The 20 Sep issue of The New Yorker has an interesting profile of inventor, designer, engineer and pitchman James Dyson, who is famous for creating the “dual cyclone”-powered Dyson vacuums — an ingenious bagless vacuum cleaner — and now the Dyson Air Multiplier — an ingenious blade-less fan. Beyond creating enormous businesses by obsolescing the conventionally indispensable components of household appliances, Sir James [corrected], as he is known in the United Kingdom, is trying to foment a new, 21st Century industrial revolution. His goal is to turn the tide on the increasingly tepid interest in engineering that plagues the U.K. In this regard, the United States fares little better, and Dyson contends that the two countries are more interested in selling things than making things — unfortunately it’s making things that’s the key to a successful society, he says.

The good folks at Condé Nast require you to buy a subscription in order to read this article at NewYorker.com, unfortunately, but it’s worth reading if you can get your hands on a copy. Of particular interest to me was this quote from Dyson about how he’s staffed his company:

“All of our engineers are designers and our designers are engineers. When you separate the two, you get the designers doing things for marketing purposes rather than functional reasons.”

That’s a great quote, and it puts a little bit of a sting to designers, like me, who could hardly qualify ourselves as engineers. I can console myself by saying that, if push came to shove, I could probably build a decent Web site on my very own, but I’m only an engineer in the broadest, most generous definition of the term. Neveretheless, it’s obvious to me that going forward, for all design professions, it’s only going to become more and more important to be able to build as well as to design.

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This compilation of screen grabs from various ad agencies’ Web sites as seen on the iPhone shows how slow the advertising industry has been to respond to the advent of a Flash-less environment. A disproportionately large number of them are broken due to the unavailability of Flash, and almost all of them show a poor regard for graceful degradation. If you’re running a multimillion dollar business, as I assume most of these agencies’ clients are, why would you trust your marketing and advertising to a company that still, three years after its introduction, can’t design for the mobile computing device that dominates the popular discourse? See the full inventory here.

On a side note, the Swedish outpost of Grey Advertising has gone in the completely opposite direction: the TAXI Creative Network reports that Grey Stockholm has abandoned its own site and moved entirely over to Facebook. That’s embarrassing in a whole different way.

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A lengthy profile of the Taiwanese producers of those bizarre, tabloidesque stagings of current events using CG animation. If you haven’t seen them yet, their often lurid, usually sensational and consistently hilarious videos are not to be missed. Their recounting of Sarah Palin’s rise to prominence, for instance, literally shows a CG-animated Sarah Palin shooting at bears from a helicopter, parachuting into a “Teabagger Rally” in a chute that says “Sarah 2012,” and destroying a Speak ’n’ Spell in frustration as she types her infamous sniglet “refudiate.”

Next Media’s novel approach to the news is the brainchild of Hong Kong tabloid tycoon Jimmy Lai, who sees it as a way to rejuvenate interest in his brand of coverage in the face of declining interest in his print products. As a response to the changing fortunes of the news industry, this one is both horrific and brilliant, and it may be the best practical expression yet of Stephen Colbert’s concept of truthiness. Let’s hope it remains a curious byproduct of Taiwan and is not copied elsewhere. Read the full article here.

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A startup in India is building inexpensive, power-efficient automated teller machines for poor regions in third world countries where such machines can positively impact economic activity for locals. It’s a laudable idea, but unfortunately these machines appear to follow the same misguided industrial design philosophy that I wrote about last month: their vaguely tech-y shapes and aesthetics would seem to make them vulnerable to ATM skimmers being grafted onto them and victimizing unsuspecting consumers. See Vortex’s products here.

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Paid Content reports on the apparently inevitable demise of RSS readers like Bloglines and Google Reader:

“But people no longer seem to be abandoning certain readers for others — or for other ways to access those same feeds. Instead, they appear to be abandoning RSS readers as a way to read the news altogether. Hitwise, for instance, tells us that visits to Google Reader are down 27 percent year-over-year, while visits to Bloglines are down 71 percent year-over-year.”

I agree that, like most long term technologies, RSS is passing out of the hands of the power user and into the consumer realm where it already looks much different than it did only a few years ago. It’s a little sad for me, since I’m a huge devotee of my RSS reader, but ultimately I think its evolution augurs even more exciting things.

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