Tag: Sundries

I was sitting in the lobby of the Shaare Zedek hospital in Jerusalem, and I noticed on the chair next to me a small booklet someone had discarded there. An idle look turned to admiration as I examined it and realized what it was.

The cover reads “EEG test – the Institute for Neurological Diagnosis“, hardly exciting. But the thing is, obviously, a coloring book. Here are two pages from it:

“Today they examine my head. And I know this does not hurt“.

“In the room there are: A bed and pillow / A working table / And a large apparatus“.

Get the idea? The booklet explains everything clearly, dispelling the strangeness of the intimidating examination room, and of course mitigates the child’s fear; all in a coloring book that takes its mind off the scary goings on ahead.

The last page gives us the names of the good people who developed this wonder and gave it to the hospital. Well done!

Form follows function!

Here is a row of anchors, which I photographed in Greenwich in the UK. You’ll note the one in the foreground has a single fluke (as the pointy ends of an anchor are called). The sign says this anchor is from around 1820.

So why would they produce an anchor with only one fluke, when most of them have two? For a very good reason.

This model was used in permanent ship moorings in shallow waters. Think of the ship floating above the anchor. Think of the falling tide. Think what will happen if the ships comes down too close to an upward-pointing fluke…

That’s why!

Unusual business cards are not rare; many companies and individuals try to deviate from the traditional white rectangle design in the hope of standing out from the crowd. But today I was handed a card that goes far beyond this. Here it is:

This card has a rotating wheel that allows different short phrases to be viewed through a cutout in the cardboard. The wheel carries the phrases “SIT International”, “Father and Uncle”, “Facilitator”, and “Builder of Communities”.

Unusual, but at first glance this seemed just one more gimmick. You see metal cards, wooden cards, cards with laser engraving… so this one has a wheel. Nice, but…

And then it hit me: there is a deeper purpose to this design! You see, once the recipient gets the idea that rotating the wheel will reveal more information, it is inevitable that they’ll rotate it in anticipation of each new snippet of insight about the card’s owner. As they do that, their interest goes beyond the mere form of the card; they engage with its content instead. Most information on a business card just slides past you; but through this tiny experience you can’t help internalizing what the phrases say about the person: the fact that he is a father and proud of it; the fact that he values his skill as facilitator; the fact that he does not care about formal titles. The wheel trick gets this knowledge across in a far more engaging manner than just reading a static card would do.

Incidentally, Amnon is the co-founder and manager of a company specializing in innovation methodology, and he told me the design for this card was undertaken as an exercise in applying that methodology; you can read about that in this article.

And here is the back side of the card – it’s quite cool that the stylized man of the company logo actually turns somersaults when you rotate his wheel!

I’ve written before about the use of tactile sidewalk strips to help the blind, as seen in Japan. Well, now we have them in Israel too! I was walking under the Calatrava bridge in Jerusalem, and saw this:

At first I was puzzled, but then I noticed this led towards the Jewish institute for the blind that is located nearby. So, these are raised strips forming a path – in fact, there were a number of paths going in different directions – that the blind can feel with their sticks or even their feet.

Well done!

This is the Ashtanur pencil case. Once you see it, you can’t help wanting one: it is simply too cool!

So I got one, and here it is.

These are made by two designers, my friend Ido Mohar and Baruch Mogilevsky, in mimicry of the local flat pita bread – called Ashtanur in Jerusalem, but Laffa in Tel Aviv (Ahh… what do those Tel Avivians know?!…)  They’re made of printed fabric, but the similarity to a folded flat pita with fallafel inside is uncanny. You can get one at Etsy.