PASH GRAPH & TECH MAGAZINE

WHAT DOES A CAREER IN DESIGN LOOK LIKE TODAY? .... Pg 1 CAN CREATIVITY MAKE US FEEL BETTER?

.... Pg 2 Southapedia aims to transform Durban with street art ....

Pg 3 Graphic: 500 Designs That Matter Is Like Time Travel for Design Nerds

.... Pg 4 - 5

WHAT IS 5G NETWORK

.... Pg 6

Consider these must-have tools for your business Consider these must-have tools for your business

.... Pg 7 .... Pg 8

CAN CREATIVITY MAKE US FEEL BETTER? Hospitals, for the most part, are dreary environments. Strip lighting, wipe-clean surfaces and miles of grubby paint do nothing to make us feel better.

But can creativity change all that?

By Emma Tucker 21/10/2019 GP’s waiting rooms and hospital corridors aren’t generally designed as welcoming environments, and it’s a lucky person that isn’t familiar with the special NHS palette of greige – liberally applied across doctors’ offices and health centres all over the UK. But while there’s definitely a way to go, there are signs that we’re waking up to the ways art and design can improve things.

Arts organisation Vital Arts – which sits within the Barts Health NHS Trust – is at the forefront of this. Charitably-funded, it runs a hospital arts programme that commissions new, site-specific works by the likes of Morag Myerscough and Chris Haughton, as well as a participation programme that bringsdance, music and literature and creative projects directly to patients across five east London hospitals.

“Although some patients might not regularly engage with culture, it’s really important that the art we are bringing into this public context is of exceptional quality,” says Catsou Roberts, Director at Vital Arts.

“It should be nourishing, mind-opening.

It could even be life-changing, if you consider that some people might be looking at art for the first time – for an extended period of time.

Southapedia aims to transform Durban with street art The fromer Design Indaba Emerging Creative says the project works with local street artists, including Paul Senyol (who was also part of the Design Indaba Emerging Creatives programme), Conform, Blessing Samukele and Gabriel Katsande to create murals inspired by Durban’s culture, history and its people. The festival also worked with NGO, Surfers Not Street Children, where some of the artists hosted an introduction to street art for the children involved with the NGO. “My biggest inspiration to start the Southapedia Mural Festival was after I was invited to paint a mural for Staufferstadt Arts, in Virginia, US. The project involved bringing contemporary urban art to a rural town. Seeing how the art inspired and celebrated the town, inspired me to create something similar in my hometown,” says Van Eeden.

“It showed me that with a bit of work it is possible to create something in Durban as well.

Too often we wait for opportunities to come to us instead of creating them!”

Not only did Van Eeden create the festival to celebrate the local culture of his hometown, but he also created opportunities for local artists to be paid to create professional murals in a town that lacked funding for local artists, as well as creative opportunities.

Together the artists created three major murals around the city centre.

He collaborated with Samukele and Katsande to create a mural titled Back to The Future. Sponsored by Innovate Durban, a company whose focus is on stimulating innovation in the KwazuluNatal region, the mural depicts a woman with a VR headset, with flying taxis and robotic birds in the foreground.

According to Van Eeden, the art is a commentary on what the future of Durban could look like, as well as the potential for growth and opportunity in the city.

The artwork of street artist, Conform, is made up of clean vector work, handdrawn and organic shapes. The fluidity of the art comes through the use of pastel colours, adding a sense of calm to the work. For the Southapedia Festival he created a mural that celebrates the architecture of Durban and the city’s skyline.

Graphic: 500 Designs That Matter Is Like Time Travel for Design Nerds These are the kinds of connections you’ll find while exploring Graphic: 500 Designs That Matter, a new book out from Phaidon next month. The stout compendium of graphics includes designs dating back to 1377, when Zen Buddhists printed the first text with moveable type.

But rather than show the Zen Buljo Jikji Simche Yojeol book next to, say, The Gutenberg Bible, Graphic: 500 ($25) R350 in South Africa showcases it opposite Paul Rand’s 1947 book Thoughts on Design.

Likewise, it features graphic designer Susan Kare’s pixelated bomb icon beside the symbol of the Nazi party. Rather than explain these pairings outright, the book implies similarity by placing designs beside each other. This use of juxtaposition has a delightful secondary effect: It primes readers to compare not only the graphics that appear on opposing pages, but images from entirely separate portions of the book.

