The International Day for Disaster Reduction (IDDR) takes place every year on October 13. Since 2011, the Day has been part of a 4-year concept to build up momentum to 2015, an important date for the United Nations – it’s not only the deadline of the Millennium Development Goals ends, but also when the 10-year international framework for disaster risk reduction comes to an end. Conceptualized during my work with UNISDR, the 4-year Step Up initiative aims to promote disaster risk red...

For the last few months, every morning I wake up and have to look out the window to a couple of construction tower cranes staring back at me. And every so often I realized that the cranes are getting taller while  I/our apartment stays at the same height. How does the crane keep getting taller? It doesn’t seem like it can budge with such a heavy head on top, yet the neck of the crane keeps growing longer and taller. Well, after a quick search, the answer is pretty simple and the design is...

If you didn’t know, there’s actually a school called the School of Life (reminds me a little of the movie School of Rock and Jack Black’s unique way to inspire kids). There’s plenty of nuggets of inspiration to be found in the School’s courses, musings, blog posts, and, more recently, a series of books on guiding people through life and everyday living. As a birthday gift, John Paul Flintoff’s “How to Change the World” was an unexpected surprise a...

The hugely popular infographic I designed for UNISDR on the impacts of disasters from 2000-2011 required a bit of an update. And with over 7,000 views already on Flickr, it was pretty straightforward to update it with new stats from CRED for 2012. But just updating the graphic wasn’t enough. There were some trials and tribulations designing this infographic and I wanted to address them in this updated version. First, UNISDR had a new brand in early 2013 and so we needed to rebrand the des...

The month of March was a pretty interesting one. Moving ahead with EyeSee2013 – my photo of the day project – 2013′s  third month was a start of capturing color in my photos (I talked about the process in a previous post). Red was an easy color to start with as it’s pretty much everywhere because it represents so much to us psychologically and sociologically. Red is the color of extremes. It’s the color of passionate love, seduction, violence, danger, anger, and adventur...