Cigarette machine vending BOOKS

via Inhabitat

German publishing company Hamburger Automatenverlag found a brilliant new use for old cigarette vending machines — instead of icky cigarettes, the re-purposed “machines” carry a series of condensed novels, photo books, graphic novels and collections of poetry by local authors. The new initiative for book distribution is a throwback to the conventional vending machine and promotes literacy in a clever and charming way.

As smoking regulations keep getting stricter and prices continue to soar, the cigarette vending machines that used to be commonly found in convenience stores, restaurants and bars are now things of the past. The machines are valued for their robust mechanics however, and Hamburger Automatenverlag just needed to make a few small adjustments to transform them into book vending machines (a layer of paint, eye-catching graphics and some shiny new hardware).

The machines request 4 euros in coins (approximately 5 US dollars), which is inserted into the front of the unit. Then, after a small tug on a spring-loaded knob, the requested book is dispensed. The restored vending machines are also part of a public art series that will be distributed around they city of Hamburg.

+ Hamburger Automatenverlag

Via COOL HUNTING

“…there are signs within the design community to advance service design. One of the issues motivating current research is the idea that service designers create multiple contacts, or touchpoints, between service organizations and their clients, including material artifacts, environments, interpersonal encounters, and more. The identification of touchpoints as an object of service design is a clear step away from the imposition of the goods-centered paradigms of the past.”

The Object of Service Design
Fernando Secomandi, Dirk Snelders

“Wicked Problems”

Structuring Social Messes with Morphological Analysis

via Swedish Morphological Society

“If you work in an organisation that deals with long-term social, commercial or organisational policy planning, then you’ve got wicked problems. You may not call them by this name, but you know what they are. They are those complex, ever changing societal and organisational planning problems that you haven’t been able to treat with much success, because they won’t keep still. They’re messy, devious, and reactive, i.e. they fight back when you try to deal them.”

 

Introduction

In 1973, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, both urban planners at the University of Berkley in California, wrote an article forPolicy Sciences with the astounding title “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”. In this landmark article, the authors observed that there is a whole realm of social planning problems that cannot be successfully treated with traditional linear, analytical (systems-engineering-like) approaches. They called these wicked problems, in contrast to tame problems. 

(A year later, in his book “Redesigning the Future”, Russell Ackoff (1974) essentially put forward the same concept — although in less detail — which he called a “social mess” or “unstructured reality”.) 

more here

Image from What is “Design thinking for wicked problems?”