frog (formerly frog design), my company, just released the latest edition of its award-winning design mind magazine in a new, large broadsheet format. The seventh print issue of design mind (and its fourteenth overall) - "The Connective Issue" - investigates the theme of connectivity. With more devices tapped into the Internet than there are people on Earth, we are now more connected than ever. In more than 18 original articles, poster-sized infographics, and interviews with technology and cultural luminaries, The Connective Issue of design mind explores all the ways we come together: from a rare behind-the-scenes look at how Facebook, the world's most popular social network executes its design strategies to successfully connect almost one billion people online, to in-depth essays on how death, government transparency, and courtship are all being re-defined in the age of connectivity.
"How we connect to each other is often defined by what we do online, but connecting is so much more than that," says my colleague Sam Martin, editor-in-chief of design mind. "With this issue we wanted to explore how easy access to information and communication is affecting our analog lives, as well as our digital ones."
In addition to frog's designers, strategists, and technologists, special contributors to this issue include Allison Arieff, The New York Times columnist and former editor of dwell magazine, Atlantic associate editor Nicholas Jackson, and noted journalists James Nestor, David A. Greene, Nate Berg, and Michele Travierso.
Highlights include:
Facebook's Design Strategy: A Status Update: frog consulting editor Reena Jana goes behind the scenes of Facebook, revealing the rarely seen creative culture behind the social network that is approaching one billion worldwide users - and sparks many a debate on privacy and aesthetic issues.
The Tech Evolution: frog executive creative director David Merkoski sits down with author and visionary Kevin Kelly to discuss Kelly's theory that all of technology is an organism, with needs and wants of its own.
Go Ahead, Remake My Product: Atlantic associate editor Nicholas Jackson discusses why companies should embrace, rather than prosecute, hackers who illegally tweak their goods and services.
Single Nation: Shanghai-based writer Michele Travierso, contributor to The Economist, Monocle, and Wired, looks at how dating and marriage in China today is getting more complicated as the Chinese economy skyrockets and citizens pursue their love of commerce.
The Connected Company: Dave Gray, partner in the Dachis Group and founder of visual-thinking company XPLANE, views corporations as living ecosystems. Tech and the City: journalist Nate Berg explores how New York City's first chief digital officer, Rachel Sterne - and her counterparts in other metropolitan governments - are using social and other digital media to boost transparency and accessibility.
Networks to Neighborhoods: frog content and community manager Kristina Loring analyzes how everyday people are enhancing their relationships and productivity both online and offline, thanks to today's digital tools from Quora to Skillshare.
The End: writer and TV producer David A. Greene investigates what happens with our online selves when we die physically, and how death itself is finding a new identity in the Internet age.
Death and Beauty: created by award-winning author Rebecca Solnit, this map plots 2009 murders in San Francisco and tells a story of a city's disconnected neighborhoods-those of privilege and safety, and those of poverty and violence, in an elegant graphic.
You can check out The Connective Issue online or order the print issue here.
Enjoy!
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