Rather than tinkering with symptoms – such as inventing hydrogen-powered vehicles, or turning gas stations into battery stations – the more interesting design task is to re-think the way we use time and space.
— John Thackara – What’s in store for the future of individual mobility?
A generation of mathematically inclined economists neglected many of Keynes’s insights about the Depression because he put them into words. For decades economists sweated over fiendish mathematical equations, only to be brought down to earth by the credit crunch: Keynes’s well-turned phrases had come back to life.
FAVRD runs on a no-webcock algorithm. If you see Twitter as a venue for public relations or marketing, or as an audience eager to hear news of a post on your ‘blog’, or a rich hot sticky vertical, or if you consider yourself a web strategist, or if you talk earnestly about social media, or if you can read Techcrunch or listen to the Gillmor gang with a straight face, it’s very unlikely the things you say on Twitter will show up here.
Polychronicity is a term that describes people who prefer to work on multiple activities at the same time. Examples of polychronic behaviors include talking on the phone while driving a car and browsing the internet while sitting in meetings. Polychronicity is in contrast to those who prefer monochronicity (doing one thing at a time). The polychronic-monochronic concept was first developed by Edward Hall in 1959 in his anthropological studies of time use in different cultures.
Our engineers were so obsessed with the details on the Segway HT that they designed the meshes in the gearbox to produce sound exactly two musical octaves apart—when the Segway HT moves, it makes music, not noise.
Entrainment in the biomusicological sense refers to the synchronization of organisms to an external rhythm, usually produced by other organisms with whom they interact socially. Examples include firefly flashing, mosquito wing clapping as well as human music and dance.
— Entrainment (biomusicology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It’s not that music is too imprecise for words, but too precise
I believe that interaction design is still in the equivalent of the early stages of cinema. As yet, we have no fully developed language unique to interactive technology. So we are still drawing on the language of previous creative modes.
— Gillian Crampton Smith in (the Forword for) Designing Interactions
One reason I really like the idea of Give Me Something To Read (and the execution, but I’m a little biased there) is because of how rote the web has become for people like us — geeks with a thirst for information: we set up massive incoming torrents and feeds and dashboards of content, and then make it a race to read it all (and complain and brag when we can’t).
— nostrich on Give Me Something To Read (via marco)
The script isn’t the play—any more than design specifications are the actual product. The script guides, but is not the totality of the play. If it were, what would we need the actors for at all?
— Putting Together a Production: A Rehearsal Strategy for Design :: UXmatters
Boston architects propose vertical farms tended by robotic arms | DVICE
Elements of a Networked Urbanism by Adam Greenfield on Huffduffer →
Over the past several years, we’ve watched as a very wide variety of objects and surfaces familiar from everyday life have been reimagined as networked information-gathering, -processing, -storage and -display resources. Why should cities be any different?
What happens to urban form and metropolitan experience under such circumstances? What are the implications for us, as designers, consumers and as citizens?
Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design helps us to understand a product.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is durable.
Good design is consequent to the last detail.
Good design is concerned with the environment.
Good design is as little design as possible.
Back to purity, back to simplicity.
Nearness on Vimeo (via Vimeo)
