IFrames let you stick a webpage within a webpage. This is cool, but can quickly lead to Inception style weirdness and thought crime. They have been shunned by the web design community for decades, until Facebook brought them back this year, for folding the web into Facebook pages.

India has long been known for innovations such as free public restrooms (peeing on the street) and high capacity buses and trains (use the roof). As the country matures, however, so is its style of innovation. Today, truly awesome products are emerging from and for India. These include a $3000 car, a $800 ECG and a $50 tablet PC. Pretty cool? Indeed.

Sometimes you need Flash, but using the full-fledged editor is like opening a beer with a bulldozer. I Googled it and found a cool product called BannerSnack that lets you make basic Flash animations online. Banners and ads mainly. Quite slick interface as well. The thing is built in Flash, to make Flash. Pretty, how do you say, flashy.

No one has innovated on the smartphone’s basic design since Apple. Every major new smartphone looks like an iPhone, big screen in the front. It’s as if that’s the end of the smartphones design evolution. But it’s not. Not the logical end at least. Why not make the whole phone a touchscreen? I don’t mean rear keyboards or whatnot, but having the whole thing being a possible interface.

An Indian professor, Vijay Govindarajan (of Dartmouth) is trying to build a decent houses for less than $300 (300house.com). It sounds impossible if you view it from the frame of a western house, but if you view it from a shanty perspective, it makes some sense. I’ve seen shanties built from advertising material, plywood and asbestos. I semi-regularly have tea in such establishments. People already build houses for less than $300. The question is whether this initiative can build them better.

Sometimes less options means better choices. Take the old and new Star Wars for example. Better CGI does not equal better storytelling. Or Photoshop and modern computing. More fonts and colors does not equal better signs. Or even human food consumption. More money does not ensure a better diet. Sometimes scarcity is the best frame art or life can have. I basically have a family now and for a while we haven’t had much money. At the end of the month we’d be waiting for paychecks and have literally nothing in hand. A few times we actually dipped into the child’s pocket money to buy vegetables and bread. But we had some really great meals.

An average of 10 people per day get killed by trains in Mumbai. With intelligent signage and design, however, they’ve managed the deaths on one line (Wadala) dropped from 23 (every six months) to 9 (in the same period). What makes the design more effective? It wasn’t more expensive (it was free), nor was it more restrictive. It was simply more scientific, dealing with the human brain as it is, not as we’d like it to be. Both economics and marketing presume that humans are rational actors, which we’re not. We’re monkeys with pants. Having some understanding for the brain can produce positive results. Which also look better.

The best policy for any aspiring dictator is birth control. If you aspire to be the father of a nation, you might want to limit the number of mouths to feed. If you don’t, there’s a high probability of revolt. If you look at the map above, youth (under 25) make up around 50% of many countries. Those countries are also prone to revolt. If you think about it, young people are strong, they can stay up all night and they have little to lose. If they don’t have numbers it’s possible to suppress them, but if they have more than 50%, resisting change will be tough. It’s a common idiom that change only comes when old people die. You could add that change also comes if there are enough young people to retire them.

The Dev World actually has pretty environmental packaging. Short eats will be wrapped in recycled paper and rice served on a banana leaf. Sadly, as we ‘develop’, everything gets boxed in paper, then wrapped in plastic. McDonald’s is probably the end of that continuum, almost more packaging than food. Design website Inhabitat, however, is going the other way and saying that banana leaf could be the packaging of the future. I don’t know if it scales up to industrial levels, however. Banana leaves are non-standard sizes, degrade fast, can’t be kept in a storeroom for months, etc. Interesting idea though.

I don’t understand the plug points here, or in the subcontinent for that matter. There are like three different types of connection and it is perfectly normal for adults to being shoving pens, keys and sticks inside. Furthermore, the plug points have an off switch and then there is often another on/off switch somewhere in the room. If you don’t have the right plug you need an adapter. This creates like five points of failure in the simple task of charging one’s laptop. I don’t get it.