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13 October 2008
Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:18:01 GMTEveryware
Adam Greenfield
Adam Greenfield’s 81 theses on the future of ubiquitous computing. Shoudl’ve nailed ‘em up to a door somewhere. A sensible look at how computers are set to work their way further and further into our daily lives, hopefully for the better, but who knows.
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17 September 2008
Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:13:03 GMTIn the Bubble
John Thackara
Notes headed with the chapter they come from.
On closer inspection however, urban sprawl is not mindless at all. There is nothing inevitable about its development. Sprawl is the result of zoning laws designed by legislators, low-density buildings designed by developers, marketing strategies designed by ad agencies, tax breaks designed by economists, credit lines designed by banks, geomatics designed by retailers, data-mining software designed by hamburger chains, and automobiles designed by car manufacturers. The interactions between all these systems and human behavior are complicated and hard to understand—but the policies themselves are not the result of chance. “Out of control” is an ideology, not a fact. 5
Lightness
Apart from its impact on the wider economy, information technology is heavy in itself. It’s a heavy user of matter in all the hardware needed to run it. One of the hidden costs of the misnamed silicon age is the material and energy flows involved in the manufacture and use of microchips. It takes 1.7 kilograms of materials to make a microchip with 32 megabytes of random-access memory—a total 630 times the mass of the final product. The “fab” of a basic memory chip, and running it for the typical life span of a computer, eats up eight hundred times the chip’s weight in fossil fuel. Thousands of potentially toxic chemicals are used in the manufacturing process. 10
One of the most startling pieces of information brought to light in Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins’s Natural Capitalism is that the amount of waste matter generated in the manufacture of a single laptop computer is close to four thousand times its weight on your lap. Fifteen to nineteen tons of energy and materials are consumed in the fabrication of one desktop computer. To compound matters: As well as being resource-greedy to make, information technology devices also have notoriously short lives. The average compact disc is used precisely once in its life, and every gram of material that goes into the production and consumption of a computer ends up rather quickly as an emission or as solid waste. 11
The pièce de résistance in the extraordinary Natural Capitalism is that the amount of matter and energy wasted, or caused to be wasted, by the average North American consumer is roughly one million pounds a year: a “million pound backpack.” 12
ELIMA, the Environmental Life Cycle information Management and Acquisition project. 13
A lot of potentially weight-reducing research goes unreported. Environmental design information tends to be scattered and fragmented, and many eco-design tools and data that could help us remain hidden from view and underused. Kathalys, a research group in Holland, turns ecological footprints into design action points by measuting pressure on the environment in terms of everyday activities in the home—such as taking a shower. Taking just one shower in a top-of-the-range cubicle, Kathalys has discovered, consumes as much as thirty-five kilojoule-pounds in energy and two hundred litres of water. Kathalys is testing a mist shower that, combined with water and heat recycling, reduces those numbers tendolf, to five megajoule-pounds of heat and twenty litres of water. 15
Buckminster Fuller I think designed a super–bathroom, of which a mist shower played it’s part. I’ve wanted one ever since. It just sounds awesome, and how hard can it be? Why aren’t they sold at Home Depot?
TNS (The Natural Step), one of many “frameworks introduced to give us a better view of the big picture.”
- Minimize the waste of matter and energy.
- Reduce the movement and distribution of goods.
- Use more people and less matter. 16
…five types of capital enable us to deliver goods and services we need to sustain and improve the quality of our lives: natural, human, social, manufactured, and financial capital. 17
It’s the accumulation of such tiny acts that weighs heavily on the planet. A relationship, or flow, or accumulation, or change, is by its nature invisible. An important new task of design is to make these behaviors and changes within systems intelligible. We need new ways to understand the morphology of systems—their dynamics, their “intelligence”: how they work, what stimulates them, how and why they change. 22
We’ve embarked on an operation compared by Ezio Manzini to “changing the engines of an aircraft while in flight.” “It may appear a difficult task,” understates Manzini, “but consider this: during two centuries of innovation, until now, we have reduced the role of labour in production by even larger proportaions. We have done it before.” 23
The Hanover Principles, prepared by William McDonough’s architecture firm. 25
Shaking off out culture’s mechanical conception of the world, the idea of controllability, and our all-round anthropocentrism will be especially difficult. Writes Theodore Roszak: “Ecology, as the study of interconnectedness, has a psychological dimension—the transition from egocentrism, to ecocentrism. Copernicus took us out of the center of the solar system; we now need to take ourselves out of the center of the biosphere.” 26
Mentions Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for a New Millennium, which looks interesting but I can’t find a copy or much of anything but passing references. 26
Speed
The acceleration of the speed of human population growth means that in a single human lifetime, the Earth may lost half of its living species, species that it took tens of millions of years for evolution to create through the process of speciation. 32
the age of acceleration
The Greeks, Levine explains had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos means absolute time: linear, chronological, and quantifiable. Kairos, however, means qualitative time—the time of opportunity, chance, and mischance. If you go to bed because the clock says 10:30, you are adhering to a chronological time sustem. if you go to sleep beacuse you’re tired, you are following kairological or event time. 33
Thoreau: “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” 33
The Kabyle people in Algeria, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu discovered, despise any semblance of haste in their social affairs and refer to the clock as “the devil’s mill.” 35
Beethoven: “the usage of measured tempo made no sense in music.” 49
Mobility
Throughout the world […] 244 million containers are moving around, or standing in yards, or waiting to be delivered, at any one time. If all these containers were placed end to end, the line would stretch to the moon and back eight times. Their contents account for about 90 percent of all the world’s traded cargo by value. In other words, 85 percent of all the goods and materials in the world are not in factories or shops, but moving, or waiting to move—on the road, in the air, or on the sea. 55
“There is far too little information in the so-called information age”, “we feel compelled to reduce all human knowledge and experience to symbolic form”, “Digitization speeds the flow of data, but impoverishes our lived experience.” 63
“[The human brain] comprises the equivalent of one hundred billion squids linked together. Overall the human brain is the most complicated thin in the known universe—known, that is, to man, to itself.” —Edward O. Wilson.
