Paris with H, 8/04-12/04
drawings / Claude Parent
horizons / Jan Dibbets
volumes / Charles-Édouard Jeanneret
cubes / Sol LeWitt
Supersurface A1-A21 is a series of abstract graphical works produced as a study into volume, rhythm and surface; a kind of visual thinking. The generative graphics are composed of a field of lines subject to deformations through the placement of attractors at different points in space. They're partly based on the reaction-diffusion dynamics evident in morphogenesis.
More info and the complete web gallery available via stdio.
At the moment I'm wondering how to begin. Here's how other people begin.
I start all my plays by naming my characters a, b and c.
When I start a piece, I create a sound bank; I include new sounds, never used before, that might fit my intention and reworked old sounds. I listen to them and create detailed inventories... For example, for De Natura Sonorum, I made lists of sounds classified by shape, subject, colour, etc, according to the TOM (Treaty of Musical Objects) typology.
When I begin a story I know it's set to go. I always begin with the first and last lines. That never changes. Some writers work on a story to see where it will go, what will happen to the characters, but I always know everything about the story before I begin writing it.
Generally I set out with a rather naive attitude because I never really know when my work is actually started. It is not that I think it is difficult - I know what has to be done - but somehow I have to start and then realize: "This will turn into something. We can build upon this" But I could never begin by saying "This is really good - this is the way to do it". I have to put things into motion and then start working.
If you want to renew something you must show that you can do what has been done. You can't begin by innovation. You can't begin by free verse for example. You should attempt a sonnet, or any other set stanza, and then go on to the new things.
The level of detail and craft is something that’s inscribed within the original design concept. And so when I begin to draw, I know what kind of detailing I want the building to have.
There was a desire to start again after the end of a certain idea of Europe, which corresponded to my life, or to my intellectual trajectory. Is there a possible start point that might allow us to begin again? As far as cinema goes, it hasn't been found and one wonders whether it's possible since we don't appear to be capable of speaking or filming differently. It's more like an end for the moment.
I begin by improvising, but when I see that money is running out, I shoot whatever stage we have arrived at.
As a working basis I often deliberately start from wrong assumptions, in order to be able to open new spaces.
Corian supersurface by Amanda Levete Architects
I've been reading Michael Hensel & Achim Menges' excellent documentation of their architectural research at the AA, Morpho-Ecologies. The ME approach can be broadly characterised by the design & fabrication of generative structures rooted in biological form, often based on cellular and plant growth models, as a means of improving the performance, intelligence and sustainability of architectural constructions. Erwin Hauer's wall for Knoll's showroom, a cellular Hydrostone surface that modulates light in sophisticated ways, is one example. See also the work of Alisa Andrasek's studio, Biothing (book), TheVeryMany, this gallery of compiled works or Bruce Sterling's documentation of generative architecture prototypes from AAST in Tokyo — some, if not all, of these examples display an ME approach.
The term morphology was coined by Goethe and ecology by Haeckel, worthy intellectual forefathers to any movement. If electron microscopy provides us with the contemporary equivalent to Haeckel's extraordinary work (see France Bourely, whose book is excellent), then the digital models produced by ME research at least induce some of the same responses; aesthetically complex, exploratory, biological, foreign designs that reveal new conceptions of form. They signal a future architecture rooted in biochemistry; Hengel & Menges are essentially trying to retool architects to think in terms of organism and environment. Speculations on membranes, synthetic life structures & evolutionary design are all to be found in ME practice.
ME surfaces can at times resemble diatoms, with gradual variation over many cells produced by adaptation to local environmental variables. I would broadly define these ME surfaces as supersurfaces, as a way of expressing the synthetic nature of their growth models; they are in a way looking to supersede the natural, not merely emulate/simulate. One such supersurface was exhibited as part of the London Design Festival by Amanda Levete Architects.
Superstudio brought the word supersurface into architectural discourse in the 70s as a vision of a homogenised, unified landscape, both an ironic counter to the spatial logic of tele-communication grids (Castell's space of flows) and a radical re-appraisal of boundary in the built landscape [1],[2]. In this new guise the supersurface is an emergent, contiguous form produced by simulated forces acting on interrelating components modelled using parametric design techniques, made real via the complex fabrication of many similar but often subtly varying components that interconnect in the final surface. The morpho-genetic growth is simulated in software, the fabricated surface simply a snapshot of the emergent form.
