December 2011
21 posts
This is a bad year for dictators.
Play
Play
Seduction techniques
Detail from Less and More, The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams at the Design Museum.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
—Teddy Roosevelt (from his “Citizenship in a Republic”
speech delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910)
“The best way to learn the value of a well crafted tool is to try using a poorly crafted one.”
—Unknown, via Best Made Co.
Frank Chimero: Seven Incredible Things from Today That Have Nowhere Else to Go →
blog.frankchimero.com
- A man helped a woman carry her stroller down the stairs to the subway. They got to the bottom, and he saw another woman approach the top of the stair with her stroller, and he went back up to help her, too.
- I realized that fire breathes just like we do. Oxygen in, carbon dioxide out.
- I waved at someone, thinking I saw a friend. It wasn’t my friend, but they still waved back.
- There was a man sitting at a diner table recreating a chess game through itsnotation. Two minds against each other long ago, today recreated by one mind to learn from both.
- Falconry! It’s a thing. Amazing.
- I’ve noticed that people are either top-lip talkers or bottom-lip talkers. I will never be able to unsee this.
- Today, I realized that at one point in time, I was the youngest person in the world. So were you. I thought we should get certificates for this accomplishment, and then I remembered my birth certificate.
Don't Be A Free User →
blog.pinboard.in
“What if a little site you love doesn’t have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn’t take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.
I love free software and could not have built my site without it. But free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources. Your time is spent firefighting and your money all goes to the nice people at Linode.”
“All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
—George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism
“A life well-lived is composed of a full range of emotions, honestly felt.”
—Aesthetics of Joy, The Spaces Between
A Victim Treats His Mugger Right →
npr.org
Michael Garofalo, NPR
Julio Diaz ends his daily subway commute one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner. One evening, his routine was broken when a teenage mugger took his wallet at knifepoint. But neither of them could have predicted what happened next.
Craftsmanship →
jonkolko.com
by Jon Kolko
“What of craft in a digital, social, or organizational medium? What does “craft” mean for designers who work exclusively on problems of services, software, or organizational change and political influence? And how can schools change their foundational focus without abandoning the obvious rigor of traditional craft-based learning?
…craftsmanship comes through intimate understanding of medium and material. The medium of painting is fairly obvious, as is the material of clay. But both the medium and materiality of service design, interaction design, and public policy are vague, abstract, and seemingly invisible. They are, however, not without definition.
Richard Buchanan has continually described the four orders of design - a framework that include symbols, things, action, and thought. In the third and fourth orders, the output of a designers work has shifted from two dimensional communication and three dimensional artifacts to behavior, organizational change, policy, and systems. The material, here - the thing that is shaped - is behavior, action and thought. Frequently, the tool that is used to shape this material is language, rhetoric, and argument. Unique to fourth-order design problems is their recursive and inclusive nature, for systems design output typically includes printed material, objects, environments, software, policy, rules, ideas, and actions. And so an interaction designer’s material is frequently a wide array of physical, digital, and cultural substance that can be shaped over a long period of time to affect change.”