“Nature doesn’t commute to work.” 72
Locality
A sustainable city, Illich foresaw, has to be a working city, a city of encounter and interaction—not a city for passive participation in entertainment. Sustainable cities will be postspectacular. 76
“Tourism—human circulation considered as consumption—is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.” Guy Debord wrote that more than forty years ago, in The Society of the Spectacle. […] Cultural attractions are like genetically modified food: bland, tasteless, and a threat to the ecosystem. 77
A city full of people can now be seen as a live database, full of knowledge, time, and attention—incarnated by human beings—that any of us might use. Louis Kahn talked about the city as a “place of availabilities”; with wireless networks and search technologies, the potential becomes actual. 86
Situation
Our very sense of being is based on an experience of process, activity, and movement. We seem to find an image of our own existence in the changing lights of the natural world. Henry Plummer, 103
Place is not given, it is made. Malcolm McCullough, 111
Convivality
The mortality rate of men with cardiovascular disease is inversely related to the level of social connectedness. 114
“When people no longer have the need or desire to resolve their problems within the network of their own relationships, medicine becomes the alibi of a pathogenic society.” Illich concluded that we have thrust the bad things of life—old age, death, pain, and handicap—onto doctors so that families and society will not have to face them. 117
Learning
Learning is a complex, social, and multidimensional process that does not lend itself to being sent down a pipe—for example, from a website. Knowledge, understanding, wisdom—or “content,” if you must—are qualities one develops through time. They are not a thing one is sent. 135
We might reject the narrow focus of much corporate education, but it’s partly our own fault as a society. We have filled the world with such unstable technology and clunky systems; these need to be looked after by people with limited horizons who do what they are told and don’t ask too many questions. 137
Over-regimented teachers are forced to cram too much predetermined content into students who spend so much time learning that they have no time to think. It’s a downward spiral. The more important learning becomes, the more demands we put on teachers and students within rigidly organized institutions. 143
Literacy
Design is to make information digestible, not to keep it out. 162
The body is our general medium for having a world; sight and movement are specific ways of entering into relationships with objects. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 171
Computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets. Ivan Illich, 180
How much do we really know about the trash heaps, slums, and wars depicted by today’s imaging technologies? THese technologies are supposed to give us a clearer image—but by sanitizing the subject, they prevent us from knowing reality itself. 183
Smartness
We would not be here had not our ancestors rotted. All organisms are designed with the intention of being recycled. Learning from nature, this means we have to be careful about bond energies in materials and see that they can be broken down easily. Julian Vincent, 191
Three thousand lines of code in an electric toothbrush? 195
The world is already filled with hundreds of microprocessors for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Think of all those ATMs, ticket-cending machines, traffic lights, billboards, cellular phones, pagers, and cash registers. A new car from General Motors, contains $675 worth of steel and $2,500 worth of electronics. 198
China is issuing all its citizens above the age of sixteen a smart card id? 201
Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we are frighteningly inert. Donna Haraway (Cyborg Manifesto), 201
Flow
“partial solutions, continually produced” 214
“We are all designers now” 226
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11 May 2007
Fri, 11 May 2007 17:28:39 GMTTimeless Beauty
John Lane
We have come to talk of music and drama and art and architecture as if they were technical words for remote abstractions or exceptional luxuries, but what is civilization for, if it is not to produce poetry, music, beauty and courtesy? These things are nothing in themselves unless they have a use for life… William Richard Lethaby, 15
Keats: Negative Capability 24
Speech is not of the tongue, but of the heart. The tongue is merely the instrument with which one speaks. He who is dumb is dumb in the heart, not in his tongue… As you speak so is your heart. Paracelsus, 44
The greatest thing that a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and to tell what it saw in a plain way. Hindreds of people can talk for one who cna thing, and thousands can think for the one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, philosophy, and religion – all in one. John Ruskin, 48
Although human ingenuity makes various inventions, corresponding by various machines to the same end, it will never discover any inventions more beautiful, more appropriate or more direct than nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous. Leonardo Da Vinci, 55
On the novelty of landscape, John Ruskin, 56
For the Native Americans, art and religion, art and life, were not separate; nor were the beautiful and the functional. Art, beauty, and spirituality were so firmly intertwined that words neither existed nor were needed to separate them. This wholeness was a function of the fact that everything in their universe worked together: poetry didn’t exist apart from ritual, and ritual didn’t exist apart from vision and meditation and even healing. This philosophy of relating all life and all materials permeated even the simplest of objects, a Pawnee drum, a pair of slippers or a Crow medicine bag. 73
The earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with god. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 102
Fritz Lang: Metropolis 139
We must draw our standards from the natural world. We must honor with the humility of the wise the bounds of that natural world and the mystery which lies beyond them, admitting that there is something in the order of being which evidently exceeds all our competence. Vaclav Havel, 143
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wander, not longer marvel, is as good as dead. Albert Einstein, 155
Walt Whitman on religion, 158:
Heaven was here on Earth and the physical and the spiritual could not be divided; they were, are, and always will be the same. [...] The future would see a spirituality of meditation and the contemplation of beauty.