The result is a volume that lays bare the interconnectedness of the visual world, bridging the present with the past, the digital with the physical, and hundreds of other seemingly unrelated subjects and symbols. On page 278, the International Maritime Flag system sits opposite the cover of Oliver Byrne’s Victorian-era edition of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry.

Both systems use color and

simple layouts to express more complicated ideas. You could say the same of the Apple logo, first released in resplendent rainbow colors in 1976, which appears on page 271.

That design, by Rob Janoff, contrasts against a black-and-white poster for a play

called “William Tell,” by Swiss designer Armin Hofmann. An apple fills the poster, but perhaps more interestingly, so does a jagged piece of text reading “Tell.”

The treatment is supposed to make the letters fade into the distance, but it looks pixelated, not unlike Kare’s 8-bit bomb on page 467—one of several icons Kare designed for Apple in the early ‘80s. That the book makes none of these connections explicitly makes the reading experience all the more engrossing.

None of this is by accident.

“

We didn’t want to do something alphabetical or chronological because it’s not the way we look at graphic design,” says Emilia Terragni, who edits architecture and design books at Phaidon Press.

“For us it’s important to do a sequence that shows the richness of design.”

To do that, Terragni had to scramble history.

Graphic: 500 descended from an earlier Phaidon project from 2012, a set of cards that featured the same designs found in this book. Terragni consulted with designers, typographers, and artists from around the world to settle on a canon of work for The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design.

The box of cards was beautiful, but not as easy to devour as a book. So Terragni and her team took up the daunting task of hanging the cards in a room and inspecting them all for interesting visual similarities. The matchups became the page layout for Graphic: 500.

A chronological index in the back offers a brief synopsis of each design.

Terragni and Phaidon aspired to show the many surprising ways that certain motifs appear throughout time and across geography.

Graphic: 500’s unique layout prompts these kinds of circuitous observations.

The longer you look, the more you’re bound to notice.

(Like, for instance, the fact that President Trump’s ties to the alt-right has helped spur a spike in sales of George Orwell’s 1984—the year Kare designed the original Mac icons.) Some of these similarities are likely happy accidents. But that doesn’t make them any less real.

Hearing aid uses 3D printed parts and costs less than a dollar A 3D-printed hearing aid be more affordable Paul Quayle/Panos Pictures

A 3D-printed hearing aid that costs less than a dollar could make hearing aids accessible for those who currently can’t afford them.

Saad Bhamla and Soham Sinha at Georgia Tech built the device using cheap off-the-shelf electronic components and a 3D-printed casing.

It is based on the first designs of hearing aids developed in the early 50s, which were body-warn devices with earphones attached.

The pair built the hearing aid to work for people who have age-related hearing loss, which currently affects more than 200 million people worldwide. This is characterised by a difficulty to hear higher sound frequencies, so the device specifically amplifies those.

According to non-profit organisation World Wide Hearing, fewer than one in 40 people who need hearing aids in developing countries can afford them.

While very cheap personal sound amplification devices proliferate on the internet, these simply amplify all sounds, and are meant only for those with mild hearing loss.

Bhamla and Sinha’s hearing aid currently has internal circuitry that is too loud according to World Health Organization standards, but they are working to reduce it.

Brad McPherson at the University of Hong Kong says he doesn’t know of any other hearing aids that are so cheap. Others have built low-cost hearing aids, but they usually cost nearer $100 dollars(R1,400 South Africa), says Bhamla.

While hearing aids are notably expensive, their cost isn’t the sole reason for their low uptake. Even in countries where hearing aids are free, like in the UK, only 2 million of the suspected 6 million people who need them have taken up the offer. Many people don’t realise they have hearing loss, and there is a stigma attached to wearing hearing aids.

Reference: biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/811828v1

5G

networks are digital cellular networks, in which the service area covered by providers is divided into small geographical areas called cells. Analog signals representing sounds and images are digitized in the telephone, converted by an analog to digital converter and transmitted as a stream of bits. All the 5G wireless devices in a cell communicate by radio waves with a local antenna array and low power automated transceiver (transmitter and receiver) in the cell, over frequency channels assigned by the transceiver from a pool of frequencies that are reused in other cells. The local antennas are connected with the telephone network and the Internet by a high bandwidth optical fiber or wireless backhaul connection. As in other cell networks, a mobile device crossing from one cell to another is automatically “handed off � seamlessly to the new cell.

