October 2009
60 posts
1 tag
The royal order of the coin
While the coin may be eventually in danger of going extinct in the United States, it is still at large and very much in play. And while it is, there is a bad habit that needs to be acknowledged. Cashiers the country-over are guilty of it, and it’s the violation of the coin order.
Let’s agree: there is a right and a very wrong way to receive change from a cashier. Whether you’re...
Lost interactions →
The Museum of Lost Interactions exhibits items from 1900-1979 that have never been found, documented, or exhibited before:
These nine exhibits were donated by a group studying Interactive Media Design, who lovingly restored each to working order. Their discoveries were made whilst researching examples of interaction design that pre-dated digital technology. They also uncovered archive film,...
The geography of design →
Nicolas Heller interviewing Paula Scher on the start of her giant, colorful map paintings, and how they began over her work for AIGA and $1000:
I wondered what those little silly map paintings would look like if they were really big. I bet it would take a really long time. That would fill a day. So I painted one big. And then it took about four months. And I liked it. So then I painted another one...
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“Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of...”
– Susan Sontag
The Beatles, flowcharted →
Equal parts: don’t make it bad, don’t be afraid, and don’t let me down. See also.
Then, Wattenberg’s the shape of a song, or what does music look like?
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Determining aural usability →
A new tool makes the connection between architectural drawings of a space and the aural experience of its soon-to-be users:
A powerful tool, called auralization, is available to help make this connection. Using computer modeling and signal processing techniques, acoustical consultants can transform architectural drawings into realistic, surround-sound aural renderings of a space (an...
Bach as distilled something else →
Jeremy Denk on Bach as reactionary:
Bach is distilled Something Else. He composed against the currents of his day; he swam upstream; he was a reactionary (for example: composing elaborate difficult counterpoint when the musical world was simplifying into homophony). His genius, according to the usual view, is not that of inventor or destroyer, but belongs to that colder virtue of perfection....
Something to aim for →
On Briol, a holiday destination:
Each of the tracks brings you across mountain meadows covered in wild flowers that make one realise that designers and artists will always have something to aim for.
It was around 1880 when Johanna, the current owner, decided that instead of jewelry, for the birth of her children, she would like each of them to have a piece of mountain. She had 15 children, 14 of...
What Jane Jacobs can teach us about the economy →
People are giving the work of Jane Jacobs — urbanist, writer, and activist — a second look, but not for her urban pioneering and development work — for her economic vision.
Most know Jane Jacobs as the ultimate champion of cities, who stood up against neighborhood demolition and saw a vibrant ballet where others saw urban squalor. But three years since her death — and a year into a downturn marked...
Time as a material →
Matt Jones on his closing keynote at the DxF2009 conference:
My talk at DxF2009 in Utrecht last week was an hour’s wander around the idea of Time, particularly historical and cultural ideas of time. My focus was time as a material for interaction design that we should deconstruct and reconstruct in order to create products and services that take advantage of new real-time web technologies.
From...
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A matter of time
I remember turning 10 years old. The birthday was not significant because I was closer to being a card-carrying, official teenager; or because I received tickets to a show in New York (where I did not yet live); or because I was numerically older than my then-closest friend, who is still 371 days younger than me. It was significant because I was moving from single to double digits.
Ever since,...
The startup super-pattern →
Paul Graham on what’s so different and mysterious about starting a startup:
The key to that mystery is to ask, how different from what? Once you phrase it that way, the answer is obvious: from a job. Everyone’s model of work is a job.
Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to be like a job, and that explains most of the surprises. It explains why people are surprised how carefully...
Human contact inspires move from tea to coffee →
Conversation accessorizes coffee:
More and more Tokyo residents are switching from tea to coffee. And in some cases, it’s thanks to Motoko Ito who runs a small fleet of yellow vans which sell lovingly brewed lattes (he roasts the beans himself) at key points around the city. The little company offers not just coffee but a moment of human contact amid the hurly burly of the city. It’s staff know...
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Math and lollipops
Being asked to write regarding something quite specific is always a relief. Just like I’ve always been a better at playing classical music than jazz, at printing rather than cursive, constraints are remarkably welcome, and doubly so when time is tight. Given the intersection of candy, October, and time, Jason’s offer was pretty easy.
I wrote about the Tootsie Pop.
Candy is not mathematics. That...
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“Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of...”
