sociology G93.3503 - RESEARCH SEMINAR: URBAN ETHNOGRAPHY | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 001 | >31202 | T | 12:30pm - 02:00pm | WS | 295L 4156 | SEM | 4.0 | KLINENBERG, ERI | |||||||||||||||||||||
Monday, June 15, 2009
other nyu classes
itp fall 09
Applications of Interactive Telecommunications Technology
| H79.2000.1 Call#71392 | Tues 4:00pm to 7:30pm | Red Burns |
Introduction to Physical Computing
SyllabusEvery Bit You Make
| H79.2530.1 Call#76839 | Mon 12:30pm to 3:00pm | Raffi Krikorian |
Future of the Infrastructure
| H79.2297.1 Call#76838 | Thur 09:30am to 12:00pm | Art Kleiner |
Materials and Building Strategies
| H79.2025.1 Call#71405 | Tues 6:30pm to 9:00pm | Peter Menderson |
Mediated Intimacy: Closeness and Distance
| H79.2798.1 Call#76844 | Mon 3:30pm to 6:00pm | Kio Stark |
Site-specific: Augmentation, Affinities, and Frames
| H79.2620.1 Call#76840 | Tues 3:30pm to 6:00pm | Marina Zurkow |
Video Sculpture
| H79.2722.1 Call#71475 | Mon 6:30pm to 9:00pm | Gabe Barcia-Colombo |
Visual Communication
| H79.2724.1 Call#76859 | Mon 6:30pm to 9:00pm | Katherine Dillon |
Friday, June 12, 2009
rca briefs
RADIO PROJECT
Radio is a strange mix between the physical and the ether; both an interface and content; an object and information.
Radio is... a thing on your kitchen shelf... music... background noise... electronics... services... radiation... networks... broadcasters... communication... culture... shared experiences...
Design a relationship to 'radio’, it could be in the ether or via the internet. It should not merely be about the radio itself, or just interacting with a radio. The radio as a ‘thing’ is simply the means of accessing radio as an experience. As well as practical needs, also think about more complicated and human ones... emotions, behaviours, desires, obsessions.
You could start by thinking a bit about what radio is... the experience it creates, how it mediates between people, whether it entertains, informs or persuades. You might want to consider what it is as a system (What is a live broadcast? Can you listen to two stations at once?); or as content (What can you listen to? What is radio when we can all broadcast?); or its social implications (What is radio in relation to social networks? How does radio create relationships between people, either in the world or in a home?); or as technology (What is internet radio? Why would a radio connect to the web? Is radio just audio?).
The project is also an opportunity to familiarise yourselves with electronics and to begin to explore how you'd like to engage with it as a medium, skill, information, tool and so on.
BMW INTENSE PROJECT -- NOMADS, MINI-NESS AND INFOSPACES
Cars no longer simply travel across geographic and spatial landscapes, they also traverse information landscapes. The tendency though, is to adapt existing objects like phones, TVs, DVD players, and GPS navigation devices for use in the car without really changing the nature of the experience. What if the car itself became an interface, would this suggest new devices, new uses for the car, or even new relationships between people, cars, and environments?
Think of the driver as a nomad using their Mini to navigate, experience and enjoy the information
landscape... what kind of relationship to it would the Mini provide? How would they access it? What tools would they need? How would it differ throughout the day/night and from person to person? How could they do all this in a very ‘Mini’ way?
The purpose of this project is to imagine new scenarios of use for the Mini in relation to information landscapes. And how the specific character of the mini could be reflected in its interactions with an information landscape and any necessary devices and services.
DESIGNER POLITICS
"On 25 April, about 40 members of a Japanese cult called Pana Wave Laboratory took over a 200-meter (600 ft) stretch of mountain road in Gifu prefecture, some 185 miles (300 km) west Tokyo, covering up crash barriers and roadside trees with huge white cloths. After three days, local officials ordered the caravan of 13 white vehicles to move on, but the cultists -- who dress all in white and wear surgical masks as protection against electromagnetic radiation -- refused, explaining that Yuko (Hiroko) Chino, their 69-year old guru, had terminal cancer after communist guerrillas had attacked her with microwaves. "
In this project we will explore the intersection of material culture (stuff, things, physicality) and ideology (ideas, beliefs, values).