I'm interested in the idea of sonic supersurfaces, partially because a practice of ME in sound is timely given our algorithmic tools, but also because it's an inherently generative way to work (Tropisms was a step in this direction). Sound has the obvious advantage of being able to capture the dynamics of growth. It was Goethe himself who said,
I call architecture frozen music. Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music.
So, sonic supersurfaces. A work in progress.
1982 Discovery
1983 Marlboro Country
1986 Suburban Sublime/Playboy Mystique
1989 Upward Mobility
1990 Urbanite Fantasy
Following a friend's recent interest in Thing Theory, I dug up my copy of Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things from the storeroom (not quite a junkspace but definitely a pile of space-junk). Leafing through I was reminded of the array of (typo)graphical techniques employed by the book's designer Lorraine Wild, with the visual linkage device above being my favourite.
I see this as a form of what I would call augmented textuality; a superposition of layered semantic relationships on text. Having recently read the thought-provoking iA article on bringing web design concepts to newspapers, I'm wondering if the web couldn't learn something from book designers in terms of augmentation. In this example, I think there's scope for a javascript-based implementation to draw Bezier curves between anchors in HTML using canvas to achieve the visual linkage effect.
Wild also uses type variations in a single text body to convey meaning, with a number of typefaces reserved for particular neologisms or words imbued with specialist definitions in Sterling's lexicon. I find it a bit naive/obnoxious, depends on your typographic stance. The web-based alternative might be to re-examine link typologies, since the consistency mantra in web design tends to crowd out attempts at applying multiple link styles to a single body, creating a homogeneity of linkage on a site-by-site basis that is bemusing if you take a step back. With regards to keywords and specially loaded (technical) terms however, I probably prefer the approach taken by the English language version of Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis,
The text of which possesses a good rhythm, induced by both typographic and linguistic techniques. A mix of bold and italicised emphasis abound, the former reserved for words with significantly enhanced meanings in the hands of Lefebvre. It's simple but makes a difference. That the book itself is on rhythm makes it doubly effective.
A disproportionate amount — disproportionate given how much online text I've read daily over the past decade — of the ideas that have influenced me over the years have come from books or essays. A lot of that no doubt has to do with copyright and IP, but some of it is down to the forms of communication themselves. Whereas the web has naturally gravitated towards networked/collaborative knowledge systems, the essay, in contrast, is standalone and demands sustained attention.
The essay and the academic research paper are still amongst the foremost textual knowledge communication formats around, despite having a fairly antagonistic relationship with the web, the former seemingly sidelined by the blog post and the latter still published as a PDF or print artefact. I'll reserve my ideas on modern research publishing for the web (itself such a huge topic) for another time, but I simply think there's scope to improve on these knowledge forms in Webby ways, without stripping them of their fundamental offerings. For example, I would love to see a web publishing engine dedicated to the essay form.
Here's a quick implementation of some crude augmented textuality techniques using HTML5 and Javascript, applied to a Rem Koolhaas essay, the hyperbolic diatribe, Junkspace, from 2001:
→ View Augmented Junkspace Demo
The techniques are completely web native (though you'll need recent versions of Firefox, Chrome or Safari to view them). You could argue this is no longer an essay but a thinly disguised term frequency vector smattered with relational graphics, a set of wordnets or a pliable series of strings. Perhaps. I would apologise to Rem if it wasn't a calculated attempt at altering the state of the text through superposition, an uninvited act of post-production.
If you're an IE user, I guess you can make do with this graphic for now:
Abraham Cruzvillegas was brought up in the self-built district of Mexico City, Colonia Ajusco. His parents built their own house (here), as did the rest of their community. Infrastructure and resources were all produced or sourced informally. Here's the DIY scene Cruzvillegas sets in his book,
Every weekend there was a festive air around the dusty activities of moving chalk, cement and sand; the women would cook and help to carry water, haul stones, bricks, bags of cement, buckets of sand or fizzy drinks, under a burning sun, in a challenging atmosphere moved by a spirit of busy and efficient collectivity. On what years later would become known as streets, the men and women of the community would stir the huge bowl of cement to the rhythm of cumbias, songs by José José, ranchera ballads, and there would be no shortage of beer, pulque or fruit juices to keep it all going.
Cruzvillegas has documented the evolution of his self-built barrio, producing photographs and a range of testimonies from the residents, recounting the relationship between the population & building materials — they often built from the natural volcanic rock on the site — as well as discussing the social, political & cultural formations that arose, imparting a great sense of what it must have been like to participate in the construction of what Mexicans call the ciudades perdidas (lost cities). His personal story is a kind of entry point for grappling with the roots, mechanics & repercussions of spontaneous organization in informal urban areas.
