Here's a follow-up to last week's post about visual and verbal thinkers. Design Observer, a blog about design and culture created by three graphic designers (including Pentagram's renowned Michael Bierut), consistently publishes some of the most articulate prose on the Web. I just finished reading "My Cup Holder Runneth Over," an astute and hilarious essay by Jessica Helfand, a Design Observer co-founder and a partner in Connecticut design studio Winterhouse. In it, she knits together two seemingly unrelated contemporary phenomena: nail salons and cup holders. A snippet:
As a Mom-on-the-go who managed to rear two children past toddlerhood without beverage dispensers surgically attached to our bodies, I can tell you that nobody ever had to be rushed to the hospital due to dehydration. Strollers were just strollers back then, way back in the dark ages — and that was the late 1990s. We’re all of us still alive and well, thank you — even occasionally drinking tap water out of a glass. Clearly, I am not the target audience for this sort of thing, yet cup holders persist, manufactured for everything from folding chairs to golf caddies. They’re slyly integrated into the molded plastic dashboards fronting the treadmills at my gym, neatly carved into the foam in my neighbor’s swimming pool float, and if that isn’t laziness-inducing enough, there are cup holders that even come to you: with a 9-volt battery and a pool, you can ferry out drinks to your friends with a remote controlled drink caddy. (Serves four.)
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