The characters of Heroes, a popular American television series, all have superpowers which come in handy for saving the world: one can fly, another can travel in time, and so on. None of them, however, has the amazing ability to transform objects by endowing them with beauty, intelligence and meaning, or by increasing their functional and economic value. That particular ability is called industrial design.
In the architecture and design section, NeU offers a good selection of sites: check out Design boom, Design Italia, Ultrafragola and the more recent Designaddict. There’s also an encyclopedia of design and an online design dictionary.
In a recent New York Times article, Michael Cannel (founder of the delightful blog Thedesignvote) asserts that, much like what already happened during the Great Depression, it will be designers who interpret and resolve many of the challenges of sustainable innovation dictated by the current crisis and strongly supported by Obama. Superpower? Perhaps not. But industrial design just might end up saving the world.
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