We've been doing a lot of reading and some furious scribbling here at HDL HQ.

Fellow Helsinkian Adam Greenfield has been musing about the contemporary city and the sorts of designers needed to make the most of it. The comments are particularly interesting.

GOOD Magazine is slowly revealing their list of 100 "exciting, interesting" people and projects. Favorites there include Project M and Data.gov.

It's a bit old news now, but Business Week has published their annual list of the "Best Design Programs in the World," a term I put in quotations because they've certainly stretched the definition of design for their own purposes. Bruce Nussbaum's introductory post titles it "World's Best Design Thinking Programs" and that seems a far more appropriate title.

Our friends at BERG London together with Timo Arnall have released Immaterials: the ghost in the field, a second video exploring the realm of RFID and nearfield communications. Rarely does one have the opportunity to watch a discourse take large strides, but I get the feeling that's exactly what we're witnessing as Touch/BERG elaborate nearfield communications as something with nuance – in other words, as a material.

Elsewhere, Matt Haughey points us to some tips on building community websites which is a nice compliment to his own on-the-ground post from 2007. These issues are on our minds as we begin to work on the new HDL site.

Adriel, Ezra, and Justin have been making headway on the studio briefs.

I Finally had a chance to talk to colleagues at 2nd Road in Sydney. Despite the bounty of ways to communicate, it never fails that the hardest thing of all is to find an overlap in two busy calendars (let alone four). Justin and I will be visiting them in November to collect information for a case study we are writing about one of their projects. That's part of a longer trip that I'll share more about next week.

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Posted by Bryan Boyer
October 16th, 2009