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02 April 2007
Mon, 02 Apr 2007 21:12:54 GMTBeautiful Evidence
Tufte’s newest tome on the art of information design, or whatever he calls it these days. I really don’t do much design of any sort, but find the stuff fascinating to look at and even read about. Here’s a list of things from the book that I’d love to have poster size and hang somewhere:
- 17 – Prints of fish.
- 37 – Pages from book on skiing.
- 46 – Visualization of Chopin piece.
- 73 – horse by Verrocchio.
- 84 – Centuar manuscript.
- 96 – da Vinci sketches of the moon, 103 – da Vinci star chart.
And a few notes:
be approximately right rather than exactly wrong 50
The rage to conclude:
The rage for wanting to conclude is one of the most deadly and most fruitless manias to befall humanity. Each religion and each philosophy has pretended to have God to itself, to measure the infinite, and to know the recipe for happiness. What arrogance and what nonsense! I see, to the contrary, that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never concluded. Gustave Flaubert, 154
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30 November 2006
Thu, 30 Nov 2006 21:34:05 GMTThe Nature of Order Book 2: The Process of Creating Life
Christopher Alexander
Architects are much too concerned with the design of the world (its static structure), and not yet concerned enough with the design of the generative processes that create the world (its dynamic structure). 4
Real kindness is something quite different, something valuable in itself. It is a true process, not guided by the the grasp for a goal, but guided by the minute-to-minute necessity of caring, dynamically, for the feelings and well-being of another. This is not trivial, but deep; sincerely related to human feeling; and not predictable in its end-result, because the end-result is not a goal. Unlike the goal-oriented picture, which is imposed intellectually on our substance as persons, real kindness is a process true to our essential human instinct and to our knowledge of what it means to be a person. But the machine-age view showed a process like kindness as being oriented toward a goal, just as every machine too has its purpose — it’s goal, what it is intended to produce. 9
The Principle of Least Action, 37:
The principle says that the evolution of any dynamic system will always follow the path of least work.
Under these circumstances, as layer upon layer of smooth unfolding takes place, what develops is a system of centers which is stronger, crustier, and more imbricated, and in which the centers (at first hundreds, then thousands, or tens of thousands) all reinforce and intensify each other. 65
This, I believe, is an essential model which teaches us the real meaning of living structure, and which shows us these phenomena as naturally existing phenomena of beauty which will occur without effort in any world where the wholeness is allowed to unfold smoothly and truthfully, without disturbing previously existing centers. Once this is clear, we shall then have a vision of the world in which the world itself — all of it — animals, plants, mountains, rivers, buildings, roads, terraces, rooms, and windows — is part of a single system and a single way of understanding. 83
Thus the world has entered a new phase. What is made, what is built now, what develops in the world, is governed by images and rules. It is no longer automatically governed by the existing wholeness. It is now governed by what we decide. 109
The essence of successful unfolding is that form develops step by step, and that the building as a whole then emerges, coherent, organized. The success if this process depends, always, on sequence. A building design can unfold successfully only when its features “crystallize out” in a proper order. 129
It goes on like that. It is not complicated, not pretentious, but simple and obvious. It is just common sense. 130
Thus what I have referred to as the “rough, rambling” quality of so much that is good in the environment, comes from the light-hearted yet profound adaptation which such a simple stepwise process encourages, and which a more formal or controlled design process cannot achieve. 171
Instead of using plans, design, and so on, I shall argue that we must instead use generative processes. Generative processes tell us what to do, what actions to take, step by step, to make buildings and building designs unfold beautifully, rather than detailed drawings which tell us what the end-result is supposed to be. 176
*All* the well-ordered complex systems we know in the world, all those anyway that we view as highly successful, are generated structures, not fabricated structures. 180
The step-by-step approach works. The all-or-nothing approach does not work. THis is the secret of biological evolution. During the course of evolution, the adaptation of the thousands and millions of variables that must occur to make one successful organism happens step-by-step, essentially one gene at a time. That is what makes evolution possible. It would be impossible for nature to “design” a system as complex as any organism all at once. 237
Butterfly effect, 241:
If we examine a complex natural system evolving, each next stage of its evolution depends on its previous stage. Mechanistic 19th-century science created a thought-model in which the next stage would be easily predictable from the previous stage. But it turns out that the world is not like the mechanical thought-model. More sophisticated discoveries have made it clear that in a complex system the next stage is dependent on the current configuration of the whole, which in turn may depend on subtle minutiae in the history of the previous wholes, so “reave-like” that there is no way to predict the path of the emerging system accurately ahead of time.
To create a living world, successfully, we must again find ways of making all building processes move forward in this experimental, responsive fashion. That on thing alone, as a kind of bedrock for all design and all planning and all building, will change the world. 246
What steps do you take, in what order? The most basic instruction I can give you as a guide for a living process, is that you move with certainty. That means, you take small steps, one at a time, deciding only what you know. You try never to take a step which is a guess or a “why don’t we try this?” Large scale trial-and-error, shots in the dark, simply do not work. Rather, you move by slow, small decisions, deciding one thing, getting sure about it, and then moving on.
...
When I say that you should move in small decisions, I do not mean that the decisions should be small in physical scale. Rather, I mean that the content of each decision should be limited to a particular subject, to some feature of the design, disconnected from other matters, and floating, to an extent, by itself. 258
We should run through the possibilities very fast, and reject most of them. If we do accept one, we should accept it, reluctantly, only when we finally encounter something for which no good reason presents itself to reject it, which appears genuinely wonderful to us, and which demonstrably makes the feeling of the whole become more profound. 258
The crux of every design process lies in finding the generative sequence for that design, and making sure that sequence is the right one for the job. [...]
