Five Fabulous: Water Bottles

1. KOR’s Hydration Vessel, $29.95 Stay hydrated during your hectic workday with this good-looking (and good-for-the-environment) water bottle inspired by the organic beauty of blown glass. Get it: aplusrstore.com

2. Seletti Glass Carafe 1.5 Liters, $30 If you’d rather forgo the plastic, reach for this line of quirky glass carafes from Italian design house Seletti. Get it: SF MoMA

3. Move Collective’s Bobble Filtering Water Bottle, $10 The carbon-based filter in this clever concoction by Karim Rashid meets the NSF International Standard 42 for chlorine, taste, and odor reduction. (Also, it just looks cool.) Get it: waterbobble.com

4. The Beverage Bottle by Lifefactory, $21.99 The wide mouth on this glass bottle (with protective silicone sleeve) makes it easy to add ice, lemon slices, and tea bags. Get it: Velocity Art and Design

5. Chain Gang Bottle by SIGG, $24.99 We’re intrigued by this Swiss-made bottle’s design (and the fact that it’s named the “Male Pattern Boldness Bottle.”) Get it: SIGG

Design For You: Eames Hang-it-All

Our Design For You contest continues. Here’s a peek at the work desks of Charles and Ray Eames – the designers behind our next prize, the Hang-It-All. Ray Eames designed a variety of toys and furniture pieces specifically for children, including this wall-hung coat rack in 1953 for Tigrett Enterprises Playhouse Division. It was reissued by Herman Miller in 1994.

Enter to win a Hang-It-All by going to the Design For You contest page.

Below is Charles Eames’ desk. The last image is Ray’s desk. I love the chaos of both workspaces – Ray more so than Charles!

Above: Ray Eames’ desk.

Images via Eames Office.

The Future of Work: Is Print Really Going to Die?

So many of us who work at home are writers. Many of us write for publications that are struggling with dwindling readership. The New York Times‘ publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., stated at a conference recently that he expects the Times will eventually move entirely online. (You can read more here on Mashable/Tech. And here at The Atlantic)

My background is in newspapers and magazines. I love a good magazine and subscribe to far too many. But I only get The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times on the weekend. The rest of the week I read my newspapers online. I just spent the weekend with a recent Harvard Business School grad who is now working at Bane. Where does she get her news? The Wall Street Journal and blogs like the Huffington Post.

It’s fascinating to look at how quickly our reading habits are changing. Growing up our breakfast table was strewn with newspaper sections. My brother and I would fight over the comics while my parents waded through the news. Today my children are confronted with their parents staring at the computer screen over a bowl of breakfast cereal and a coffee.

I hope I’m not the only one doing that. Where – and how – do you get your news? Do you still subscribe to a newspaper?

A Little Friday Eye Candy

We’ve had a nice response to the Design for You contest so far. I thought I’d leave you today with some more shots of the Eames chairs after the artists spent some time on them. These prizes will be unlocked in the final week of the competition. Look out for interviews with the artists coming up on Lifework.

Andrew Holder‘s design.

Josh Cochran‘s design.

Phil Lumbang‘s work.

Mark Giglio’s rocker.

Christopher Lee’s rocker.

High Five

Where we’ve been this week…

1. Slate Summer is seriously winding down. We’re heading back to our desks in droves and it’s hard to sit still after so many weeks of adventuring. I need some good reasons to return to the screen and Slate is one of them. It was founded in 1996 so in web years this online news magazine is positively ancient. The editors offer “analysis and commentary about politics, news, business, technology, and culture” with just the right dose of wit and humor. Where to start: The Wrong Stuff’s Kathryn Schulz’s interview with Barry Marshall. Then go through all her posts – being wrong was never so interesting.

2. Deadline Hollywood Vanity Fair just placed Nikki Finke, the editor and founder of the Hollywood-centric news and gossip blog, 93rd on its list of the 100 most influential people. Finke breaks stories before they hit mainstream media so the blog makes a great gossipy read over morning coffee. Nice way to ease yourself into the work day. Where to start: It’s news driven so start at the top and just dip in as it interests you.

3. Gadget Lab Wired magazine’s tech review blog. Great in-dpeth analysis from guys you trust. Where to start: A nice post on the Documents To Go app for the iPad.

4. Hatch Design Public’s blog covers good design from all angles. Where to start: Today’s home office is pretty cool.

5. Make it Right OK, os I admit it was Brad Pitt’s involvement in this New Orleans housing project that first drew me in. But it is the great architecture that kept me coming back. 200 people have now been housed and 50 homes are completed. Where to start: Check out the designs from some of the world’s best architects here.

Venice Architecture Biennale 2010

Wallpaper ran an excellent slideshow covering this year’s Architecture Biennale in Venice. It’s a fascinating look into the future. I was taken by the South Korean pavilion with its warm timbers and careful craftsmanship. I could see myself typing away in a space like that.

