Antidote to Apathy

How to Make Stuff (These Days)

How to Make (Almost) Anything

Make Magazine

Makers, The Novel

MakerBot

FormLabs

KickStarter

By Land and Sea

Wodiczko & Rajchman @ Walker

Obama & Rosa

Negroponte @ The Economist

Your Mind's Eye, Coming Soon to a Store Near You

Skip to 3:30 to see a system that uses live brain scanning (FMRI) to visualize your imagination.

Difference, Universality, Change, Identity and Conflict

Deiter Ram's Ten Principles of Good Design

Earlier this week Apple became more valuable than Microsoft and Google (combined). It is amazing to think that such a large company could be built entirely upon principles of high quality design. Design is, afterall, the product of pure imagination. It is the act of making something out of nothing. In times of economic recession, where resources are scarce, and jobs are hard to find, focusing on quality design may be one of the best ways of bootstrapping prosperity.

So in honor of this major financial milestone, I thought now would be a good moment to reflect on the importance of design in Apple's ascension. In particular, Jony Ive's contribution to the company as Industrial Designer-in-Chief and the influence of another designer, Deiter Ram, on Ive's design philosophy.

According to Deiter Ram, good design:

Is innovative - The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

Makes a product useful - A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

Is aesthetic - The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products are used every day and have an effect on people and their well-being. Only well-executed objects can be beautiful. 

Makes a product understandable - It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user's intuition. At best, it is self-explanatory.

Is unobtrusive - Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user's self-expression.

Is honest - It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.

Is long-lasting - It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today's throwaway society.

Is thorough down to the last detail - Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.

Is environmentally friendly - Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

Is as little design as possible - Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

American Global Equilibrium

The Ministry of Storytelling

The Fuzz Buzz

Making a Toaster from Scratch

Global Reddening

Tyger

JavaScript. But not as we know it.

Javascript has taken over. The V8 engine makes it as fast as machine code. People are using it all over the place on the server-side as well as in web browsers. But the thing that many developers miss is that Javascript is actually a very different kind of language than its predecessors. Instead of being class-based, it is prototype-based and dynamically mutable, making it far more organic and wild. Instead of deferring to a strict hierarchical tree of class definitions like in Java, JS objects defer to other objects when calling a missing field. This makes for a structure that's more like a switching network of train lines than a branching tree limbs. (I'm a visual thinker.)

What's more, variables and functions can be easily added and removed at runtime, which has given rise to the notion of "mixins". You like the glow-in-the dark features of your jellyfish object and the hoppity-hop or your rabbit object? You can use the mixin pattern to blend these two objects into a new glowInTheDarkBunny object. It's not hierarchy, it's hybridity.

To get a sense of what all this means, check out this decent book on modern Javascript:

Poland A / Poland B

Apparently, Poland's version of So You Think You Can Dance? is a TV show called You Can Dance!. Hilarious.

WiFi Painting

The Divine Comedy

Two Police Forces

I just dug up this fascinating quote after reading Occupy Vancouver's current list of demands.

If law-abiding citizens are to be protected against unjust persecution by the police, there must be two police forces... one designed, as at present, to prove guilt, the other to prove innocence; and in addition to the public prosecutor there must also be a public defender, of equal legal eminence. This is obvious as soon as it is admitted that the acquittal of the innocent is no less a public interest than the condemnation of the guilty.

— Bertrand Russell in Power: a new social analysis

Media Art Innovation

Winter Comes in a Lot of Places in August

Steve and the Arts

The biggest achievement of Steve Jobs was to reorganize the technology industry around humanist ideals. For the bulk of its lifespan, computing had been dominated by military-industrial interests and engineering-driven design. Steve Jobs, through Apple, NeXT and then Apple again, created a massive gravitational center around the needs of creative people. He made emotion and intuition important in a world of rationality, logic and predictability. Steve, in effect, brought the arts firmly back to the core of the technological universe. For that, we can all be very thankful.

The Music of Pi

I wonder what this would sound like transposed to a minor scale... or a blues scale (for those of us who died a little in math class)...

Joan Jonas @ Venice Biennale