Another way of saying the same thing is to observe that for many people, perhaps the most difficult thing of all in understanding living process, and in getting a proper sequence for the unfolding of the whole, is reconciling oneself to the idea of doing one thing at a time. 317
It is only in its uniqueness to unique conditions, made necessary by find adaptation, that anything takes on living form. This is true to such an extent that if the structure of uniqueness at every part does not occur within a structure, we can be sure that it is not an unfolded whole, not a living structure at all. 324
Just make it nice at every spot.
337In any living process, or any process of design or making, the way forward, the next step which is more structure-enhancing, is that step which most intensifies the feeling of the emerging whole. 371
What matters is that the building — the room, the canyon, the paingting, the ornament, the garden — as they are created, send profound feeling back towards us. 372
What I am saying then, is that before making anything, large or small, and before each step in the process of making it — before each step — we must be able to feel its emotional substance. 383
The idea that a building becomes more “organic” if it has a more complex form, even when based on notions of the interior organization, is almost always wrong. 422
Simplicity:
making the essential in life come forward, and allowing the inessential to be laid aside. 462
To understand the idea that the symmetries in a structure are “just right,” consider, for example, the flow of electricity in two parallel wires. Other things being equal, the current will flow equally in the two wires. Why is this? If we want to, we can invoke some rule like Ohm’s law or the principle of least action, to show why the wires carry the same current. But the deepest explanation, the most profound one, is simply this: There is no reason for the two wires to carry different currents, because the situation is symmetrical. Therefore, they carry the same current. In the absence of any reason, thing distribute themselves symmetrically. Asymmetries occur only where there are reasons powerful enough to generate them. 472
...the lack of need for “image,” again makes it possible for people to do just what is required, and nothing else. 478
In the 20th century we assumed that to be simple is to use drastic geometric shapes lacking in structure. Yet nature teaches us that what is truly simple — a waterfall say — is vastly complex — as a structure — and yet vastly simple in its essence. Thus we must strive for something which is utterly simple, in the sense that there is nothing unwanted there, nothing extra. At the same time we know that if we succeed in being truly simple, we reach a find filigree of level upon levels in which every part is unique, each adapted to the one unique spot in the world where it lies. 489
Frederick Taylor, mentioned 515.
The traditional process of the architect then, what is it? [...] Making, designing, building, helping. 560
The idea that feeling itself can become both criterion and instrument – that what is done, no matter how large or how small, can become personal, connected to the personal self of all human beings – and that this process then opens the door to a new form of society. That is truly revolutionary. That can shake the world. 567
What I do know, and am certain of, is that the society of the future, the long future of men and women on our planet, will – must – inevitably be carried forward by this kind of process which allows the nourishment of the individual to happen at the same time that vast, and highly technical developments occur. 569
It is the vision of a future living Earth that draws me on. Inspired by a throughly new view of structure, feuled by a view which sees living process as the origin of all life, this allows us to contemplate, for the first time, the idea that one day such living process will cover and completely generate, in biological fashion, the natural and human-made and built environment that we may ultimately learn to call our living Earth. 570
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21 September 2006
Thu, 21 Sep 2006 09:09:08 GMT Death 'N' Stuffvia Kjell Olsen2071 days agohave we become so bored by life that we’ve inadvertently become inured to death?
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31 July 2006
Mon, 31 Jul 2006 11:37:10 GMT Dangerous Beauty: The Art of the Shivvia Kjell Olsen2122 days agoResourceful design?
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29 July 2006
Sat, 29 Jul 2006 11:51:00 GMTBrilliant Orange
David Winner
A look into the synthesis of Dutch culture, football, and design. A few months ago one of the guys at work mentioned it, and when I saw it again mentioned here there was no stopping me telling the friendly librarians to send it my way. Centered around the freestyle, elegant, beautiful style of Netherlands football from the glory days, Winer looks at how that philosophy merges with the rest of the Dutch world. Lots of talk about Soccer and Design, two good hooks for me.
Pieter Jansz Saenredam (59), post renaissance dutch painter. Wow, find Interior of the Church of St Bavo in Haarlem and take a look at it..
Hollandse Velden (62), Hans Van der Meer on photography:
Football is a game of space So why should you leave the space out? Every Monday in the newspapers you see the same stupid, boring close-ups taken from behind the goals with long telephoto lenses which distort the space. Those pictures show you football situations but you have no idea what they mean. Two players fight for the ball. So what? Where on the pitch are they? IN the 1950s, we had different pictures, more interesting photographs of the crowd, wide-angle pictures of the game. The close-ups tell you so little. When the sports photography archives are opened in a hundred years, there will be a whole part of the history of the game missing because all the interesting little things around the pitch were simply not photographed. 64
You can’t rationalize it. It’s like driving a car. That is also about being part of a system larger then you… the car becomes you. You can only drive it when you don’t know the rules any more, when you forget everything they taught you. Every time you turn a corner, you don’t get out of the car to measure the curves and then get back into the car. You do everything blind because of the system, the road and the other cars, which are part of the system too… And that’s the moment when you are ‘in form’ in both senses. It feels good and there’s this whole hectic feeling of extension into the world this is being “informed.” Lars Spuybroek (architect), 71
We played with anything as long as it was round – rolled up papers tied with string, anything. Some people’s parents had money and could get hold of a proper ball, but mostly it was tennis balls. You develop great technique like that. The ground was hard, so you didn’t want to fall because it hurt; so you have good balance. And the game was very quick because the hard ground makes the game quicker. No one ever told us how to play. It was all natural. Arnold Muhren, 119
I’ve always wanted to con kids into playing soccer with a tennis ball, I kick them around my house and play keep away with the dogs using only my feet, and it’s good fun. But something about having fields and goals makes it hard to use tennis balls, and I’ve never even played soccer in the street. Goddamn privilege.
