Will we soon be seeing nutrition labels on the property sheets realtors hand out? If sustainability-focused designer and green architect Michelle Kaufmann has her way, we will. She has relaunched her appropriately named project, "Nutrition Labels," which asks if it might be smart to attach labels to new home construction, featuring such information as "Annual Energy Consumption" and "Average Annual Water Use." Now she has offered it up as a white paper and everything (pdf). It's a clever idea, and one that will surely get passed around all over this here internet, but is it something that can make the jump into every day application? Call us crazy, but in a housing market like this, where any realtor is just begging to stand out, we can see potentially becoming a big industry trend.

Then again, isn't it always just better to retrofit an old building than to make something new? Oh yeah. Still, every bit counts, right?

We think we have a new crush and she goes by the name Cathleen McGuigan. Her piece, "Bad News About Green Architecture," in the upcoming issue of Newsweek, is a terrific calling out of how much further the green movement, particularly in regard to design, has to go. Granted, this is not particularly new, as we were reporting on the negative co-opting of the term "green" by marketers across the globe, but McGuigan puts a nice spin on it by complaining that just because something takes home some flashy LEED award (we're looking at you, China), that doesn't mean that anything involved with the building even remotely follows the tenants of greenness (e.g. the "Green McMansion" or the greening of Vegas hotels). But she comes full circle and explains that these transitions are all part of the initial growing pains into something new and hopefully, people like Renzo Piano (she really likes his new California Academy of Sciences building), will help save us all from ourselves, eventually leading to "green" becoming bland and ordinary from hyper-familiarity.

Between scarcity and abundance, there comes—you guessed it—a tipping point, and so who better to headline this year's "Scarcity and Abundance"-themed Pop!Tech conference than Malcolm Gladwell? The pop sociologist will be on hand at the twelfth annual ideas summit (October 22-25 in Camden, Maine) to preview and discuss the themes in his forthcoming book The Outliers, which isn't the sequel to Chip Kidd's The Learners but an examination of what separates extraordinary and average people (hint: it involves memorable hair).

Other speakers in the just-announced line-up include social media guru Clay Shirky, MIT media lab researcher and huggable robot creator Kelly Dobson, and New York Times fragrance critic Chandler Burr, who earlier this year opined that an eau de Lever House would be "an angular blend of black currant, verbena, and grapefruit." For those who can't make it to Maine, Pop!Tech tells us that Yahoo! will again be live streaming the event in its entirety, free of charge, from October 23-25. Unfortunately for Burr fans, Yahoo! has yet to perfect Smell-o-vision.

Ross Lovegrove, he of the pointy grey goatee, has been chatted up by CNN for their feature "Just Imagine...What Will Life Be Like in 2020?" (we don't really understand the reason for the ellipses either). In the interview, Lovegrove speculates on all sorts of things, from architecture to city life to what exactly "modern" will be after we've been in the "modern" age for almost hundred years already. Although he doesn't predict a future filled with cyborg dragons and electric sno-cones like we're really hoping for (hence Stephanie's multiple tattoos which portray both in great detail), it's still a pretty good conversation with a guy who will probably help deliver us whatever we're into come 2020:

I have to think about the future because, not that I'm bored with it now, but I can't live now, it's not my place to live now. I've got to live ahead of myself. I think that's a kind of beautiful thing and I often say everything that I visualize in here, everything that I could draw, or create to show people has been influenced by my life experiences, what I see, what I know, what I learn, everything.

Cars can be so boring: they insist on retaining the same shape day after day, have little interest in fashionable clothing, and are woefully difficult to customize without the help of a professional and several thousand dollars. Enter the lycra-skinned GINA Light Visionary, BMW's newest concept car, which consists of a translucent fabric skin stretched over a four-paneled, reconfigurable aluminum frame. Six years in development, the two-seated roadster that made its public debut on Tuesday is, for BMW, "a whole new approach to automotive design." According to AutoWeek, The GINA (Geometry and Functions In "N" Adaptions) model is "a design exercise, meant to give [BMW head of design] Chris Bangle's team free reign to create a minimalist car with sweeping lines and a sculptural appearance."

Because we don't know a V8 engine from the tomatoey beverage of the same name, we turned to industrial design historian Russell Flinchum, who has taught courses on car design at the Museum of Modern Art and is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts's D-Crit program. While pointing to the stretched skins perspective cultivated by Italian industrial designers in the 1970s, he also suggests another powerful reference. "Chris Bangle digs deep into the adolescent fantasies an entire generation of young geeks were having about Seven of Nine back during Star Trek Voyager and successfully probes their deep collective subconscious," he tells us. "Resistance IS futile."