What if the Labour and Conservative parties had their own product lines? How would they differ? What would a Conservative toaster be like, a Labour car, a Liberal Democratic mobile phone? This is not about appearance and style, but the values embedded in products and expressed through their functionality.
CLUB MINIHOMPY
This project is a collaboration with the France Telecom team developing a new system which generates an environment allowing people to create tighter social links. These links could be between close friends, relatives, communities of shared interest (such as hobby groups etc.) and people who met both on the Internet and in real life.
The service will contain many elements already familiar to us from existing applications on both desktop machines & mobiles (such as Blogger Flikr, ichat, IM Cyworld etc.). The system is both a web and (critically) mobile-based service and one of your design challenges is to try and take full advantage of both these elements. The system will allow users to design/customise their own ‘spaces’, provide ‘rooms’ that their existing friends can consult and enrich and a network for them to meet new people through. The system will link tightly into the users real life communities and networks.
What the team are keen for this new system to do is ‘strengthen social links’ and to explore ways that people can personalise the space - presenting their own individual quirks, likes and dislikes and blurring the boundary between their on and off-line personas.
Working with the plans for the technical achievements of the new system as a given, your job is to think very specifically about how a real group of users might use or abuse this type of environment.
Each if you will pick an actual Club or Society from the smorgasbord on offer at our neighbouring institution of Imperial College … be it cavers or the conservative club … your mission is to meet these people and persuade them to reveal to you as much information as you can.
We want you to feel as if you know and care about this group, that you understand not just what they do, where they do it and when, but why they do it. What are their motivations? What do they get out of their club? Why on earth did they join? Who are their family and friends? How do they communicate with other people in the club and how do their circles of associates spin out from this group?
Once you have as much information as you can gain about your chosen group you will have to tell us about them – why would we want to join this group?
Only then will you start to design with/for/against them … your design process for this project should be as specific and focussed as you can possibly make it. Focus on your particular club - revel in their specific likes, dislikes, passions and eccentricities and design a way for them to utilise an entirely bespoke system.
NANOTOPIA -- UTOPIA OR DYSPTOPIA?
This project is an opportunity to familiarise yourselves with some of the key issues surrounding
nanoscience and nanotechnology, especially its potential social, cultural and ethical impact on
society.
After some initial familiarisation and research you should identify either a hope or fear for
nanotechnology and develop it into a ‘what if...?’ scenario. Treat it as though it has already happened, and bring back some compelling evidence from your scenario (artefacts from the future) to present in the final crit.
The project has two other important elements: separating fact from fiction in relation to future time
scales; and identifying, making contact with, and consulting experts to help accurately locate your scenario in the near, mid or far future.
ME, ONLY BETTER
From smart pills to designer babies and extended life spans, technology now promises to transform our very nature ...
“We all share a desire for self-improvement. Whether through education, work, parenthood or adhering to religious or ethical codes, each of us seeks to become a ‘better human’ in a variety of ways. And for some people, more consumerist pursuits hold the key to self-improvement: working out in the gym, wearing makeup, buying new clothes, or indulging in a spot of cosmetic surgery.
But now a new set of possibilities is opening up. Advances in biotechnology, neuroscience, computing and nanotechnology mean that we are in the early stages of a period of huge technological potential. Within the next 30 years, it may become commonplace to alter the genetic make-up of our children, to insert artificial implants into our bodies, or to radically extend our life
expectancy.” Paul Miller and James Wilsdon, Demos
This project uses design as a medium to explore the social, cultural and ethical consequences of these developments. Your design proposals should pose questions rather than provide answers, making complex issues tangible, and therefore debatable
MUTATIONS
Media and communication were on a collision course for several years and the fallout has had far-reaching results. Phone companies, Internet providers, and Media conglomerates are converging as the content they deliver and the devices that deliver it are becoming completely interwoven into each other and our technology-driven lives. From a user standpoint though, this has resulted mostly in a culture of the `MULTI` as technologies are simply added on to one another to deliver new types of content to as broad a consumer as possible.