Brazil, sadly, is no longer swinging and flaming. I see defenders boot the ball away shamelessly. Holland must never play like that. If we did, people would murder me, and they would be right to do so. Guus Hiddink, 149
Holland v. Italy, Argentia ‘78: Arie Haan 163 (Whenever a specific goal came under discussion, I checked for it on youtube or google video, and it would be there.)
I think it is very Dutch to look for a simple solution. And the biggest thrill in our work is to find an even simpler solution. That is what we like. In the end the most satisifying solution is the one where you have cleared everything away and there is no solution at all any more but, at the same time, the problem has been solved. That’s the nicest way of doing it. Benthem, 237-8
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21 June 2006
Wed, 21 Jun 2006 23:46:00 GMTCambiasso
I really want this to post up on my wall. Also a fascinating post on design and architecture and football, but that sort of thing just flies right over my head.
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21 April 2006
Fri, 21 Apr 2006 09:57:00 GMT Sci-fi I like, Fictional Futures, Goldsmithsvia Kjell Olsen2223 days agoThis is why I like design, because we can look at all these crazy things and float off into wildly abstracted spaces, but in the end it has to come down to stuff, and the stuff I really like is the everyday. That
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18 April 2006
Tue, 18 Apr 2006 20:25:33 GMT Hacking A More Tasteful MySpaceKjell Olsen2226 days agoMike Davidson hacks his myspace page to (_gasp_) look decent.
Many MySpace outsiders knock the service because its garish appearance and overall clunkiness overshadow anything good that may be underneath.
I’m going to say that’s a pretty damn good reason not to use the thing. But I might just have to make a profile and take it out for a spin sometime this summer.
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15 April 2006
Sat, 15 Apr 2006 19:06:00 GMTNotes on the Synthesis of Form
Christopher Alexander
Alexander lays out a system for designing complex forms, taking into account that just the human brain is completely incapable of such a task.
His system is a graph of design considerations organized hierarchically to minimize interference between individual subsets of the graph. When subsets are sufficiently decoupled, they will come to functional equilibrium independently of the entire system, allowing the form being designed to be created and fulfill it’s requirements quickly.
Alexander lays out two traditions of design: the unselfconscious, and the selfconscious. The unselfconscious builder acts within a complete system of design, taught to him by means of example and by hand. The selfconscious is today’s architect – taught in school and putting his reputation on the line, trying to be new and different, with each project undertaken.
The Mousgoum cannot afford, as we do, to regard maintenance as a nuisance which is best forgotten until it is time to call the local plumber. It is in the same hands as the building operation itself, and its exigencies are as likely to shape the form as those of the initial construction. 31
I shall call a culture unselfconscious if its form-making is learned informally, through imitation and correction. And I shall call a culture selfconscious if its form-making is taught academically, according to explicit rules. 36
On the unconscious:
No complex adaptive system will succeed in adapting in a reasonable amount of time unless the adaptation can proceed subsystem by subsystem, each subsystem relatively independent of the others. 41
Closely associated with this immediacy is the fact that the owner is his own builder, that the form-maker not only makes the form but lives in it. Indeed, not only is the man who lives in the form the one who made it, but there is a special closeness of contact between man and form which leads to constant rearrangement of unsatisfactory detail, constant improvement. The man, already responsible for the original shaping of the form, is also alive to its demands while he inhabits it. And anything which needs to be changed is changed at once. 49
This is the second crucial feature of the unselfconscious system’s form-production. Failure and correction go side by side. There is no deliberation in between the recognition of a failure and the reaction to it. 50
Rigid tradition and immediate action may seem contradictory. But it is the very contrast between these two which makes the process self-adjusting. 52
The forms produced in such a system are not the work of individuals, and their success does not depend on ant one man’s artistry, but only on the artist’s place within the process. 59
On the conscious:
With the invention of a teachable discipline called “architecture,” the old process of making form was adulterated and its chances of success destroyed. 58
To achieve in a few hours at the drawing board what once took centuries of adaptation and development, to invent a form suddenly which clearly fits its context – the extent of the invention necessary is beyond the average designer. 59
It isn’t that the designer sucks, it’s that he pretends not to suck. Which makes him suck all the more.
Language gets in the way of our reckoning with a design problem:
But once these concrete influence are represented symbolically in verbal terms, and these symbolic representations or names subsumed under larger and still more abstract categories to make them amenable to thought, they begin seriously impair out ability to see beyond them. 69
Caught in a net of language of our own invention, we overestimate the language’s impartiality. Each concept, at the time of its invention no more then a concise way of grasping many issues, quickly becomes a precept. We take the step from description to criterion too easily, so that what is at first a useful tool becomes a bigoted preoccupation. 70
In this fashion the selfconscious individual’s grasp of problems is constantly misled. His concepts and categories, besides being arbitrary and unsuitable, are self-perpetuating. Under the influence of concepts, he not only does things from a biased point of view, but sees them biasedly as well. The concepts control his conception of fit and misfit – until in the end he sees nothing but deviations from his conceptual dogmas, and loses not only the urge but even the mental opportunity to frame his problems more appropriately. 70
We can’t get out from under ourselves, we’re completely self absorbed by nature. We’re so good, who would even want to deviate from his conceptual dogmas. So?
