What indie music and your favorite restaurant have to do with Haiti and TED.

It's World Water Day today – though we believe every day should celebrate and honor Earth's most precious resource. Since 1992, March 22 has been an international observance of the importance of clean water for a healthy world. Today, we spotlight three smart projects that actually do something about the cause and offer ways in which you too can help.

TAP PROJECT

In 2008, Tap Project topped our list of the year's best ideas. We still think it's one of the simplest, smartest efforts to both raise awareness about water sustainability and make an actual, action-based difference.

Developed in partnership with UNICEF, the project's premise is brilliantly simple: During World Water Week March 21-27, restaurants would ask patrons to donate $1 for each glass of tap water that they normally enjoy for free. It may seem like little, but $1 actually provides clean drinking water for a child for 40 days – which means less than $10 get a child a year's worth of water. All donations go to UNICEF's water sanitation programs that strive to bring clean, accessible drinking water to children around the world.

The one million restaurants across the US comprise the second largest industry in the country, following government. Thousands of them are participating in the program this week – up from 300 in 2007, when the project launched. So imagine the scale of impact of these micro-contributions, a powerful long tail of goodness.

This year, Tap Project is launching Tap Project Radio – a platform for musicians, artists, directors and thought leaders to play music, raise awareness and help fight the water crisis. From performances by Kenna, They Might Be Giants and other indie favorites, to interviews of advertising legends Lee Clow and David Droga (who founded Tap Project in 2007), the lineup is an absolute treat.

You can help in one of three ways: Dine at one of the participating restaurants and buy yourself some tap water; donate directly to the project; or text Text "TAP" to UNICEF (864233) to donate $5 and give a child 200 days of clean drinking water.

Have a restaurant or know someone who does? It's not too late to register and join the effort.

CHARITY: WATER

Also in 2008, we featured just-launched nonprofit charity: water – a fundraising effort to bring clean drinking water to people in the developing world. Since then, the project has become such a blockbuster success – from getting press in just about every major media outlet to being the beneficiary of last year's Twestival – so we won't elaborate on what it's all about.

Today, charity:water is launching Unshaken – a concentrated effort to help Haiti recover by providing long-term water solutions in a country where a third of the population didn't have access to clean drinking water even before the disaster. The plan focuses on 11 specific areas that need funding. For each of them, the charity: water team has worked hard to calculate the exact costs and collected real-life stories from the community about how that particular issue affects their daily lives.

The goal is to raise $1.3 million, helping 40,000 people in dire need. Bring them a wee closer to it by donating today.

PUR

At TED last month, we were excited to see PUR's drive to donate 10 liters of clean drinking water for every tweet that answered the question...

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Lightning sketches, journalistic sycophancy, and what Thomas Edison as to do with Pixar.

It's a well-established fact that we have a longstanding obsession with Pixar animation and the occasional racy side project by the crew. But we also think it's important to understand the historical roots of today's creative obsessions.

Case in point: The Enchanted Drawing , a silent animated film from 1900 by British filmmaker J. Stuart Blackton, who pioneered animation in America. (He was also among the first to use stop-motion as an animation technique, another piece of modern-day ubiquity.) In it, Blackton sketches a face, cigars, and a bottle of wine, then "removes" these last drawings as real objects so that the face appears to react.

Before his filmmaking career, Blackton made his living as a vaudeville performer known as "The Komikal Kartoonist." It was in this entertainment act that he first began drawing "lightning sketches" – high-speed drawings on an easel pad, modified rapidly before the audience's eyes as he delivered an equally rapid verbal stream.

Eventually, Blackton became a reporter for the New York Evening World newspaper and in 1896 was sent to interview Thomas Edison about his brand new Vitascope invention. In an age where wooing reporters was critical to success, Edison took Blackton to Black Maria , his studio-cabin, and created an impromptu film of Blackton doing a lightning sketch of Edison himself. Blackton became so infatuated with the technology that he soon founded the American Vitagraph Company and began producing films, debuting with The Enchanted Drawing in 1900.

Six years later, Blackton created Humorous Phases of Funny Faces , the earliest animation exploring the intricacies of human expressions and the human face. (Something else we've been notoriously fascinated with .) The film is now in the public domain and thus available for all the remixing your heart desires.

Blackton's work is part of The Origins of American Animation, 1900-1921 – a fantastic collection of the work that sparked what became one of the most powerful creative movements in visual media.

We highly recommend it.

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Voyeurism, organic apricots, and indulging the human penchant for patternicity.

Since October 16, 2007, digital artist Noah Pedrini has been combining two of our favorite things: Found art and sticky-notes. Collecting other people's discarded Post-Its from Brooklyn to Boston to Buenos Aires, he created AnthroPosts – a fascinating collection of more than 300 found Post-Its that offers both an analog antidote to and a narrative parallel of today's fragmented, short-form digital communication.

This very second, someone, somewhere, is busy jotting something down on a Post-it® note. A phone number, a grocery list, a reminder. And there is someone who has just finished dialing, just finished buying, just been reminded; and is now tossing the pastel-colored square on the ground.

You can explore the collection in a number of interactive ways, organizing the notes by complexity (how much has been written on them), color (intensity and hue), and common words ("chicken" and "please" are particularly prominent staples of Post-It vocabulary), while a voiceover stream reading the notes gives the experience an almost haunting quality.