In this project DI and IDE will be working with O2 to rethink the relationship between users, content, devices, and service providers. You will be investigating how these overlapping services, technologies, and objects do not just generate multiple possibilities; they interact with each other and our selves to create mutated ones.
Working in groups of 3 students will research and develop new mutations of communication/media/technology of the near future from the perspective of specific users. The notion of the `user` has changed dramatically and what was once a passive role is now a powerful position which allows people to take an active role in both content production and distribution. Each team must begin by examining a specific group of people to uncover their specific quirks, needs, types of communication, and interactions. From the research you will then develop highly specific services/products/media/devices which address the needs of your group.
In the final stage you will examine broader implications of your group’s specific needs and develop a proposal for how your mutation could affect a broader group of users. Each team will produce a “proof of concept” which explains both their mutation/device through physical prototypes and scenario driven illustrations/films.
54p7
Over the coming years, robots are destined to play a significant role in our daily lives. But how will we interact with them? What kind of new interdependencies and relationships might emerge in relation to different levels of robot intelligence and capability? Given a choice, what would we like to happen? How would we like our robots to exist in our homes, public spaces, cities, countryside, and within our bodies?
There are a number of established areas of research: Creating human or animal-like robots (androids); Robots for doing specific tasks that are too dangerous or unpleasant for humans (industrial, military); Invisible robots (in cars, in cities, automating everyday actions and assisting us); Alternative sources of energy like microbial fuel cells (ecobots, gastrobots, etc); Smart products (eg: robot vacuum cleaners); Networked and cellular robots (eg: swarms of
miniaturised robots); And research into the practicalities and metaphysics of artificial intelligence. But one area that has seen little attention is the design of our interactions with them.
In this project, we would like you to explore the idea of the ‘robot’ from an interaction point of view.
Stay away from the clichés. Think about meaning, emotional ties, and aesthetics. You can zoom in and focus on details, or zoom out and think about scenarios, it’s up to you, but whatever you do, your design proposal should explore and question social, psychological, political or aesthetic meanings robots might take on in the near future. Some things to think about: What exactly is a ‘robot’? Are artificial life forms robots? When does an animal become a robot / When does a robot become an animal? When does a machine become a robot / When does a robot become a machine
Radio is a strange mix between the physical and the ether; both an interface and content; an object and information.
Radio is... a thing on your kitchen shelf... music... background noise... electronics... services... radiation... networks... broadcasters... communication... culture... shared experiences...
Design a relationship to 'radio’, it could be in the ether or via the internet. It should not merely be about the radio itself, or just interacting with a radio. The radio as a ‘thing’ is simply the means of accessing radio as an experience. As well as practical needs, also think about more complicated and human ones... emotions, behaviours, desires, obsessions.
You could start by thinking a bit about what radio is... the experience it creates, how it mediates between people, whether it entertains, informs or persuades. You might want to consider what it is as a system (What is a live broadcast? Can you listen to two stations at once?); or as content (What can you listen to? What is radio when we can all broadcast?); or its social implications (What is radio in relation to social networks? How does radio create relationships between people, either in the world or in a home?); or as technology (What is internet radio? Why would a radio connect to the web? Is radio just audio?).
The project is also an opportunity to familiarise yourselves with electronics and to begin to explore how you'd like to engage with it as a medium, skill, information, tool and so on.
BMW INTENSE PROJECT -- NOMADS, MINI-NESS AND INFOSPACES
Cars no longer simply travel across geographic and spatial landscapes, they also traverse information landscapes. The tendency though, is to adapt existing objects like phones, TVs, DVD players, and GPS navigation devices for use in the car without really changing the nature of the experience. What if the car itself became an interface, would this suggest new devices, new uses for the car, or even new relationships between people, cars, and environments?
