Two bits of trivia: 7-Eleven stores are ubiquitous in Taiwan, with a density in the major cities that rivals that of Starbucks in Manhattan. 7-Eleven in Taiwan is open 24 hours a day. But it’s still called 7-Eleven, not Twenty Four. Weird.

I just attended the first session of a course called Design: Past, Present, and Future. It is pretty much what it sounds like: a survey of design history from 15,000 BC to the present day, with speculation on future directions. Sitting through the instructor’s halting, verbatim reading of his slides was mostly an exercise in [...]

I had no idea that the “what do you do?” question was so emotionally loaded until I ran across this post, and the slew of reader comments that follow, on the New York Times Freakonomics bleg. I confess, I don’t really get why people would get offended by ignorant questions about what they do for [...]

Lately, I have been looking at web sites that appeal through the simplicity of their interfaces. Answering the simple question: Do I need an umbrella today? http://umbrellatoday.com/ The site promises simplicity, and it delivers. The only whistle to go with its single bell is that it offers a text service to notify you on days [...]

During my time in Taiwan, I was always well-fed. The tour bus would drop us happy vacationers off in front of a restaurant, and we’d sit down family-style and eat whatever was placed in front of us. Most of the time this turned out fine, since I obeyed the one rule required for foreigners to [...]

I’ve been getting increasingly miffed at all the fun things I’m not doing while I tend to Very Important Life Matters™, the latest being getting drunk. Also on my not-to-do list: seeing Party Central USA‘s new stage show, Riding an Inflatable Hotdog, at the PIT marching in the annual Village Halloween Parade being part of [...]

Here is a version of a Toy Story 2 trailer video cut to the audio track from a Dark Knight trailer. Although both the video and audio sources were probably used without permission, the resulting recut on YouTube is entertaining in its own right because of the juxtapositions the creator chose to make. Watching it [...]

I spent a large part of today making compositions out of dots. Above is a digital reproduction of one of my creations for a studio course at NYU called 2D Design Principles. The course covers the basic principles of two-dimensional design as a foundation for future work in graphic and product design. Today we learned [...]

For the Course 6 gal who has everything, a little bit of geekery… Posted by email from corinna’s posterous