– John Szarkowski, 1925 – 2007
Work, interrupted →
Joseph Holmes on the Workspace project, an attempt to capture the private spaces people carve out in public:
Such spaces represent a tug of war between personal expression and comfort on the one hand and the unyielding demands of work on the other. …. Lately I’ve been finding workspaces by walking in off the street with camera and tripod and simply asking (though “simply...
Look no farther than the front yard →
The Front Yard Company designs and manufactures products to make front yards useful places to store things that take up space indoors, meanwhile, invigorating the street and sidewalk:
Front yards are important in three ways: 1) Their contribution to the street, as a part of our built and designed environment; 2) Their contribution to the natural environment; 3) Their contribution to the street...
When the only possible achievement is negative →
Regarding supermarkets, all the anthropology, all the focus, all the Underhill, is always on the customer or the seller. No story has been written on the checkout operator. Until now:
[T]he checkout might look like the last survival of the old scene in the shop: there is a counter and on the other side of it a human being. But this formal resemblance conceals the great difference. The cashier,...
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Multitasking →
Tyler Cowen on the human mind becoming more, rather than less powerful, and on a “change that is filling our daily lives with beauty, suspense, and learning:”
The word for this process is multitasking, but that makes it sound as if we’re all over the place. There is a deep coherence to how each of us pulls out a steady stream of information from disparate sources to feed our long-term...
Curated inspiration →
The Architects’ Journal blog network introduced a selectively curated architecture and design inspiration, the Architects’ Notebook. Collecting both editors’ picks and others, it presents the Heffer Pitcher (admittedly, a favorite gift of mine) and the recent crowd-favorite the hand from above.
Clearly, even without explanation, crowd curation is valuable. Yet sometimes, I wish...
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“I know where you’re going because I’m right in the middle of it.”
– Philip Johnson, 1906 - 2005
People in order →
Short films that arrange 471 people according to four scales: age, birth, love, and home.
471 strangers plucked from the streets of Britain and arranged in order. Everyday life made simple!
The first two (New Age, Old Age and New Love Order) are available, and bear a charming resemblance to Michael Apted’s Up Series.
Escalante, and small teams with world-size effects →
Matt Webb’s keynote from from Web Directions South on design, hiking, science fiction, and invention:
Hiking is a journey of discovery of internal and external terrains. And you find out who you are behind the chatter and the blisters and the every day. Exploring a landscape takes time, and good pens, and good shoes. This is one thing designers do really well. They’re able to define a...
When a place is better than a plan →
On why revitalizing urban areas is better done through small improvements, not grand schemes:
Small changes are appealing for many reasons. They’re cheap, for one thing. Also, what works can be easily expanded, and what doesn’t work can be as easily terminated or altered. One successful food concession can become two; an unsuccessful stall selling local crafts can be replaced; a planter made from...
Broken windows work →
Twenty-seven years ago, James Wilson and George Kelling published “Broken Windows” in The Atlantic. It proposed that even “untended disorder and minor offenses” would lead to serious crime and the decay of an urban environment. While responses to the article were wildly mixed, New York City had a seemingly undisputed crime drop in the nineties. But the theory and approach...
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On “thank you,” or why Socrates was wrong
As she drove us home in the blue Fiat that first week of fourth grade, my mother began by announcing that it was time for me to begin writing thank you notes. “When you’ve received a present (referring to my new tennis racket), you must follow up by saying thanks with a card or a letter,” she instructed. “It’s good manners.” So there I was. Torn between manners and a racket. Upon arriving home,...
The return of mentorship →
A good case for why for education might return to a pass/fail system and start becoming more human centered, the model that was predominant from 98,000 BC to roughly 1800 AD:
The model of education from its earliest times was one of mentorship, starting with hunter-gatherers taking their children out on the hunt 100,000 years ago, all the way up to the teaching methods employed at the university...
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Amateur →
Michael Chabon reading from a piece titled “The Amateur Family:”
Perhaps there is no perfect word for the kind of people I have raised my children to be: a word that encompasses obsessive scholarship, passionate curiosity, curatorial tenderness, and an irrepressible desire to join in the game, to inhabit in some manner—through writing, drawing, dressing up, or endless conversational...
Avoiding apparent risk →
Seth Godin on apparent risk and actual risk:
When things get interesting is when the apparently risky is demonstrably [less safe] than the actually risky. That’s when we sometimes become uncomfortable enough with our reliance on the apparent to focus on the actual. Think about that the next time they make you take off your shoes at the airport.