The dilemma is simple. As time goes on the designer gets more and more control over the process of design. But as he does so, his efforts to deal with the increasing cognitive burden actually make it harder and harder for the real casual structure of the problem to express itself in the process 73
If theory cannot be expected to invent form, how is it likely to be useful to a designer? 75
Alexander introduces his program as a layer in between the subjective selfconscious interpretation of a design problem and it’s application to a form. The creation of an interrelated set of specifications (graph theory) reduced to it’s simplest and least coupled form (a tree), can mediate our bias toward a problem and lead to the best solution.
Form and requirement diagrams: form diagram represents what an object will look like, a requirement diagram represents how it will work. Separate the two aren’t of any help to designing the solution to a problem.
The solution of a design problem is really only another effort to find a unified description. The search for realization through constructive diagrams is an effort to understand the required form so fully that there is no longer a rift between its functional specification and the shape it takes. 90
The unified description is the merger of form and requirement, representing all the information pertinent to solving the problem at hand.
In all these cases, the invention is based in a hunch which actually makes it easier to understand the problem. Like such a hunch, a constructive diagram will often precede the precise knowledge which could prescribe its shape on rational grounds. 91
And Alexander is already on his way to getting at the idea of a pattern langauge:
Every component has this twofold nature: it is first a unit, and second a pattern, both a pattern and a unit. Its nature as a unit makes it an entity distinct from its surroundings. Its nature as a pattern specifies the arrangement of its own component units. It is the culmination of the designer’s task to make every diagram both a pattern and a unit. As a unit it will fir into the hierarchy of larger components that fall above it; as a pattern it will specify the hierarchy of smaller components which it itself is made of. 131
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01 March 2006
Wed, 01 Mar 2006 21:50:00 GMT YouTube - microsoft ipod packaging parodyvia Kjell Olsen2274 days agoI figured that this was parody, in which case it’s worth a look, but I wasn’t going to go and elevate it to post on my blog status. But it’s an actual internal MS project, which makes it completely hilarious. Plebs.
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27 December 2005
Tue, 27 Dec 2005 17:42:00 GMTDon't Make Me Think!
Steve Krug
A good look at usability in web design. Quick read with nice illustration. I got the second edition, all nice and glossy, and had I been going anywhere on an airplane, likely could have finished reading it while up in the air.
Not too much to say about it, but that it will be a nice one to have on the shelf to peek at.
The overall idea is that of common sense – make things easy for the people using your website. Test the site against actual people to see what needs improvement. Test early in the development cycle, so that feedback can quickly be integrated into the site.
Applies more to static web sites. There isn’t lots directly applying to web apps, which is more what I’m interested in, but most of it rubs off in some applicable fashion.
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12 December 2005
Mon, 12 Dec 2005 14:10:58 GMT Renzo Pianovia Kjell Olsen2353 days agothe people who make the most noise often have the least to shout about.
In some way, people believe that if you are permeable, if you are a good listener, you don’t have the quality of somebody with a firm attitude. But this is not true. I think people should try to teach young children that these qualities – stubbornness and a capacity to listen- might look like they are opposites, but they are not. This is what, fundamentally, I got from my mother.
If you are the first in the class, I guess – I never experienced that – but I guess you grow up with the feeling that other people will learn from you. You are teaching others, not the opposite. And I feel that there is a moment when, unfortunately, because of that, you stop learning. You stop absorbing. And life is about learning, about grabbing every occasion. And art is about that; art is robbery in the noblest sense. It is taking things. Art! Art! In every sense.
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09 December 2005
Fri, 09 Dec 2005 15:16:58 GMT Simple means launching somethingvia Kjell Olsen2356 days agoI love these guys:
If you find yourself talking more than walking, shut up, cut the vision in half, and launch it. You can always fill in the gaps later. In fact, you
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01 December 2005
Thu, 01 Dec 2005 13:28:45 GMT Venom Line by the Specialized - Dexigner Design Forumsvia Kjell Olsen2364 days agoBas ass sweet prototype bicycles, for release 2006.
It’s one of the first bikes in the world to have no rear hub. That’s right, no rear hub. The rear wheel has a special magnetically polarized rim that is suspended inside the frame, where it floats inside a magnetic suspension field. [...] The Viper looks crazy, but it works!
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20 November 2005
Sun, 20 Nov 2005 11:04:29 GMT Flipbookvia Kjell Olsen2375 days agoBienvenue sur FLIPBOOK.info, un site enti
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19 November 2005
Sat, 19 Nov 2005 01:35:13 GMT paper worksvia Kjell Olsen2377 days agoPaper structures/sculptures.
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02 November 2005
Wed, 02 Nov 2005 16:44:54 GMT Remake/Remodelvia Kjell Olsen2393 days agoI’m blocking out a site for my yet to be realized business, and it looks lots like this. Almost exactly, but with different colors. Me like.
My remit? Nothing but content. The content is king. Nice big bold blocks of text. All the fancy stuff kept hidden.
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31 October 2005
Mon, 31 Oct 2005 17:28:00 GMT Material guyvia Kjell Olsen2395 days agoHow long do you think concrete lasts? It has many problems and it’s very difficult to replace or fix. If a paper tube is damaged it can be replaced by a new one. The lifespan of a building has nothing to do with the materials. It depends on what people do with it. If a building is loved, then it becomes permanent. When it is not loved, even a concrete building can be temporary.