Think of the driver as a nomad using their Mini to navigate, experience and enjoy the information
landscape... what kind of relationship to it would the Mini provide? How would they access it? What tools would they need? How would it differ throughout the day/night and from person to person? How could they do all this in a very ‘Mini’ way?
The purpose of this project is to imagine new scenarios of use for the Mini in relation to information landscapes. And how the specific character of the mini could be reflected in its interactions with an information landscape and any necessary devices and services.
DESIGNER POLITICS
"On 25 April, about 40 members of a Japanese cult called Pana Wave Laboratory took over a 200-meter (600 ft) stretch of mountain road in Gifu prefecture, some 185 miles (300 km) west Tokyo, covering up crash barriers and roadside trees with huge white cloths. After three days, local officials ordered the caravan of 13 white vehicles to move on, but the cultists -- who dress all in white and wear surgical masks as protection against electromagnetic radiation -- refused, explaining that Yuko (Hiroko) Chino, their 69-year old guru, had terminal cancer after communist guerrillas had attacked her with microwaves. "
In this project we will explore the intersection of material culture (stuff, things, physicality) and ideology (ideas, beliefs, values).
What if the Labour and Conservative parties had their own product lines? How would they differ? What would a Conservative toaster be like, a Labour car, a Liberal Democratic mobile phone? This is not about appearance and style, but the values embedded in products and expressed through their functionality.
CLUB MINIHOMPY
This project is a collaboration with the France Telecom team developing a new system which generates an environment allowing people to create tighter social links. These links could be between close friends, relatives, communities of shared interest (such as hobby groups etc.) and people who met both on the Internet and in real life.
The service will contain many elements already familiar to us from existing applications on both desktop machines & mobiles (such as Blogger Flikr, ichat, IM Cyworld etc.). The system is both a web and (critically) mobile-based service and one of your design challenges is to try and take full advantage of both these elements. The system will allow users to design/customise their own ‘spaces’, provide ‘rooms’ that their existing friends can consult and enrich and a network for them to meet new people through. The system will link tightly into the users real life communities and networks.
What the team are keen for this new system to do is ‘strengthen social links’ and to explore ways that people can personalise the space - presenting their own individual quirks, likes and dislikes and blurring the boundary between their on and off-line personas.
Working with the plans for the technical achievements of the new system as a given, your job is to think very specifically about how a real group of users might use or abuse this type of environment.
Each if you will pick an actual Club or Society from the smorgasbord on offer at our neighbouring institution of Imperial College … be it cavers or the conservative club … your mission is to meet these people and persuade them to reveal to you as much information as you can.
We want you to feel as if you know and care about this group, that you understand not just what they do, where they do it and when, but why they do it. What are their motivations? What do they get out of their club? Why on earth did they join? Who are their family and friends? How do they communicate with other people in the club and how do their circles of associates spin out from this group?
Once you have as much information as you can gain about your chosen group you will have to tell us about them – why would we want to join this group?
Only then will you start to design with/for/against them … your design process for this project should be as specific and focussed as you can possibly make it. Focus on your particular club - revel in their specific likes, dislikes, passions and eccentricities and design a way for them to utilise an entirely bespoke system.
NANOTOPIA -- UTOPIA OR DYSPTOPIA?
This project is an opportunity to familiarise yourselves with some of the key issues surrounding
nanoscience and nanotechnology, especially its potential social, cultural and ethical impact on
society.
After some initial familiarisation and research you should identify either a hope or fear for
nanotechnology and develop it into a ‘what if...?’ scenario. Treat it as though it has already happened, and bring back some compelling evidence from your scenario (artefacts from the future) to present in the final crit.
The project has two other important elements: separating fact from fiction in relation to future time
scales; and identifying, making contact with, and consulting experts to help accurately locate your scenario in the near, mid or far future.
ME, ONLY BETTER
From smart pills to designer babies and extended life spans, technology now promises to transform our very nature ...
“We all share a desire for self-improvement. Whether through education, work, parenthood or adhering to religious or ethical codes, each of us seeks to become a ‘better human’ in a variety of ways. And for some people, more consumerist pursuits hold the key to self-improvement: working out in the gym, wearing makeup, buying new clothes, or indulging in a spot of cosmetic surgery.