Between Friday and Sunday, while we were growing up, fragments of homes were built with a dynamic that some more than others joined in with. Water was brought in tins, buckets or tin cans originally used for vegetable fat, hung from a strong pole that bent in the middle - it was balanced across someone’s back so that it wouldn’t spill and he wouldn’t fall on the uneven ground. It was also brought on request in bins from Primera Parada (First Stop), so-called because at that time it was the only place where you could pick up public transport.
There were sometimes real conflicts over the monopolising of some specific service. Accidentally, the drinking water tap was in front of someone’s shabby little home; absurdly, they then became the ‘owners’ of the water. There was an owner of light, an owner of a telegraph pole, an owner of the street and even someone who owned the rubbish-always a source of excellent building materials.
Cruzvillegas has gone on to explore the aesthetics of this kind of construction, basing his art practice on notions of auto-construcción,
Windowless constructions, wooden shutters, tile and linoleum floors, walls with a plasterboard finish, plastic mouldings and aluminium windows, can be chosen on the spot, at a moment when the visual intention, the urgent need for comfort, functional ingenuity and lack of resources combine. That is why the lack of planning or the apparent stylistic incongruity of many self-built structures are also ideological, with a social and economic basis, even when apparently at their most frivolous. The formal configuration of the houses is first rooted in intuition, in the instinct for survival and the distant reference to what a decent life means, that is satisfying all vital needs, including the visual character of the day to day environment, its objects, its ornaments, and the physical relationship with things – ergonomics straight from the heart.
Here's the complete Auto-Construcción booklet (pdf, 4.2MB). Thanks to Marcela for pointing me in this direction.
- Michael Jackson, Original Solo Recordings, 1972-1997 (view medium size, view large size)
Last week I was at Music Hackday, messing around with music data at The Guardian offices in Kings Cross, London. The outcome is this Michael Jackson doughnut, which spans the whole of his solo recording career, showing which of his tracks have been the most popular & loved by Last.fm listeners, as well as which releases have been the most influential and loved. The graphic was programmatically produced and could be produced for other artists quite easily.
Some notes on how to read this information graphic: The size of each slice is proportional to the number of plays of that particular track or release compared to the total number of plays of Michael Jackson's material on Last.fm. The darkness of the slice indicates how loved that track or album is by the listener base. Tracks are organised by album, by date, starting with his first solo record, Ben, from 1972.
Some notes on the metrics: The graphic takes into account 6 months worth of Last.fm listening data, that's 3,606,823 individual plays of his tracks by 1,432,458 listeners worldwide. The loving data spans a shorter time period, a little over two months; this period contains data which falls both before and after his death. The love data for releases is normalised by track count, so the darkness of the blue hue expresses the average number of loves per track on said release.
In the case of (countless) albums featuring re-releases of original works, such as Number Ones, I have aggregated play counts and merged them into a single play count for the original recording (e.g. Billie Jean). This is why you don't see releases like HiStory (Book 1) or The Essential Michael Jackson in the graphic. The playcounts on original tracks which are featured on those records, however, do contribute to the tracks shown in the graphic, as I'm trying to get a feel for which of his original recordings are the most influential overall.
Some notes on the tech: I spent much of the 4-8 hours it took to produce the software coming up with ways of cleaning the data. The gap in the doughnut represents the proportion of plays which relate to live versions, endless remixes (official & unofficial) and collaborations (duets etc). I chose to keep these in the dataset in order to represent proportionally how much attention goes towards that kind of material. I also stripped a lot of seemingly badly tagged, or dubiously attributed tracks using a bunch of filters aided by my observation of the dataset. I used simple Levenshtein distances to merge tracknames together and a few simple transforms to help the merging process. The merging operation was crucial because some tracks have been officially re-released over 30 times and the metadata can vary a little each time. The graphic was produced using PHP & Actionscript with JSON as the transport mechanism between the two.
Popularity and love data is from Last.fm, release dates are from Musicbrainz and Discogs was used for authoritative discographic data.
Lastly, just a note on the motivation - MJ was primarily a childhood experience for me (I was 6 when Bad was released), and the hours I've spent with the dataset have given me the time to reflect on what a grip his older material has had on my generation's collective identity. As the notion of a mainstream, backed as it is by broadcast media, gives way to thousands of niches in disparate networks, it's hard not to see MJ as a relic of an age of mass cultural experience that is slowly receding into the distance. R.I.P. MJ.
