Quickly back to the news we were reporting on the other day that Philippe Starck will be the star of his own new reality TV game show, we find that Brand Republic has received all the details on the upcoming BBC series, from the structure to the various challenges the ten designer contestants will face, to even the working title: "Philippe Starck's School of Design" (which is sure to be replaced with a groan-worthy, barely relevant pun, like "Starck Raving Mad" or "In Starck Contrast"). Here's a bit:

Over six one-hour episodes, Starck will bring the 25 most promising applicants to meet him in Paris and, after setting them a challenge, will select 10 to join his school of design. Once at the school, successful applicants will be given the chance to demonstrate their abilities by working on real design projects. Applicants will be eliminated until one or more students are rewarded with the opportunity of a work placement with him.

Still, while it's almost considered a crime to not pick on reality television, the show is about product design, which should be interesting. And the BBC is behind it, so that makes it better too, right? Dare we say that we're almost kind of excited to see it? No, probably not. Better to play it cool and pretend we're too good for everything. Carry on.

Earlier this year, we told you about photographer Chris Jordan's keynote presentation at the Greener Gadgets conference in New York City. A few weeks after that event, Jordan (who we've described as "an eco-warrior version of Andreas Gursky") addressed the 2008 Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference crowd, presenting his "portraits of American mass consumption" that help people to wrap their brains around staggering statistics such as the 40 million paper cups used daily. Stand back from one of his works depicting the number of people who die from cigarettes and its 400,000+ tiny cigarette boxes form "Skull with Cigarette" the 1886 Van Gogh painting that also happens to grace the Chip Kidd-designed cover of David Sedaris's new book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. Below we've posted the newly released video of Jordan's TEDTalk.

Proof that people in the movie business do read sometimes, Gothamist is pointing to the news that just days after Penelope Green's piece in the NY Times about architect Eric Clough, who built hidden puzzles and games into a wealthy family's apartment for their children to discover and interact with, director J.J. Abrams has swept in and bought the rights to make a film adaptation of the story, already assigning a couple of writers to get busy in penning the thing. Here's The Hollywood Reporter's synopsis of the tale:

The parents, Steven Klinsky and Maureen Sherry, are Wall Street financial experts and purchased the 4,200-square-foot, 1920s co-op with views of Central Park in 2003 for $8.5 million. Soon after, they hired young architectural designer Eric Clough, who devised an elaborately clever "scavenger hunt" built into the apartment that involved dozens of historical figures, a fictional book and a soundtrack. (Many of the secrets were included without the parents' knowledge, either.)

Okay, now we get it. When everyone was scratching their collective heads, wondering why Philippe Starck was telling everyone that design was dead, he wasn't just making an off-the-cuff, random statement, he was just setting the ground work to help promote a show he has in development with the BBC. Like every other show being made for television, it, of course, is a reality-based competition where designers work to become the best of something and win a contract somewhere, or a new car, or maybe a ride in Starck's "green" monster yacht. But like we said a second ago, whatever the show becomes, he has an instant sell for the thing: "Design might be dead, but these edgy, 20-something designers in my competition are just the ones to bring it back to life!" (to be followed shortly thereafter with said edgy, 20-something designers involved in an absurd task that has no basis in any form of conventional reality).

Now that Carrie Bradshaw's desk and computer are safely back in the hands of the Smithsonian, the institution will enjoy more film-related buzz with a cameo in the new Get Smart movie, starring Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway as accident-prone Maxwell Smart and his cooing yet skillful sidekick, Agent 99. Opening Friday, the film features updated versions of the duo's favorite gadgets (think dental floss detonator) and of CONTROL, the top secret U.S. government agency that employs them. Would you believe the Smithsonian as a front for spy headquarters? "In the TV series, when Max parked his car in front of that building and went in through that famous series of doors, they never said what the building was," director Peter Segal told the New York Post.

We thought if we put our CONTROL underneath the Smithsonian, then we could have him walk though the displays. We have a museum guide saying, "This is an exhibit of CONTROL, a 1960s spy organization that was disbanded at the end of the Cold War." So in there we put [Smart's] red Sunbeam Tiger and the shoe phone, and the Cone of Silence, and a few of the other things. There's a scene later in the movie where he needs to borrow a couple of items from the display.

