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It was with a heavy heart that I joined team iPhone this summer. As a self-appointed Apple h8r, I spent the previous 3 years of my mobile phone life with Android devices. As with any relationship, there were good and bad times but at the end I realized that we needed to test the waters with others. I was not the least bit enthusiastic about this decision but it felt necessary at the time. Now that I’ve had a few months to adjust, I can say it was the right decision if not for one main factor…Instagram.

Every June, more than 50,000 conservative suits descend on Chicago for NeoCon (National Exposition of Contract Furnishings). There are so many of them, I feel like I never left my lovely hometown of DC, where Capitol Hill politicos run rampant and style still runs short. (Sorry, DC, you’re trying!) NeoCon is the most important show in the American contract furniture industry, with $25B in sales even during an economic slump. Your office chair, desk, and file cabinet were probably first scouted here. You haven’t given them a second thought once you were situated, and why would you (*yawn)? Fortunately, someone else is paid to do so and that person goes to NeoCon.

Established in 1969, NeoCon is always held at Merchandise Mart, a historic structure built by Marshall Field & Company in the 1920s. Once the largest building in the world at 4 million square feet, it has its own zip code and is a monument to architecture, design, and merchandising. It’s quite fitting that NeoCon is here: a pillar of a traditional American industry inside an American landmark. Merchandise Mart is now home to high-end designer showrooms, ad agencies, tech firms, and government agencies.

What you may not realize is that NeoCon is also a huge meat market.

There’s a lot of data out there about us. In fact, it’s easy to forget just how much information various companies and organizations (and the Internet in general) know about us. The first page of Reflecteur this week looks at the ways two separate sites used infographics to display a huge amount of information with very different results:

* Where Americans are Moving looks at 2008 IRS data to map county to county moves. It’s your one stop shop to US migratory information and it only takes a few minutes of playing with the maps to realize that there are a lot of stories hidden within this data. Just click on ‘Detroit’.
* Watch a Phone Company Stalk a Customer is, not surprisingly based on the title, far more disturbing. This site maps, via a video, all of the data a phone company in Germany gathered on one of their customers over 6 months. It seems more spy movie thriller than real life.

Travel over to Page 2 for a bit more fun:

Page one features 2 reinventions:

* In an interesting twist to the reimagining world theme we often discuss, Picture Cook takes the stuffy old recipe format and redesigns it with a focus on experimentation. Even if you’re more into the cut-and-dry recipe format, these flowchart-like versions of recipes will look great on your kitchen wall.

* Travel Time Tube reworks the classic London Tube map. A fixture in the design world, this site completely changes the focus of the map from relation to time. Put in two stations and watch it change forms based on routes that take the longest.

Page two looks at two captivating photo collections:

* Ghana- The Electronic Dumping Ground of the World highlights the dark side of technology and electronics. Perhaps the ‘new gadget smell’ isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be?

* Finally, we get a glimpse of a somewhat odd underworld in Taryn Smith’s Contraband. These images showcase 1,000 various items confiscated at JFK airport in New York. Some items make sense, but some…. well you just need to see them to believe it.

Download issue 80 of Reflecteur here!

In this week’s Reflecteur, we highlight two games (Zombie Streetview
Apocalypse & Famous Objects from Classic Movies) to help you waste
oodles of time and two popular photographic memes (Looking Into the
Past Photos, and Young Me/Now Me) that you just might go out and try
yourself.

We’ve also included some recently popular tumblrs under Top Reflecteur
Links… in case you have a few more hours to burn.

Download the latest issue here!