Grid Index by Carsten Nicolai is a truly excellent visual investigation of 2D planes. Comes with vector files for every tiling/grid in the book.
Patrick Blanc's vertical garden wall outside Herzog & De Meuron's Caixa Forum in Madrid (full size). Calls to mind Hundertwasser's rooftops (1, 2) – speaking of which, you can get lurid socks in his name – or Edouard Francois' work (1, 2, 3).
All of which has been mistagged 'green' architecture.
Wall mounting system using clips and hooks from the 98p shop. The hooks are temporary and don't appear to leave a mark, which is great because I have a landlord for the first time in my life.
I've turned to paper, since I've found my thinking on software and sound increasingly requires schematics inline with text. This notebook is from Lulu.
Christopher Adjei and Nils Holland-Cunz have published a thesis entitled Visualizing Last.fm. The website's in German, but you can see an analysis of individual user tastes by genre, geographic fluctuations in artist fans over time (correlated to concerts), some listening trends on new releases and geographic listening trends by genre. It's a great array of information visualizations based on our APIs.
We prefer Bach to Wagner, and the spirit which inspired the Parthenon to that which created the cathedral... This modern sentiment is a spirit of geometry, a spirit of construction and synthesis. Exactitude and order are its essential condition... Our trend is towards higher and more impartial gratifications, by reason of the mathematical spirit which inspires us; we can create in a detached and pure manner. Such are the epochs which we call classical.
- Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow And Its Planning
I overdosed on xmas spirit and found myself writing a patch that draws pentagonic snowflakes. Feliz navidad.
Best photography book I've picked up this year: Takashi Homma's large format New Waves. I've never known a book that transported me like this one.
The cosmic General Assembly, Chandigarh, designed by Le Corbusier
On this last trip to India I took some time out to wander North, to Chandigarh, the Punjabi capital. It's a 50's modernist urban planning experiment commissioned by Nehru on the dawn of the partition, as a psychological replacement for Lahore, offered as the state capital to the displaced Hindus and Sikhs. My family were largely displaced from Lahore and the surrounding areas, and some of them ended up in Chandigarh.
An Indian garden city inspired by the Chicago school of urban planners, Chandigarh was conceived and executed by a number of Europeans and Americans, finally (and most famously) by Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre, who, together with a number of Indian architects, worked on a completely integrated design solution for the modern Indian city, from bus stop to manhole design to theatres & cinemas, administrative buildings, residential blocks, commercial complexes and transport infrastructure. This is planning from scratch, on an overwhelming scale.
Top: The Secratariat façade, Middle: General Assembly detail, Bottom: Original tape showing the 'modulor' measurement scale
I was surprised to find Corb's writings to show a deep contemplation of proportion - he talks of building Chandigarh "in human proportions" and applies this to everything from road length to window dividers, tree height to about 10 different scales and qualities of housing. He used his own measurement scale ('modulor') based on the golden ratio, devised a set of traffic categorisation principles to be used in road layouts and oversaw the construction of an artificial lake and landscaped areas of the city. I've generally regarded Corb's inability to execute a usable, human architecture problematic but in this project he evidently injected a lot of useful ideas alongside his sheer intellectual energy. His cousin worked on Chandigarh until his death (long after Corb had returned to Europe) and is probably the unsung hero of the project.
Top: The city pavilion, Middle: Corb on Sukhna Lake, Bottom: Sukhna Lake today
I came away thinking of Chandigarh as a quiet triumph, in that it largely delivers and functions; utopian visions giving way to pleasant, usable spaces. The overriding aesthetic of unmaintained cubes of concrete is stunning, the landscaped areas put to good use by the residents, the traffic and housing density incredibly low by Indian standards, the noise pollution well contained. Astonishingly, much modern private residential housing in the city seems to have absorbed the modernist aesthetic (Corb's trademark strip windows are a particular favourite), as if the immersion in the lines, façades, materials & forms of the original architects has somehow overcome the place, gripping it despite the decades that have passed.
As you wander around, you are slowly overcome with a quiet sense of well-being that I can only attribute to a consistent design vision carried out on an unprecedented scale. If nothing else, it's an affirmation of the central role of design in all aspects of everyday life.