There are plans to use millimeter waves for 5G.Millimeter waves have shorter range than microwaves, therefore the cells are limited to smaller size. The waves also have trouble passing through building walls. Millimeter wave antennas are smaller than the large antennas used in previous cellular networks. They are only a few inches (several centimeters) long. Another technique used for increasing the data rate is massive MIMO (multiple-input multipleoutput). Each cell will have multiple antennas communicating with the wireless device, received by multiple antennas in the device, thus multiple bitstreams of data will be transmitted simultaneously, in parallel. In a technique called, beamforming, the base station computer will continuously calculate the best route for radio waves to reach each wireless device, and will organize multiple antennas to work together as phased arrays to create beams of millimeter waves to reach the device.

The new 5G wireless devices also have 4G LTE capability, as the new networks use 4G for initially establishing the connection with the cell, as well as in locations where 5G access is not available.

5G can support up to a million devices per square kilometer, while 4G supports only up to 100,000 devices per square kilometer.

Usage scenario The ITU-R has defined three main uses for 5G. They are Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC), and Massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC).

Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) uses 5G as a progression from 4G LTE mobile broadband services, with faster connections, higher throughput, and more capacity. Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) refer to using the network for mission critical applications that requires uninterrupted and robust data exchange.

Massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTC) would be used to connect to a large number of low power, low cost devices, which have high scalability and increased battery lifetime, in a wide area. Neither URLLC nor mMTC are expected to be deployed widely before 2021.

Consider these must-have tools for your business

E

very business has their own unique needs and tech stack within their organization. Yet, with thousands of tech tools out there, how do you know which ones are best for your company?

As a digital marketing executive, I’ve used various tools and programs to amplify my marketing tasks and keep track of specific projects. It can be overwhelming at times, but it also gave me tons of exposure to various tech tools, allowing me to really narrow down my favorites.

Tools to start making money online 1.Drop Shipping The basic idea behind an online drop shipping business is that, as a small business owner, you don’t have to maintain a large inventory (or any inventory whatsoever) of products or handle any delivery to your customers.

While your company and each department might have different opinions on tech tools, I’ve selected some of my favorite and the best tools that help me be more productive daily. Here they are.

Pros • Requires very little startup capital • No need to maintain inventory • You can leverage established

marketplaces with existing customer bases Cons • You can be blamed for your drop shipper’s mistakes • The market is very competitive • You must sell a lot to generate a

substantial income

1. Trello 2. Buffer 3. Sniply 4. Slack 5. Intercom 6. Expensify 7. Owler

2.Affiliate Marketing Affiliate marketing is somewhat similar to drop shipping but with some key differences.

With this e-commerce model, you again don’t maintain an inventory of your own products, and you don’t have to worry about shipping products to customers.

Final thoughts While the above tech tools are the “best” for me, they may not all be right for you or your daily tasks.

Everyone has their own opinion, but these are resources that I’ve found so much value in over the years.

Pros • Low risk: No initial investment required • Hands-off business model Cons • You’re responsible for driving web traffic to the affiliate link (no traffic means

no money) • May need to spend money on advertising and marketing

However, if any of these sound like they can increase your productivity or success, then I highly recommend you check them check out.

What tech tools are you utilizing at your company?

Oculus Rift S, the company’s mid-generation hardware update to the Rift platform, only just launched a few months ago, but it’s already getting its first discount this upcoming Black Friday.

Lenovo has published its 2019 Black Friday ad, and to our surprise it’s knocking $50(R700 South Africa) off the $400 (R2800 South Africa) Oculus Rift S. It’s very likely that we’ll also see the same deal replicated elsewhere, including Oculus’ own online store and a host of official retailers such as Best Buy, Amazon, NewEgg, and more.

Image courtesy Lenovo Launched back in May, Rift S is more of a remaster than a sequel to the original 2016-era Oculus Rift. With its inside-out tracking (no external tracking sensors needed), halo-style headstrap, and higher resolution LCD panel, it makes for a pretty complete package for VR newcomers—provided you have a PC capable of playing VR games.

SEE ALSO How to Tell if Your PC is VR Ready Before you go counting your pennies though, make sure to check out our deep dive review on Rift S to see if it’s right for you, or if you’d be better off springing for the best-inclass PC VR headset currently available, Valve Index.

Not into PC gaming? Well, we haven’t heard about any sales on Oculus Quest just yet, the company’s high-end standalone VR headset starting at $400, but Oculus hasn’t released word on its Black Friday plans, so we’ll be sure to update you when they do.