But now a new set of possibilities is opening up. Advances in biotechnology, neuroscience, computing and nanotechnology mean that we are in the early stages of a period of huge technological potential. Within the next 30 years, it may become commonplace to alter the genetic make-up of our children, to insert artificial implants into our bodies, or to radically extend our life
expectancy.” Paul Miller and James Wilsdon, Demos
This project uses design as a medium to explore the social, cultural and ethical consequences of these developments. Your design proposals should pose questions rather than provide answers, making complex issues tangible, and therefore debatable
MUTATIONS
Media and communication were on a collision course for several years and the fallout has had far-reaching results. Phone companies, Internet providers, and Media conglomerates are converging as the content they deliver and the devices that deliver it are becoming completely interwoven into each other and our technology-driven lives. From a user standpoint though, this has resulted mostly in a culture of the `MULTI` as technologies are simply added on to one another to deliver new types of content to as broad a consumer as possible.
In this project DI and IDE will be working with O2 to rethink the relationship between users, content, devices, and service providers. You will be investigating how these overlapping services, technologies, and objects do not just generate multiple possibilities; they interact with each other and our selves to create mutated ones.
Working in groups of 3 students will research and develop new mutations of communication/media/technology of the near future from the perspective of specific users. The notion of the `user` has changed dramatically and what was once a passive role is now a powerful position which allows people to take an active role in both content production and distribution. Each team must begin by examining a specific group of people to uncover their specific quirks, needs, types of communication, and interactions. From the research you will then develop highly specific services/products/media/devices which address the needs of your group.
In the final stage you will examine broader implications of your group’s specific needs and develop a proposal for how your mutation could affect a broader group of users. Each team will produce a “proof of concept” which explains both their mutation/device through physical prototypes and scenario driven illustrations/films.
54p7
Over the coming years, robots are destined to play a significant role in our daily lives. But how will we interact with them? What kind of new interdependencies and relationships might emerge in relation to different levels of robot intelligence and capability? Given a choice, what would we like to happen? How would we like our robots to exist in our homes, public spaces, cities, countryside, and within our bodies?
There are a number of established areas of research: Creating human or animal-like robots (androids); Robots for doing specific tasks that are too dangerous or unpleasant for humans (industrial, military); Invisible robots (in cars, in cities, automating everyday actions and assisting us); Alternative sources of energy like microbial fuel cells (ecobots, gastrobots, etc); Smart products (eg: robot vacuum cleaners); Networked and cellular robots (eg: swarms of
miniaturised robots); And research into the practicalities and metaphysics of artificial intelligence. But one area that has seen little attention is the design of our interactions with them.
In this project, we would like you to explore the idea of the ‘robot’ from an interaction point of view.
Stay away from the clichés. Think about meaning, emotional ties, and aesthetics. You can zoom in and focus on details, or zoom out and think about scenarios, it’s up to you, but whatever you do, your design proposal should explore and question social, psychological, political or aesthetic meanings robots might take on in the near future. Some things to think about: What exactly is a ‘robot’? Are artificial life forms robots? When does an animal become a robot / When does a robot become an animal? When does a machine become a robot / When does a robot become a machine
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
jack schulze
http://www.kickerstudio.com/blog/2009/05/six-questions-from-kicker-jack-schulze/
Six Questions from Kicker: Jack Schulze
For the fourth installment in our Six Questions series, Kicker interviews Jack Schulze, of Schulze & Webb.
photo courtesy Timo / elasticspace.com
Jack obtained his MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art in 2006, previously running an independent design studio for four years and graduating in Graphic Design from Central Saint Martins in 2000. He is interested in optical perception, especially in display, and focuses his graphics work on looking and perspective. His projects in this area explore maps and representations of urban space. Most recently Jack’s interests are in the aesthetics of mechanisms, and his work is drawn from comics, cinema, manufacture and television.