Top: Corbusier's 'Open Hand' logo for the city, Middle: High Court building, Bottom: A commercial block in the pedestrianised city center
There is consciously very little sensitivity to Indian tradition in the design of Chandigarh - Corb built a cosmic general assembly building that takes inspiration from Mughal endeavours past, but other than that, the city was from day one to be a "new city, unfettered by the traditions of the past" (Nehru). This place of 800K inhabitants, which was conceived on a completely empty plot of land in 1949, despite its grubby look and feel, still seems ahead of its time in today's smog-ridden, noise-polluted, poorly zoned urban India.
Interestingly, Chandigarh has been listed as a potential UNESCO World Heritage site, something which I imagine would have appalled Corbusier; a spirit ever in favour of creation over preservation.
Cacao was a last minute addition to a bill at the Sassoon Gallery in Peckham last night, supporting Janek Schaefer and Yuri Suzuki. It was only our second live show - I'll be putting the audio and visuals online soon.
Yuri played his prepared turntable - a custom made dubplate played with portable styli (video). It was top. Go check out some of his other work at Yuri's website.
Hand-crafted on the cusp of the digital age, this poster has been re-printed by Blanka from the original drawn in 1968 by Wim Crouwel. I like his alphabets.
Most Fridays we hold talks known as 'osmotics' at Last.fm. Their purpose is to share understanding about the various things that are going on in different departments; an open session which anyone can use to present recent work. It's a response to our growth, as it's now impossible to know what's happening throughout the company at any given point in time.
A few weeks back I presented some of the work we've been doing on interaction path analysis. As web developers we're completely spoilt for usage information on our apps, and interaction histories are sitting in our apache logs the entire time. We've been using tools to mine these and better understand real interaction flows on our site, in order to improve our understanding of common use cases.
You'll often find that your users don't use your software exactly as you designed for. That's natural, and as web developers we need to be equipped to observe these flows and adapt/optimize our software accordingly. As Stewart Brand observed of buildings, so too good software should learn from usage patterns rather than working against them. A good app should flow.
We use a tool suite from Omniture - the pricing may well be out of reach of most startups, but anyone can mine apache logs to get similar information. Bear in mind the presentation assumes no technical knowledge and was prepared in about 20 minutes - it's more of a lightning talk than anything. I've blacked out some sensitive bits of information.
→ Interaction Path Analysis - slides with annotations (1.1MB)
If a building is allowed to fail small, early and often, and be corrected, the building as a whole can succeed
- Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn (1995)
I'd heard of Stewart Brand's book How Buildings Learn before, but didn't know there was an accompanying TV series (with music by Brian Eno). The TV series is available in full online (episodes 1-6). By focusing on what happens to buildings after they're built, Brand articulates lots of principles that we use in software today. Brand's own notes even refer to it:
Most of the 27 reviews on Amazon treat it as a book about system and software design, which tells me that architects are not as alert as computer people.
It's interesting to see so many insights that tie together the two kindred fields of architecture and software design in one place. The fact is architects still struggle with the seeming permanence of their design decisions - even big memes of recent years like parametric design haven't laid the path for conscious design of adaptive buildings yet. And as Brand points out, it's not neccessarily a technological question, simply a re-definition of the architect's role and attitude.
We, on the other hand, have got it easy, working in a fairly pliable medium of pixels on screens, with tight feedback loops and the opportunity to evolve our design over time both available at a low cost.
Whatever time and space mean, place and occasion mean more
- Aldo Van Eyck (dismayed with modernism)
Van Eyck designed and built about 700 playgrounds throughout Amsterdam from the 1950's onwards. Social network designers could learn from Van Eyck's thoughts on and approach to public space - he petitioned for these areas of play and dotted them throughout the city as spots where the 'seeds of community were sewn'. A whole generation of children found themselves playing in the very heart of their city, in all sorts of unlikely locations. The playgrounds were rarely cordoned off from the city around them - they were open, exposed areas that forced kids to come up with rules for play and security. They brought unlikely elements together, valued ambiguity and looseness in function and blurred borderlines. You can find more information on his playgrounds and another article here.
I reject the argument that ornament increases the pleasures of life of a cultivated person, or that it is beautiful. I prefer undecorated gingerbread. Modern people will understand.
Unstudio's inspirational little house, VilLa NM, was destroyed by fire in February this year. Just found out. Sadface.
Above: Spread from 'Tokyo and my Daughter'. Below: Images from 'Tokyo Suburbia'
Takashi Homma is a japanese photographer. I really like 'Tokyo And My Daughter' and 'Tokyo Suburbia'. He's about to publish a volume which aggregates a selection of his work on Tokyo to date.
