Design better parking for our two-wheeled friends and spread that love across NYC… The Department of Transportation and Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum have announced a design competition for new bike racks in New York City. Submissions are due June 9th. See more here.

From a newspaper in Mozambique.

To accompany my photography book on hair salons in Johannesburg (publication pending), I culled together some fun facts (ok, maybe not so fun) and created this spread of information graphics. It presents some of the economic imbalances in the City and includes striking numbers on unemployment and informal housing in Diepsloot, the township I worked in. Click here to see a larger version!

Favorite toy no. 257: Speak & Spell. In 1978, Texas Instruments introduced the first single-chip speech synthesizer which was able to electronically duplicate the human vocal tract on a single chip of silicon. In charming and fresh fashion, their first product was the Speak & Spell for children and it quickly became one of the most popular toys of the ’80s.

The inviting bleeps and gentle man-voice have since been sampled by various artists, including Kraftwerk and Dopplereffekt, and the machines themselves have been reconstructed into crazy-ass synthesizers by those with know-how. Texas Instruments went on to produce boring calculators for adults, but they’ll always be grandfather of the talking toy and that makes them supercool.

One of my favorite things is the “9″ sculpture in front of 9 West 57th Street. To accompany the sleek and sloped office building designed by SOM in 1974, graphic designer Ivan Chermayeff (who, with his partner Tom Geismar, designed the Mobil, PBS, and Chase logos) created a big shiny red number. The steel sculpture makes for a dramatic entrance and a 3-d version of a hot modernist poster.

Fun fact: since the number actually sits on city-owned property, it costs $100 in monthly rent. Totally worth it…

On a Miracle Mile in South Carolina.

When I biked in Brooklyn I had a lot of I-love-life moments coasting down Clinton Street and its tall canopy of trees. When I biked in Chinatown I almost died over and over again. My bike is now property of the delivery boys downstairs, but I salute all the persevering Manhattan bikers/survivors…

Things are definitely on the up and up with new bike lanes added each year and you can easily find them thanks to the NYC bike map (free at any bike shop). Through my friend Jen, I got a chance to offer the Department of Transportation some designs for this year’s bike map cover. Alas, they went with something else, but I thought I’d post my three design passes so they can have a brief life beyond my laptop.

One of the best marketed products in history is sea monkeys. The instruction booklet that came with your little plastic tank depicted sea monkey dads playing catch with their sea monkey sons and sea monkey families enjoying picturesque picnics in their sea monkey park. The crowned cartoons were having such a blast you couldn’t wait to hang out with them too. They were “a true MIRACLE of nature” in “SUSPENDED ANIMATION!” and “real TIME-TRAVELERS” ready for their “journey into the FUTURE!”

Eventually you had a stagnant tank of tiny floating particles and eventually you poured them down the sink, but what stuck with you was the pamphlet version of sea monkeys in their fun sea monkey world. That’s some good marketing. And that’s what I remixed in this sea monkey landscape I just found in my old files. For a contact printing project in my college photography class, I combined my TRUE sea monkey friends with everyday objects to give them another sea monkey world of PURE FUN and AMAZEMENT! Haha good times…

Wouldn’t it be fun to see one of these big-ass houses divided like a tenenement building? This article in The Atlantic lays out a good argument for why the suburbs will become the next slum. According to current trends 40 percent of McMansions will be unwanted surplus by 2025. American urban planners have some major infill development ahead… or maybe some post-urban-renewal suburban renewal… snap.

Photo above from the article.

James (aka KinoSport) just made a hot new mix called Crashed in Radioland. Bookended by In the Mood for Love sound bites, it’s a warm, echo-y land of motivating background music to work to. And as time goes by, it shifts ever-so-slightly into soft-focus, just like you at work! Download it for free and get productive to old school dub techno hits by Basic Channel and Burger & Ink and wall-of-sound anthems from Brian Eno and The Field.

Image above by James from his site.