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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

About a week ago, I rejoined Cameron Moll’s Authentic Jobs network for creative professionals. If you look to the right column of this site, you’ll see a “Help Wanted” module with links to five recent postings on the AJ boards. As it happens, this month also marks Authentic Jobs’ fifth anniversary. To commemorate that milestone, the network is promoting charity: water, “a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing clean water to millions of people in developing countries.” The goal is to raise US$20,000 for the Bayaka tribe in Africa; that amount will provide clean, potable, life-sustaining water to a thousand people — which is pretty remarkable, really. Find out more and donate today.

Courtesy of the excellent indie film site Mubi, a quick overview of a seminal designer from the formative era of American advertising: “Frankfurt was a brilliant designer as well as a great ideas man, and his most innovative marketing concept, starting with ‘Rosemary’s Baby̵ in 1968, was to see the packaging of movies as a totality — designing the titles, posters, trailers and ads with one common look and theme.”

In addition to “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Downhill Racer,” shown above, Frankfurt contributed to a host of films from the 60s and 70s, many of which you’re sure to recognize. And yes, of course, the write-up includes the obligatory reference to “Mad Men,” so rest assured Don Draper fans, you can continue to view that era through the lens of that show — much as your knowledge of “Happy Days” rounds out your view of the 1950s. I kid! Read Mubi’s write-up here.

FREITAG am Donnerstag is “a breakfast lecture series” organized by the bag and accessory designer/manufacturer FREITAG in collaboration with my good friend Tina Roth Eisenberg, better known as swissmiss. The series is meant to highlight their new Reference collection of media-inspired messenger and city bags, and they’ve invited a few speakers — including myself — to give talks about the state of journalism and the media. The first event is next Thursday morning in Zurich, Switzerland in FREITAG’s very cool-looking Reference Editorial Space.

Zurich is a bit far for many of my readers, I know, but if you’re in Switzerland next week and can make it, you can read more and sign up here.

I came across this interview I conducted in 2008 with former Guardian design director Mark Porter and realized that I had never linked to it here. It ran in the December 2008 issue of Print Magazine (where I now write a monthly column) but that site is notoriously difficult to navigate. The interview is a bit of a relic of history now, as neither Mark nor I are still helming the design groups at our respective news organizations, but I thought it was still interesting enough to post here. Mark recounts his experience acclimating himself to the digital environment after spending most of his career as a print designer, and has some illuminating things to say about where the two schools of thought overlap. Read the full interview here.

The publisher of the once well-regarded media cataloging application confesses that feature creep and a lack of follow-through subverted their ambitions for its second major release, leaving many customers frustrated and disappointed where the company had intended to wow them.

“Let’s say, for instance, 80 percent of these features worked great. I’d think, ‘Yay, I did good, I added a bunch of great stuff to the new version, it was definitely worth US$20 to existing customers.’ But, that’s not how the customers see it — they see the 20 percent that’s buggy, and they think, ‘This is crappy? he released software that didn’t work.’“

This is an object lesson in how success, ambition and even good intentions can lead to a bad product even when the business is fully aligned with the customer experience. It’s also a clever bit of mea culpa-style media spin. Not that I think it’s dishonest; I just find it very savvy. Read the full article