And while privacy crusaders would no doubt frown, we love the lean-back voyeurism the project exudes. (As opposed to the more lean-forward kind of PostSecret and We Feel Fine's content, actively and purposefully contributed by users.) AnthroPosts offers quiet insight into the most mundane reality of people's lives, tickling your imagination to fill the voids in the process – from the person's romantic relationships ("organic apricots for Tess" on a shopping list whispers of young love) to what they do for a living ("property code 8043" could belong to a bland building inspector, or to the right-hand-man of a mafia kingpin) to complete life stories (apples and milk on a shopping list in Russia paint pictures of New York's newest, most wide-eyed immigrants).

I know many might not see them quite like I do, inadvertent messages in a bottle, but that's okay. If some find an appreciation in the curves of an "S", the vertical symmetry of an "E", or the self-similarity of an "A", I'll keep collecting, and sharing what I find here, for those willing to look.

Mostly, we love that AnthroPosts feeds our hard-wired human tendency to look for patterns in everything, to build storytelling around even the most barren of narrative landscapes and create meaning where there's only...

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What Chinese noses and hairy Brazilians have to do with the Moore's law of breast.

The "beauty industry." The glaring oxymoron of this very term – standardizing and industrializing something that's supposed to be abstract and subjective and "in the eye of the beholder" – aptly reflects its status as one of the most controversial yet ubiquitous facets of culture. We've all read about, heard of or seen first-hand the various disjointed manifestations and consequences of humanity's unhealthy obsession with "beauty" – eating disorders, plastic surgery addiction, plain old nacrissism and social discrimination – but capturing the complete, wide-angle story of this cultural idée fixe is an incredibly ambitious task.

That's exactly what photographer Zed Nelson explores in Love Me – a gripping, powerful series of images that capture the conflicting social, psychological and economic rewards and penalties of appearance obsessions.

Beauty is a $160 billion-a-year global industry. The worldwide pursuit of body improvement has become a new religion.

Elham, 19, and her mother, 55. Rhinoplasty 'nose job' operation. Tehran, Iran.

"I'm competing with men 20 years younger than me." - Anthony Mascolo, 46. Liposuction to chin and abdomen. New Jersey, USA

The book reveals the frightening commodification of beauty, both industrially and culturally, (did you know that ten years ago, reconstructing a woman's breasts cost $12,000, compared to $600 today?), exposing the intricate network of transactions and businesses that govern it – the fashion, cosmetics, diet, medical and entertainment industries, with their powerful propaganda mechanisms and meticulous marketing plans.

'Westernising' the human body has become a new form of globalisation, with 'Beauty' becoming a homogenous brand. The more rigorously our vision is trained to appreciate the artificial, the more industries benefit.

Nose bridge prosthetic implants, to increase size of nose. Beijing, China

Like it or not, we are judged, and judge, by appearance. Perhaps we are obsessed with the way our own bodies look because we know how instinctively judgemental we are of the bodies that we look at.

"Men's Health magazine (USA) hasn't had a hairy chest on its cover since 1995." - Wall Street Journal. Copacabana Beach. Rio, Brazil.

The body has, in a sense, become just another consumer purchase. Everyone can, in the spirit of our age, go shopping for bodily transformation. Banks now offer loans for plastic surgery. American families with annual incomes under $25,000 account for 30 per cent of all cosmetic surgery patients. Americans spend more each year on beauty than they do on education.

From sexed up teenage club-hoppers to prison beauty queens to a brilliantly curated Alain de Botton quote , the book is a cover-to-cover gem that explores, with superb creative direction and a merciless confrontation with superficiality, the most uncomfortable fringes of cultural anthropology.

Ox and Angela, plastic surgeon and wife. Rio, Brazil

Nelson's introductory statement about the project is very much worth a read. Explore the collection online, or grab a copy of Love Me for the real deal of glossy-paged coffeetable ...

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Strangers on a train, pixelated postings, and why ham tastes better in Helvetica.

Good design has a universal capacity for improving quality of life – from smart industrial design that literally changes lives in the developing world, to the small everyday design touches that make us smile amidst mundanity. Today, we look at three delightfully inspired design efforts that wink at the mundane, transforming it into aesthetic amusement with wonderful wit and superb art direction.

MISSED CONNECTIONS

For the past year, Sophie Blackall has been capturing Craigslist missed connections in her distinct and delightful illustrations, brimming with charm, romanticism and soft whimsy.

Every day hundreds of strangers reach out to other strangers on the strength of a glance, a smile or a blue hat. Their messages have the lifespan of a butterfly. I'm trying to pin a few of them down." - Sophie Blackall

We love the simplicity and childlike wonder of Blackwell's aesthetic sensibility. There's something incredibly powerful and heartwarming about this imaginative reverse-engineering of serendipity, otherwise left to wither in the barren landscape of plain digital text.

So wonderful is the project that it captured Babelgum's attention last year, resulting in this wonderful short documentary about the project.

Each illustration is more delightful than the next, so we strongly encourage you to explore the entire Missed Connections site. Needless to say, we'd love to see Sophie join our ranks of blog-turned-book success stories.

CARDON COPY

We featured designer Cardon Webb's ingenious Cardon Copy project a few months ago to an overwhelmingly positive response. Which is no surprise, because the effort is pure urban guerrilla genius – web hijacks the communication dinosaurs that are neighborhood flyers, redesigning and replacing them with artfully revamped versions.

Part neighborhood Banksy, part Pixelator, part utterly original, the project is pure conceptual genius.

See all the hijacked flyers for even more goodness.

SHOPPING LOSTS

Simon Attwater turns lost shopping lists into typographical treats. From ham to Helvetica, sardines to serifs, he's got it all covered in his Shopping Losts.

To have your very own shopping list turned into a design statement, email it to Simon and gush at the kerning of your Krispy Kremes.

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