{ design@tive } information design
Tim Brown says the design profession is preoccupied with creating nifty, fashionable objects — even as pressing questions like clean water access show it has a bigger role to play. He calls for a shift to local, collaborative, participatory “design thinking.” […]
Architect Thom Mayne has never been one to take the easy option, and this whistle-stop tour of the buildings he’s created makes you glad for it. These are big ideas cast in material form […]
The proportion of heavy babies at birth has doubled in the past decade in Shanghai, raising concerns more people may suffer obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases in adulthood […]
IDEO’s David Kelley says that product design has become much less about the hardware and more about the user experience. He shows video of this new, broader approach, including footage from the Prada store in New York […]
At the 2008 Serious Play conference, designer Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play — with many examples you can try at home (and one that maybe you shouldn’t) […]
The Shanghai English Language Usage Standards will be issued soon to improve English-language signs and services before the 2010 World Expo, the Shanghai Language Work Committee said recently.
The Chinese State Council, or Cabinet, passed a long awaited medical reform plan which promised to spend 850 billion yuan (123 billion U.S. dollars) by 2011 to provide universal medical service to the country’s 1.3 billion population. The plan was studied and passed at a recent executive meeting of the Chinese State Council chaired by The Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, and has been deliberated by authorities since 2006…
More than half of high school students consider the Internet the best way to learn about sex, a survey conducted by a Shanghai family planning body and the city’s accidental pregnancy hotline has found, Xinmin Evening News reported recently. The survey, covering 1,684 middle school students, revealed that 68 percent of high school boys and 46 percent of high school girls learn about sex from Websites, the newspaper said […]
Researchers are concerned that obesity may become a bigger problem among children in Shanghai after completing a study that found kids here have almost the same average height and weight as those in the United States, Shanghai News Times reported. The research team, under the leadership of Jiang Yifang, dean of children nutrition at the Children Hospital Affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University, found that boys aged 10 to 15 were slightly taller and heavier on average than those in the US…
The average lifespan for Shanghai people reached 81.08 last year – the first time it has passed 81. Infant mortality was three in 1,000 and the pre and post-natal mortality rate for women was 6.68 in 100,000, according to statistics for 2007 just issued by the Shanghai Health Bureau. That’s way above the national average: although Chinese people’s average lifespan has almost doubled since 1949 — shoting up by 36 years and people now live to 71 — other cities in China, like Beijing, will only reach 80 by 2010…