A week and a half ago I received the premier issue of a magazine that I have been thoroughly looking forward to, Peter Bil’ak’s Works That Work: A Magazine of Unexpected Creativity.
Mid-sized and with a wide array of contents, the magazine felt refreshing and had a good balance of diversity in its 84 pages. A mix of paper stock, mix of article length, mix of visual and purely narrative content.
Creativity as presented in the magazine included write-ups of a mix of clever, of-and-for the masses solutions. How do you design coins for a mixed population without a standardized system for writing numbers? (A: hand gesture drawings). Every design student’s 101 course is to design a chair, but what are vernacular solutions that reside outside of 3D modeling software? (A: see cover, also a fuller photo essay inside).
Space for People, Not for Cars, by Viveka van de Vliet
One article explores, and advocates for, Hans Monderman’s Shared Space traffic design philosophy. A fourth looks at the functional side of urinal art. A lovely interview with Linda Asher discusses what it takes for a successful translation. David Ives touches on the same topic with the script from a play titled The Universal Language.
Aiming To Reduce Cleaning Costs, by Blake Evans-Pritchard
Brimming with stories creativity and humanity, the magazine reminds me in segments of Alex Steffen’s Worldchanging books, or possibly a cross-pollinated sprout of TED talks and Cabinet Magazine. In any case, it’s a wonderful discovery which I highly recommend, and hope it succeeds into many more issues.