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Cadence →
Jeremy Denk regarding the Goldberg Variations:
If “cadence” were a word in the dictionary (OK, it is, but you know what I mean), Bach in the Goldberg Theme has found one of its less-often-used meanings; one of the fun ones; and he locates this meaning with the help of the “words” that he uses to lead into it … through their implications … This paradoxical hinging of the cadence (return) on...
Time as observation →
John Goodman introduces the annosphere, a clock that presents the most elementary periods of time — the day and the year. Its goal is to help people appreciate the longer cycles of their lives:
The annosphere tells time, but more usefully, it presents time. It shows you sunrise and sunset, the start of spring and the winter solstice. It lets you see on your desk what you can’t see in the world:...
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“The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their...”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Bell Labs in the 1960s →
The days of beehives and big mainframe computers. I’m positive that Karen Dell is my favorite.
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Nonsense sharpens the intellect →
A recent study suggests that contrary to what seems logical, nonsense may provide space for the brain to detect patterns in it would otherwise miss.
Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with...
The menace of mechanical music →
In a 1906 edition of Appleton’s Magazine, John Sousa predicts a deterioration of music and musical taste — “impending harm” — because of the introduction of “music reproducing machines.”
Sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang of Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in...
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Work →
Anthony Bourdain in a candid chat on how traveling for No Reservations has changed his perspective:
The more you travel, the less you realize you know. …. When you travel it changes the definitions of words that you thought you understood. You thought you knew what the word “work” meant. You didn’t know if you’re from the West until you’ve seen a rice farming community, for instance.
A much...
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Broccoli →
Merlin Mann on Anne Lamott on Haruki Murakami on great sentences:
I couldn’t really place the sentence on my great sentences list because while it’s mostly grammatically sound and includes words and punctuation, it did not meet my own requirements of having a large foam cowboy hat, nor was it about how broccoli looks like little trees, nor did it create a fort made of sofa cushions in which I...
Calligraphy thinking →
Peter Merholz raises new questions about the value of separating “business thinking” from “design thinking:
”[W]hat we must understand is that in this savagely complex world, we need to bring as broad a diversity of viewpoints and perspectives to bear on whatever challenges we have in front of us. While it’s wise to question the supremacy of “business thinking,” shifting the focus only to “design...
A philosophical inquiry into “fiasco” →
The best definition of when a situation turns from mild “mishap” to more serious “disaster” to utter “fiasco” is still This American Life’s episode 61, Fiasco, aired in April 1997. Here Ira Glass and contributing editor Jack Hitt tell the story about a high school Peter Pan production, explaining when the audience turns from a forgiving one to one whose empathy dissipates. And thus, fiasco sets...
The jump rope test →
Tom Waits on how to tell whether your craft has become part of culture:
“What you want is for music to love you back. That’s why you pay your dues. You want to feel like you belong and are part of this symbiosis, metamorphosis, whatever you want to call it. That one day … ” He coughs and regroups. “I used to imagine that making it in music – really making it in music – is if you’re an old man...
Books furnish life →
Roger Ebert on how books furnish his life:
My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven’t read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may — need is the word I use — to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill’s history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, 47...
Seeing yourself see →
Beau Lotto on seeing yourself see:
Seeing color is one of the simplest things the brain does but even at this simplest level, context is everything. Why is context everything? Because answering that question tells us not only why we see what we do, but who we are as individuals, who we are as a society.
He goes on in an interview with TED to describe how the seeing-yourself-see concept can...
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“Technique exists for one reason only — to create a sound that reflects the...”
– Eric Nisenson, The Making of Kind of Blue
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Boulevard →
Steven Heller interviews Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of Where the Wild Things Are, the classic story about childhood frustration mitigated by the imagination.
“That is a boulevard, and those are automobiles.” And she added, “You mustn’t worry.” But that put into my head the word “boulevard,” and it has always been a major word in my life....
Four-letter words →
The four-letter word machine by artist D A Therrien.
The 4 LETTER WORD MACHINE, the first installation in the BEAUTIFUL LIGHT series, explores the purity of white light, the mystery of language, the precision of digital codes and the magic of 4 letters - A, C, G, T - representing the DNA code, and consequently, all known life.