Design For You

As a company Herman Miller is known for great design and working for a better world around you. This contest celebrates both of those things by giving you lots of chances to win great designs and have fun doing it.

How will it work? The more people who enter, the more prizes are unlocked. Each prize is better than the last. For the grand prize, you could win one of five artist painted Eames Rockers (above left to right: Andrew Holder, Philip Lumbang, Christopher Lee, Mark Giglio, and Josh Cochran). Each chair is one-of-a-kind. Stay posted for interviews with all the artists and sneak peeks of the chairs.

Simply enter your name and email address to be eligible to win. You only need to enter once to be eligible to win throughout the contest.

A drawing takes place each week if we reach the sign-up goal for that week. If we don’t meet the goal, there is no drawing. The contest goes on to the next prize. For a list of all the prizes click here.

Make sure to get all your friends and family to sign up because getting others to enter is another way to win. Get the most people to sign up and you can win an Aeron chair. So enter now and good luck.

The first prize? A signed copy of John Berry’s Herman Miller: The Purpose of Design, with a foreward by Eames Demetrios. According to Berry the idea behind the book was “to support the understanding that design is about problem solving and is broader than just products. The current/second version added three chapters and updated the timeline to 2009.”

“I joined Herman Miller in 1980 as Director of Corporate Communications, later becoming Vice President of Corporate Communications reporting directly to the CEO. That included a range of responsibilities that grew and changed over the years. The archives were under my responsibilities, so I had a good understanding of what was there. My first week was spent with George Nelson who came to Zeeland to provide my orientation.”

“I was also asked to be HMI’s liaison to the Eames Office. Charles had died in 1978. I became close to Ray. She introduced me to Eames Demetrios while he was still a student at Harvard.  I was a frequent visitor to the Eames Office, 901 and the Eames house. When I left HMI in 1996, Eames Demetrios asked if I would become part of the Eames Office to function as their PR consultant and be their liaison back to HMI. I continue in that role today.”

A Cool New Bulb to Work By?

London-based Hulger today launches a new designer fluorescent bulb called Plumen. It sits perfectly within the bare-bulb trend (check out the lights in Heather’s office) and although I’m not sure what it would be like to work by it certainly looks good. What do you think? If ever I replace the IKEA work lamp that currently graces my desk I’m partial to Yves Behar’s lovely red Leaf light
.

Objects Offer Us Cultural Understanding

Designers excel at thinking about form and function. They are less adept at thinking about objects as cultural expression, says Prasad Boradkar, an associate professor of Industrial Design at Arizona State University and author of a new book, Designing Things: The Cultural Meaning of Objects.

“It’s not a part of normal design discourse to talk about theory—to talk about how we [designers] think about objects,” he says. He hopes the book, which is an interdisciplinary look at the cultural meanings of the things we use every day and the designer’s role in that process, will be the impetus for more discussion.

The book also explores the worth of things, the making things, the greed imperative, planned obsolescence, and even fetish objects, all the while using product examples from companies like Nike, Bling H2O, and Herman Miller.

He was inspired to include Herman Miller in the book not just because of the iconic nature of some products but also because of the company’s values, including the way it embraced design early and for the right reasons, its emphasis on durability (the 12-year warranty), and sustainability. And he admires the way the company engages external designers. It’s a great way, he says, for the company to get “a fresh perspective every time.”

Unplggd: Recycle Your Old Tech

“Love it or leave it, social networking is here to stay. No matter how much you might love it or dislike it, it’s very useful when you have to connect with people you know. When you are trying to get rid or sell some old tech, one of the best ways is to leverage you social networking contacts.

I’ve used Facebook for a variety of ways to exactly to this. In fact, I was able to do even more. I’ve found apartments and roommates this way. Donating or selling old tech is really easy if you you’ve got a number of contacts in your social networking circle. The easiest way is to simply put it in your status update directly. A simple sentence will do.

If you need to do more, then you can always place a ad in the Marketplace section (for Facebook) or similar section in other social networking sites. One of the reasons why this works well is because your Facebook friends might have similar interests, so they’ll be interested in getting vintage video game consoles, cameras, etc.

People are always interested in getting second hand tech because it’s a lot cheaper than buying new stuff. I always keep an eye open for DSLRs and laptops. A lot of users tend to upgrade their tech frequently, which means that you can probably snag a year old laptop at a significant discount. The same is true for DSLRs.

That being said, leveraging your social network to marshal up some interest in some stuff that you want to sell or get rid off is usually acceptable, except if you do it all of the time. I usually use it when I purge or move and need to get rid of stuff. Believe me, people are also glad to pick up stuff for free. So before you ferry off your stuff to a recycling center or try to find a way to donate them away, make a status update to see who will come by and pick it up for free. If you struck out at this, you can try the Freecyle Network.

By Range.”