If you're a fan of designing how information is delivered, we found Information Architecture Television an interesting bit of miscellany. It's a site dedicated to collecting and posting clips about all things IA. It's a bizarre mix of material, from the really highly tech-based to the random bits, like Twyla Tharp talking about creativity and motivation, to this weird little piece, featuring Cisco's director of user experience, Martin Hardee, talking about how to draw comics to help understand a user's interaction with a site:

Visual artist Byron Kim and experimental filmmaker Bruce McClure (pictured at left) are among the "five engaged, wildly independent artists" receiving 2008 Alpert Awards in the Arts. Initiated and funded by The Herb Alpert Foundation and administered by California Institute of the Arts, the awards provide unrestricted prizes of $75,000 to artists in the fields of visual arts, film/video, dance, music, and theatre. Kim was selected from a slate of 20 nominated artists by a panel composed of curators Elizabeth Brown (of the University of Washington's Henry Art Gallery) and Franklin Sirmans (of the Menil Collection) and art historian James Elkins, while cultural critic Rosa-Linda Fregoso, Whitney curator Chrissie Iles, and the Walker Art Center's Dean Otto picked McClure.

Known for minimalist canvases with a conceptualist twist, Kim says he is "interested in making abstraction and abstract painting relevant today, and doing so in a way that might subvert our usual ways of perceiving." To wit: a painting of horizontal stripes takes on a new meaning when the viewer learns that it is a code of sorts, based upon the head-to-sneakers colors of Kim's son. Meanwhile, the Alpert Foundation labels the difficult-to-describe McClure as an "artisan of light and sound ephemera," which may be more helpful than the artist's own explanation: "I should describe what I do as continuity of movement never fully completing a figure." Brooklyn-based McClure was trained as an architect. "It's a two-dimensional representation of three-dimensional objects," he said of architecture in a 2006 interview with The Brooklyn Rail. "Just as film is two-dimensional and somehow becomes three-dimensional."

A quick heads up for all those who are fans of starchitects and their various starchitecture projects: Later today, the Charlie Rose show will be featuring interviews with four winners of the Pritzker Prize, including the newest member of the club, Jean Nouvel. Also in attendance will be Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Renzo Piano. We're not quite sure if it'll be separate interviews, as most of them have appeared on the program before, or all bunched up in Rose's all-black outer space interview cube, so go forth with few expectations. Personally, we're desperately hoping they stuff them all in the same room together. That'd be pretty fantastic. Maybe Hadid will pat Nouvel on his shiny head. For those who have, ahem, real jobs during the day, the show is pretty great about sticking broadcasts up on their site right away, so check back here, if you're keen to watch.

Interesting story we found by way of Firstshowing over at Fortune: "Apple and Eve." In it, we learn that Apple's design head and all-around sacred idol, Jonathan Ive, pitched in a bit to help out on some of the character designs in the upcoming new Pixar film, Wall-E. While it sounds like he didn't wind up doing much, just nodding his head in agreement a lot when looking at character sketches and pieces of the film, one can't help but notice that the character Eve in the film (not that any of us have seen the picture yet -- so we'll all just working off supplied screengrabs here), looks like it has the body of an upside down old model iMac and follows the general Apple white-on-white aesthetics. But thanks for a billion knock-offs, nearly every piece of technology looks like that now days, all because of Ive and his work with the computer company, so who are we to make assumptions? Anyway, here's a bit:

A call from [director Andrew Stanton] to [Steve Jobs] in 2005 resulted in Johnny Ive, Apple's behind-the-scenes design guru, driving across the San Francisco Bay to Pixar's converted warehouse headquarters to spend a day consulting on the Eve prototype. Stanton said that it was a "lovefest" with Ive, but that the notoriously tight-lipped design wizard offered few specific modifications. "Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn't even really allude to where the future of technology was going," says Stanton. "The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do." (Through a spokesman, Ive declined to comment.)

Every story written about Ive sounds like those last couple of quotes, doesn't it? The man should really just start dressing up like a mime. That'd just make things easier for everyone.

Vivacious fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi recently retooled his website, adding a bundle of new video content and blogs created in his company's stunning Gotham headquarters. Among the new "Watch Isaac" features is an informal and endearing video blog by the designer himself, with brief musings on everything from getting old to a serendipitous encounter with a marketer of Italian pizza ovens. Earlier this week on his video blog, Mizrahi discussed the power of proper lighting.

"Why do Richard Avedon photographs look so beautiful all the time? Why do people look so beautiful in Steven Meisel portraits? Because these men know how to light people," says Mizrahi, who adds that he's no lighting expert but knows good light when he sees it. He recently discovered a bathroom mirror in his Bridgehampton home in which he says he looks unusually handsome and deduced that it's because of the lighting. He snapped a photo of himself in the enchanted mirror for further study (see above screenshot). Mizrahi's other favorite well-lit space? The Bristol Hotel in Paris. "That lighting was totally genius," he says. "You've never looked so pretty in the world. Just book yourself into the Bristol and never leave."