1. What is the most cherished product in your life? Why?
I have old stuff which is rare and personal, like my grandfather’s migration documents, but those aren’t products. Matt Webb recently pointed me towards Bruce Sterling’s last post on Veridian. Sterling says the only stuff worth keeping is beautiful, emotionally important, or things you use all the time. Sell everything else. I don’t really cherish products that much. They lose their mystery when you work with them every day.
I like Monster Burp most as a product in the world at the moment, and also the Peecol series of figures by Eboy. That world of art vinyl works between manufacture and graphic design. It’s very clever, very elegant. I’m drawing an enormous amount from these bodies of work right now.
There’s also one of my vintage Transformers I really like. Those toys were truly remarkable pieces of engineering and design, and amazingly manufactured too. It is hugely inspirational to imagine there was once this team of people able to conceive, design and manufacture something of that level of beauty and cultural imagination. Amazing that Hasbro have managed to shit on the franchise so badly now.
2. What’s the one product you wish you’d designed, and why?
There are products I wish I’d designed because I like them and then people would think I’d done them and like me more. This list is massive. Off the top of my head: I wish I’d directed and conceived the perfume commercial where a guy on a helicopter kisses a woman at the top of the Eiffel Tower, and a Channel commercial with Little Red Riding Hood shooshing the wolf. I’d like to have been the first to take the photomontages Hockney produced in the 60s. I wish I’d written The Filth by Grant Morrison. I wish I’d conceived and made Super Mario Galaxy. I love the table-top skirmish game called Necromunda in the Warhammer universe, although I only played it once, because the social negotiation of the rules that always happens around the game, are embedded back into the rules. I think Formula 1 television coverage is visually completely remarkable. I have no idea what is going on, but it’s so good I can watch it just for the optics. It’s like injecting Photoshop filters straight into your eyeballs.
There are also those products I wish I’d designed because that would imply I had a much higher level of technical aptitude than I do. But I’m more interested in telling you all the things that would have been better had I done them. This response is more revealing than it looks. Design (verb) is often blamed or cited as to why a product is unsatisfying. Design (noun) is where that process manifests, but it’s rarely the process which has failed. It’s almost always something else.
So most of the things I’d like to redesign would include that something else. I would have to wield the enormous corporate power within the structures from which the design and products are inseparable. I wish I could do this with anything Nokia have produced since the 3210i. I wish I could design the Flash video platform. And someone needs to redesign Adobe Creative Suite, and it may-as-well be me, it certainly can’t get much shitter. I’d really like to work somewhere like Bang & Olufsen, I really appreciate the emphasis they place on desirability.
3. What excites you about being a designer? Why do you keep doing it?
It’s a funny question, like those ones you get for university applications, ‘why do you want to study at Theslethwick College of Brilliance?’ And you always end up thinking ‘um, because it’s on my bus route,’ but you actually write ‘because you reputation is unprecedented and I’m hungry for a stimulating and diverse educational environment,’ etc.
The truth is I don’t do much design. Recently I’ve been working on graphic work around the Here & There projection. That’s design, it’s true, although it isn’t the point of the project but just the current form of the output. Also recently lots of animation and photography, and that isn’t design. Working with Matt to shape the company is not design work. The word ‘design’ as I was taught it has shifted so much that I try to ignore it now. But I have to say, I’m probably unemployable, not having been an employee for ten years and I’ve only got hippy degrees.
I keep doing it because I get excited about my company and working with my colleagues. I like it that the company is set up in a way that there is a balance between working with other companies with very specific, directed interested, and our own explorations. I love working with Matt Webb and a guy called Paul. I like it when I’ve been involved with something that other people like, and I like that the work is culturally interesting and affecting and technically weird and challenges.
I’m personally most excited when I’m involved with something I’m literate in, but technically unfamiliar, when I’m in pursuit of something culturally new or playful. When there’s a sense of discovery or itchyness about newness, that’s when I’m happiest.