"Is New York the New Innovation and Design Center?" Bruce Nussbaum asks over at BusinessWeek. With companies like IDEO opening up new offices in the biggest of apples and famous designers spending half their waking lives traveling to the mega-metropolis, Nussbaum sees a trend of design and idea shops heading east. Unfortunately, we really fail to see any realistically-big story in any of this, as is also reflected in many of the comments on the site. It sort of seems like issuing a report like "all of the big fish companies are moving toward cities with large bodies of water!" When a huge majority of corporations are based out of New York and virtually all the world's money filtering through the city at some time during its life, is it really crazy to think it wouldn't be a good idea for some of these powerhouses of design and idea generation to have an office there? But hey, what do we know? We didn't see people loving sliced bread or aeroplane transportation as much as they have; so we're certainly no experts on trend predictions.

Last spring, designer Garth Roberts set up shop in Milan, but the arrangement was far from permanent. In fact, it was Adhoc: Roberts' project to create a series of transient design ateliers in collaboration with art schools around the world. Now in its earliest days is the second Adhoc office, a collaboration with Germany's University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. With a staff of about 15 people recruited by Roberts through an open call, the Adhoc Berlin Studio will produce industrial design, graphic design, and environmental design projects for the next three months. They'll chronicle their experience online, through a blog, Myspace posts, Flickr photos, and youtube videos.

"The intention was not to focus on the output of the pop-up office but to examine the work process, and to take a close look at how the factors of location, culture, and regional industry affect the creative process," Roberts told Metropolis recently. "Though initially this project was intended for Milan, Berlin, and New York, the concept's merit has gained some interest and now I am exploring offers for collaborations in cities as such as Vancouver and Hong Kong. It will be nice to work in Asia."

Meanwhile, Scott Klinker over at Core77 has gotten into that same kind of discussion as the post above, but far more in depth, coming to the conclusion that design is fantastic because it can evolve into whatever it wants, taking over whole industries whenever it pleases. That's what you get when you have a blanket term like "design" that can really mean whatever you want it to mean, from architecture to images to advertising to, heck, strip it all down and make it mean "creation" (hence why the religious zealots like it so much). And thus, that sheer breadth of definition helps to explain things like something we'd noticed recently and that Klinker cites as an example: Frank Gehrysigning up to make stuff for Tiffany's. It's a great read and something of a nice testament to the power of a word. Here's a bit:

If the world is flat as Tom Friedman claimed, then so is design--stripped of the hierarchies that used to distinguish high and low, design and art, theoretical and applied. Has this newfound freedom produced wild experimental design thinking? Not enough. Instead, design's intellectual edge has been mostly employed by the vanities of a fashion system. Someday we may recall this period as design's fashion phase.

Finally, to end this writer's day on a piece of op-ed, the site Ten Thousand Things has a fun post up called "Dear Colleagues," which asks designers to lay off being so dang cocky. It's a good, quick read and particularly something to hold on to and potentially pass along to co-conspirators when you're complaining about those people you've run into at conferences or, heck, maybe even share an office with. But we do think that if the writer of the post were to spend any time in the big budget ad agency world, or in fashion, or, god forbid, around high profile artists, designers would start looking much, much better. Here's a bit:

Seriously people, what's wrong with you? I don't know where exactly, but somewhere in between Saul Bass and Joshua Davis, a new breed of designers was born. A breed with tremendous talent (most of them anyway) but with one big flaw: they developed an arrogant attitude and started acting like Divas instead of acting like the professionals they were supposed to be.

In "Of Eyeballs & iHoles," Adobe's John Nack is responding to one of the wildest photo copyright ideas around, Canon's Iris Registration Mode, something that embeds "biological metadata" into photos a photographer takes. If you haven't read up on it, it's really crazy and even if it doesn't pan out, it's one of those interesting bits of science fiction worth checking out. But Nack believes that's about all it ever will be, something that won't really do much of anything:

Iris scanning doesn't address the fact that if you can edit the pixels of an image, you can get around copyright data in the image (through copy and paste to a new file, if nothing else). And for all the talk of wanting secure metadata, I don't see much use of the Digimarc technology that's been bundled in Photoshop for ~10 years (allowing copyright to be subtly encoded into the pixels themselves), nor do I hear of many photographers passing around their images as secure PDFs (which offer 128-bit encryption, among other things).