and whilst I found it a bit hard to navigate at first, once I let myself wander around the site as if in a real-world museum, the process of discovery took me on a very enjoyable journey. Every exhibit I visit is joined to the next with a line, looping across the index to show me what I’ve looked at. There are 300 projects on display online, which is 50 more than the physical exhibition.

It’s hard to pick a favourite, but after my journey on the tube this morning, I think I have to go for the Flyhead Helmet from the Environmental Transformer project.

Which exhibit would you choose?

One (or two) of the things that characterise the Web 2.0’sphere is (a) an almost unnatural predisposition to omitting vowels and (b) delight in new stuff.It was only a matter of time before The Onion entered the fray with frrvrr.com, touting a social network service that introduces you to people you don’t know, based on shared purchase history and your browsing habits, medical records and CCJ’s.

As ever, The Onion is so close to the bone it hurts. I particularly like the description of how it works:

When you sign up, Frrvrr’s AvaTroll Accelerator™ will download itself onto your desktop and begin cataloguing your web history, or “webtory,” from the past eight months. Once it gathers all of your information, it creates a personalized avatar of you based on the snapshot of you gleaned from web usage and sites visited.

Hate to think what my avatar might look like. Could be worse than the one here…

Images from the Flickr Coversourcing pool

Random House have come up with a very good wheeze to promote the upcoming book ‘Crowdsourcing’. Crowdsourcing, for the unitiated is:

“the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”

taken from Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing blog

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Hoorah! After a tantalising wait, MyDeco.com has arrived. Much like a build on Grand Designs, it has been built from the ground up by a determined team with a very strong vision of what it’ll become. MyDeco is a site that addresses the big gap in the interiors market for a stylish aggregator that brings 1000s of products together in one place, with inspirational features, usable interior visualisation tools and a community to share the fun, trials and tribulations with.

From what I’ve seen so far, Brent Hoberman and co have pulled it off.

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