4. When do you first remember thinking of yourself as a designer?
Design is a weird word isn’t it? Sometimes it means a job title, hotly contested (not by me). This used to work better when design fields were associated with vocations (book designer, furniture designer). Now it seems suspiciously vague. Design is sometimes used like a verb, like an ambiguous cluster of unfamiliar processes. People say ‘I’m doing some design,’ or ‘I’m designing something.’
I was producing designs and doing design from a very early ago. It was always a component of my drawing as a child. I didn’t start calling myself a designer until I was in my early 20s, but now I don’t find it important to define myself in that territory. It’s easier to describe my company and the projects it has done, or to talk about the people I work with.
5. What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned, and who taught it to you?
No one cares about what you think, unless you do what you think. No one cares what you do, unless you think about what you do. No one ever really cares what you say.
I learnt this lesson from Spencer Thursfield, an old tutor of mine.
Here’s another. You get the work you do. If you want to do something else start doing it.
6. What are the 5 things all designers should know?
1) Don’t use processes like User Centred Design or Usability dogmatically. Learn your trade and do it properly and you’ll be able to deliver work confidently.
2) Talking about your work does not directly improve the actual quality of your work. Ultimately design happens in the world and in your hands, and not in your mouth.
3) Once it was possible for designers to hide in their vocations and ignore the context around their work. Designers are better now because they include business, processes, media and software in the substrates they work with.
4) Some people (they are wrong) say design is about solving problems. Obviously designers do solve problems, but then so do dentists. Design is about cultural invention. There are some people who want to reduce the domain of design to listable, knowable stuff, so it’s easy to talk about. Design is a glamorous, glittering world and this means they can engage without having to actually risk themselves on the outcome of their work. This is damaging. It turns design into something terrified of invention. Design is about risk. We all fear authentic public response to our work, but we have to be brave enough to overcome.
5) Always have nice pens.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
crisis meets crisis
fromPompeii on the American Riviera
One firefighter called the blaze a “three-headed monster”: it’s moving in three directions at once, and given the wind, its movement is unpredictable. As of yesterday, seventy-five homes were destroyed and thousands more were in danger. No deaths have been reported, though eleven firefighters have been injured. In spite of all this, Satya reports that “spirits are high. I think the whole town is just in awe of what could’ve been, if the emergency crews—all those involved, from city officials to police to firefighters—had not been as prepared and outfitted with resources as they have been.” Such preparedness is the slightly charred silver lining left behind by Santa Barbara’s last major fire, which was extinguished just six months ago.
It remains to be seen what will become of all those dismal cruise vacations, lately rerouted from Mexico through the “American Riviera” (i.e. Santa Barbara) due to swine-flu concerns. Crisis meets crisis.
Friday, May 8, 2009
the illumination of perspective
photos from jason hawke via http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/04/human_landscapes_from_above.html
the things we use, buy
the things we use, buy
Red vans awaiting shipment, parked on disused aerodrome at Upper Heyford Oxfordshire, UK. [google map] (© Jason Hawkes)
where we sleep, eat, live
where we sleep, eat, live
Apartment blocks, Hong Kong mainland. China. (© Jason Hawkes) #
how we grow
how we grow
Lines of crops growing near the Village of Prickwillow in Cambridgeshire. [google map] (© Jason Hawkes) #
how we enjoy nature
how we enjoy nature
Footpaths criss-crossing Hyde Park in London, UK. [google map] (© Jason Hawkes) #
how we destroy nature
how we destroy nature
Mucking Marshes Landfill, a major landfill site servicing London. [google map] (© Jason Hawkes) #
how we sleep, eat, live (the american dream)
how we sleep, eat, live (the american dream)
Newly built housing and new housing plots on edge of Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. [google map] (© Jason Hawkes) #
bio terrorist survivor
In this April 28, 2009 photo, Edgar Hernandez, 4, who according to Mexico's Veracruz state authorities survived the swine flu, plays in his garden in La Gloria, Mexico. Hundreds of his neighbors in La Gloria - villagers who live among pig-breeding farms - were suffering from flu-like symptoms, as well. (AP Photo/Alexandre Meneghini) #
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Post a Comment