The next year, the Kobe earthquake struck in his native Japan, and Ban came to the aid of the Vietnamese refugee community. “All the temporary houses were outside the city, but if they moved out of the city they would lose their jobs. So they had to live under plastic sheets in the park, and it became very unhealthy. Neighbours tried to kick them out. I thought maybe if I redesigned everything very nicely they could continue living there.” Ban came up with a simple “log cabin” made out of thick paper tubes, with plastic sheeting for the roofs, prefabricated windows and beer crates filled with sand for the foundations. Each cabin can be assembled in a few hours. He also built them a new “temporary” church out of paper columns (and money from his own pocket), which was only dismantled a few months ago – to be reassembled in Taiwan.
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27 October 2005
Thu, 27 Oct 2005 08:16:05 GMT pricingvia Kjell Olsen2400 days agoI’d want something like this if I was starting up. Interesting thoughts on payments to freelancers.
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18 October 2005
Tue, 18 Oct 2005 23:45:00 GMT How Apple Does Itvia Kjell Olsen2408 days agoGo apple go. I’ve pledged allegiance to you ever since I’ve had an allegiance to pledge. You could rule the world way better then google.
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10 October 2005
Mon, 10 Oct 2005 20:26:29 GMT iPod with Inverted ScreenKjell Olsen2416 days agoThe black nano looks spectacularly badass, even more so with a dark interface on screen.
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14 September 2005
Wed, 14 Sep 2005 16:11:00 GMT web|works content, part 2via Kjell Olsen2442 days agoSweet presentation on web interface design. Direct to presentation. links.
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13 September 2005
Tue, 13 Sep 2005 18:09:25 GMT Powazek: Just a Thought: Digging in the Dirtvia Kjell Olsen2443 days agoSecond, and this is something I’ve been percolating for a long time, I wanted to focus more on the page bottoms. Page bottoms are the most valuable screen real estate there is. You read that right. All that nonsense about people not reading and not scrolling is complete bullshit.
In my last redesign I moved the sidebar into the footer – I think it works much better there. I’ve been meaning to fit more down there, and I like what Mr. Powazek has done.
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08 September 2005
Thu, 08 Sep 2005 22:59:28 GMT 37signals Getting Realvia Kjell Olsen2448 days agoA new book is coming out of the crew from 37signals, Getting Real.
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21 August 2005
Sun, 21 Aug 2005 10:27:00 GMT Color for Coders - Color and Design for the Non-Designer [Design Principles]Kjell Olsen2466 days agoI wish I could design better. Colors stump me particularly, in trying to put something together.
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22 July 2005
Fri, 22 Jul 2005 16:30:00 GMT Kevin Kelly - Cool Tools | Sketchupvia Kjell Olsen2496 days agoI’ve had my eye on this software for a year or two, but at $500 it blatantly out of my price range, and will be for a long to to come (but I’m not knocking on wood).
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18 July 2005
Mon, 18 Jul 2005 17:50:44 GMT CSS Reboot Fall 2005Kjell Olsen2500 days agoI just signed up for the second, it coincided well with a redesign I wanted to get working on over the summer. But I’m not going to do it in on fell swoop, it’s going to be iterative from now until september first, at which point I hope to be contented with what I’ve done and leave it be for a bit.
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05 July 2005
Tue, 05 Jul 2005 18:56:44 GMT Writeboard (write, share, revise, compare) is coming soon - it'll be better, not betavia Kjell Olsen2513 days agoI remember 37signals announced this even before backpackit, but nothing ever came of it. Maybe I’m crazy. But coming from them, I bet it will be jaw droppingly cool, even if I never use it.
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25 June 2005
Sat, 25 Jun 2005 07:05:02 GMT how i learned to stop worrying and relinquish controlvia Kjell Olsen2524 days agoPerhaps the most brilliant thing Flickr did was to provide an API that allows developers to hook into it seamlessly. This meant someone could create a free tool that lets me move photos directly from iPhoto to Flickr. This newfound ease of upload increased my Flickr usage so much that I needed to buy a Pro account. So, get this: Someone else did the work, and Flickr got the money. All because they levy so little control.
Web applications need to relinquish the control, be open and user driven.
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22 June 2005
Wed, 22 Jun 2005 08:11:11 GMT Web Design ReferencesKjell Olsen2527 days agoGreat collection of essays and tutorials on all different kinds of web design.
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20 June 2005
Mon, 20 Jun 2005 13:41:00 GMTThe Very Small Home
Azby Brown
Azby Brown details 18 beautifully designed compact Japanese homes. The mantra of constraints fostering creativity is beautifully reinforced in the book, with incredible solutions to space problems.
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18 June 2005
Sat, 18 Jun 2005 22:11:04 GMT colr.orgvia Kjell Olsen2530 days agoNeat (tag based :b) site for finding and browsing different color swatches.
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15 June 2005
Wed, 15 Jun 2005 12:59:55 GMT mekentosj.com | Modern Cubismvia Kjell Olsen2533 days agoA CT scan of the Apple Design Award trophy, wow, apple rocks so hard.
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Wed, 15 Jun 2005 12:17:53 GMT
Digital Web Magazine - The Principles of Designvia Kjell Olsen2533 days ago
A nice intro to the basics (I do mean basics) of design. I’m getting ready to try another visual design for this site – and I’m looking for a little reading because I really don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to design.
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09 May 2005
Mon, 09 May 2005 20:06:00 GMT Ajax and weblogs (kottke.org)via Kjell Olsen2570 days agoKottke comes up with another neat home page outside the box weblog feature – keep your weblog’s front pages from being so boring. Might have to take it from him like I did remaindered links.
