Last Thursday night I went to this dance and music performance by Steven Reker and People Get Ready at the arts space The Kitchen here in New York. I’ve been to several modern dance performances before but this one caught me by surprise: Reker is not just a dancer but a musician as well, and this performance was an unlikely but riveting hybrid of indie rock and modern dance — the musicians danced and the dancers played music. More than that, the pieces they performed (there were about a dozen of them, organized like two sides of a mixtape) established a clean and vibrant linkage between the act of dancing and the act of making music. It wasn’t just music and dance together, it was music and dance as one act. I haven’t seen anything quite like it before and I thought it was great. You can listen to some of People Get Ready’s music here, and read The New York Times review here.

Well-regarded futurist Paul Saffo has been talking about a new economic age that he believes is now upon us. First came the producer economy in the early 20th Century, which “harnessed manufacturing in the service of satisfying the material desires of a newly prosperous working class and emergent middle class.” Then came the consumer economy in the middle of the century, in which “companies realized that they had a demand problem rather than a production problem and shifted their resources to finding new ways to sell their existing products.” Now comes the creator economy:

“Now we are entering a third age in which the central economic actor is someone who both produces and consumes in the same act. I like the term ‘creator,’ as this new kind of actor is doing something more fundamental than the mere sum of their simultaneous production and consumption. Creators are ordinary people whose everyday actions create value.”

So well put, and a really fascinating and useful framework for understanding why the things that worked so well in the last century are breaking down in this new century. Read Saffo’s full argument here.

The first official version of Mac OS X was released on this day ten years ago. Amazing. I can hardly believe it’s been a decade, and I can hardly believe I’m that much older. Macworld looks back in this retrospective.

The pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim’s staff cafeteria in Biberbach, Germany features a stunning architectural design that caught my attention. Have a look at the brilliant roof.

More about the project here.

My friend Allan Chochinov of Core77 is putting together this new Masters program at the School of Visual Arts, to debut in the fall of 2012. It already boasts a very impressive faculty roster, but I have to admit I can’t explain what it’s about except to quote the main message on the program’s Web site:

“Products of Design transforms designers, educating head, heart and hands to reinvent systems, create new types of value, and catalyze positive change through the business of making.”

Find out more at the source.

Photographer Irina Werning re-stages old photographs with the original subjects many years later, making for some entertaining contrasts in time and age.

See the full series here. A second series is promised for later this year.

“Pickpocketing in America was once a proud criminal tradition, rich with drama, celebrated in the culture, singular enough that its practitioners developed a whole lexicon to describe its intricacies. Those days appear to be over.”

Movie site Mubi makes the argument that there is a surprising uniformity to the poster designs for many recent high school comedies and quirky indie films, one that might be traced back to the 2004 quirky indie high school comedy “Napoleon Dynamite”:

“[A] cut-and-paste combination of photographs of actors surrounded by absent-minded doodles (and preferably on a backing of lined or graph paper) has become de rigeur for advertising high school comedies. It’s also become a staple of the quirky urban indie (and occasional doc) where the protagonists are set against whimsically sketched city skylines. And of course hand lettered title treatments are also mandatory…”

I think I was somewhat aware this was the case but seeing all of these collected together brings the trend into sharp relief.

Of course, that’s not to say that this trend is bad. This hand-drawn quality is certainly a step up in imagination from the otherwise dominant trend of floating heads in movie posters.

See more examples and read Mubi’s full write-up at their blog.

A catalog of all of the cars that cartoonist Hergé drew in his immortal (if flawed) Tintin comics series — matched up with photographs of their real world equivalents. See the obsessiveness in full here. (Via Swiss Cheese and Bullets.)

At first glance, what interests me the most about Apple’s just-announced iPad 2 is its innovative new “Smart Cover,” which fastens to magnets built into the frame of the new tablet, allowing easy removal. When closed, the cover puts the device to sleep, and when opened and folded back, it forms a triangular base upon which the device can rest. Through and through, this strikes me as a truly clever design, the kind of protective layer that only Apple — and none of the third party case manufacturers vying for this market — can come up with, because they can make all the pieces fit together. It also strikes me as the kind of intelligent engineering that Apple should be coming up with, meaning it corrects the blight on industrial design that was Apple’s old iPad cover, a chintzy, polyurethane rain slicker of a cover; I found it ill-fitting, remarkably un-Apple like in nearly every way. It always seemed to me more like something you’d find sold under a generic or unfamiliar brand name at Staples than something designed in Cupertino. Good riddance.

The new Smart Cover has its own marketing page here, where a video shows it in action.