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Mon, 09 May 2005 19:32:38 GMT
Matt Webb's Interconnected (Outrageous, alarming, courageous, charming.)via Kjell Olsen2570 days ago
Sweet website, I’ve had in in my feed since I read Mind Hacks but what a cool design, I love the no images/sweet styling combination.
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08 April 2005
Fri, 08 Apr 2005 08:24:15 GMT Land Living: Modern Lifestyle Designvia Kjell Olsen2602 days agoPaolo Soleri is an Italian architect who was an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 1940’s. Soleri later developed the concept of Arcology, the fusion of architecture and ecology, an alternative urban development form. In 1970 construction began on Arcosanti, a prototype town for 5,000 people (there are currently about 60 residents).
Looks cool.
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19 March 2005
Sat, 19 Mar 2005 23:56:00 GMTDefensive Design for the Web
Matthew Linderman and Jason Fried
What you should do to foolproof the ‘critical’ points of your website. How to keep people from getting frustrated while trying to accomplish their goals, ultimately allowing them to do buisness with you instead of getting pissed and walking off.
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13 March 2005
Sun, 13 Mar 2005 16:16:00 GMT cityofsound: Shortsighted Shuffle?via Kjell Olsen2627 days agoAs products get smarter in terms of being aware of their behaviour – in some senses, becoming reflexive – and as their raison d’être gets increasingly close to personal, social functionality – in some senses, becoming involved in presentation of self and the behaviour of the users – there is huge potential to build devices which become increasingly, personally meaningful, which can adapt to personal context and preference like never before.
I know I love having everything I play on my iPod put into audioscrobbler – apparently you can’t do this with a shuffle. But this sort of technology is fascinating – with sites like audioscrobbler and del.icio.us and flickr being able to show you where you fit amidst a group of people with similar interests.
It strikes me that the basic condition for these products is to be essentially self-aware – in this specific case, that the iPod Shuffle should be able to keep a track of what tracks the user has played on it, and communicate that information such that that metadata can then be transferred and combined with the overall iTunes Music Library. This ecosystem of music experience software and hardware can therefore keep a track of what tracks have been played (track, album, artist etc), when, on what device, and by whom. Upon this basic usage data, we can build a panoply of useful, interesting services. Look no further than Audioscrobbler for some inspiration.
I really like how community sites are tying people together in their interests – a site like 43things showing you people who have similar goals to you, who live in your city, and eventually both together. When the application fades away and the data that is collected by the application is brought together and made sense of, I think that applications will be able to become entirely more useful.
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11 March 2005
Fri, 11 Mar 2005 07:38:00 GMT Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals) - The new Signal vs. Noisevia Kjell Olsen2630 days agoI’m no designer, I think these guys have me on that issue – but this is definitely how to keep your site fresh:
We have a lot of ideas for the new SvN, and over the next few months you’ll be able to watch us think out loud. The site may be different tomorrow. And different again the next day. The design will be ever changing until we settle on what we’re really happy with. But instead of doing it all behind the scenes, we’ll be doing it in the open.
Why keep all the changes you want to make to your site in a to do list somewhere when all they really take would be 5 minutes of fiddling with templates or css? Just do ‘em, make your site better, and get out of that ‘redesign’ state of mind.
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09 March 2005
Wed, 09 Mar 2005 11:40:00 GMTA Pattern Language
Christopher Alexander
A great book detailing some widely applicable ways to design building, and why. Taken from studies conducted by Alexander and his architectural students and colleagues from The Center for Environmental Studies at the University of California, Berkely.
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18 February 2005
Fri, 18 Feb 2005 14:10:03 GMT how stuff is madevia Kjell Olsen2650 days agoSort of like my favorite childhood book – How Things Work. A good look at, well, how things get made. From the faq:
HowStuffisMade is a visual encyclopedia documenting the manufacturing processes, labor conditions and environmental accounts of contemporary products.
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02 February 2005
Wed, 02 Feb 2005 20:02:04 GMT Veer: Ideas: Lightboxingvia Kjell Olsen2666 days agoLightboxing – ultra cool design awesomeness. I wish I could do this.
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Wed, 02 Feb 2005 19:51:36 GMT
AIGA Design Archivesvia Kjell Olsen2666 days ago
Whoa, I need to look through this sometime, I’m gathering my redesign energy right now and hope to overhaul this place in the next few weeks.
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23 January 2005
Sun, 23 Jan 2005 17:34:34 GMT LukeW: Web Application Form Designvia Kjell Olsen2676 days agoA nice guide to spacing and labeling and coloring and general web form design.
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09 January 2005
Sun, 09 Jan 2005 11:57:55 GMTSmall Spaces
An incredible look at how to best use small spaces, taking storage, utility, and all kinds of other factors into account.
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05 January 2005
Wed, 05 Jan 2005 19:55:13 GMT GUUUI - Navigation blindnessvia Kjell Olsen2694 days agoStatic category/section navigation could be very wrong, not at all embracing the user and allowing him to accomplish his goals.
The findings suggest that navigation should be a prominent part of a website. Instead of being discrete appendices separated from the rest of the site, navigation should be integrated into the site and make sure that users stay in the flow.
...why should we place this burden on people if we can design navigation schemes based on how people actually navigate.
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08 December 2004
Wed, 08 Dec 2004 19:53:50 GMT Forty Media - Phoenix Web Design - Web Design in 2005Kjell Olsen2722 days agoColor of the year – here I come. I love brown!
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Also somewhat recently