- Josef Albers, Fugue (about 1925)
- Henri Nouveau, plastic representation of the Fugue in E Flat Minor by JS Bach, 1928
I'm consistently drawn to expressions of music in other media. Here's two expressions of the structural properties of the Fugue from the Bauhaus period.
I’ve been thinking: let’s rate our technologies for how much they help us as primates, rather than how they can put us further into this dream of being powerful gods who stalk around on a planet that doesn’t really matter to us.
- Kim Stanley Robinson, from an interview on bldgblg, Comparative Planetology
Gui Boratto / Chromophobia
Another remix from The Field on this one. Axel Willner keeps a distinctive, simple style through all of his production work. I admire the consistency.
Download the free AJAX Control Toolkit which includes over 30 AJAX controls including rounded corners...
- Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express website.
Uncanny similarity in conduct between Microsoft, Scientology and Neo-con Republicans here, all going ahead and creating their own new realities. Conclusion: positions of such power allow organisations to disregard the actual state of the universe. By this logic, Microsoft is purely an ideology machine and no longer a technology company.
Top: An Ambassador, for decades the most ubiquitous vehicle in India, thanks to the British Empire. Bottom: A Tata Nano, the cheapest car in the world
The Tata Nano is the cheapest car in the world at just 1-lakh Rupees ($2,500, £1,277). Mr Tata unveiled it today, saying:
I observed families riding on two-wheelers - the father driving the scooter, his young kid standing in front of him, his wife seated behind him holding a little baby. It led me to wonder whether one could conceive of a safe, affordable, all-weather form of transport for such a family. Tata Motors' engineers and designers gave their all for about four years to realise this goal.
- 'Silverlight Architecture' schematic, Microsoft
This illuminating 'architecture' drawing from Microsoft manages to pack six (awful) logos and two pieces of packaging onto one stupid schematic. If you're in Microsoft's marketing department, can you please do us all a favour and take extended leave? Please? And leave Visio alone. It's not for you.
Hackney Coat of Arms (source: Wikipedia)
The border of blue and white wavy lines represents the water of the rivers and canals on or near the borough's boundaries. The red and white Maltese Cross and the black and white background, like that in the arms of the Metropolitan Borough of Hackney, commemorates the Orders of the Knights Templar and Knights of St. John. The Knights Templar wore a red Maltese Cross on white surcoats and mantles and the Knights of St. John wore black surcoats and mantles with a white Maltese Cross on the left breast. In 1312 the Knights Templar were suppressed and their lands and rents, including those in Hackney, were transferred to the Knights of St. John. The two golden oak trees with red acorns derive from the arms of the Metropolitan Borough of Stoke Newington and recall the forest which once covered the northern part of the Borough. The three golden bells represent the Bells of St. Leonard's Church, Shoreditch, referred to in the nursery rhyme. "Oranges and Lemons". The Crest consists of a representation of the tower of the former Parish Church of St. Augustine, Hackney, which is the only part now standing and the only scheduled Ancient Monument within the Borough. The green mound, represents the island in the River Lea - "Hacon's Eyot" - from which the name "Hackney" is thought by some authorities to have been derived.
From civicheraldry.co.uk
I'm keeping up.
Studies in Cellular Automata
Using a Cellular Automata program I wrote a couple of years back. Click on a thumb for a larger version.
Three of the following interface elements are from the new look Delicious, and the other three are from Flickr.
Galileo inlines empirical observations of Saturn with text in what Tufte claims "may be the best piece of analytical design ever done", in Sidereus Nuncius ('Starry Messenger') , 1610.
Also check Tufte's note on Galileo only ever once stating in print that the Earth moves.
A parquet deformation is a continuously evolving tessellation. This one is taken from Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas
Carsten Nicolai processes muzak culled from hotels, airports & in-flight airline programs in xerrox.
Thus, the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first century urban world squats in squalor surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay... the one billion city-dwellers who inhabit postmodern slums might well look back with envy at the ruins of the sturdy mud homes of Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia, erected at the very dawn of city life nine thousand years ago.
Also check Neuwirth's TED Talk on what the World Bank called "the most significant problem of the next century" in 1990.
I have a long dream to build my own house in a very energy-efficient approach. That's going to be very soon. It uses the right kind of wood that serves as a heater and as an air conditioner, combined with some other techniques in how the wood is assembled to operate energy life pressure. You don't have to add energy into a house after you build it. I love that concept. It's like the way I used to make computers. I want to build it myself.
Steve Wozniak, 'Wozniak's New Goal is energy efficient housing'
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The time to make a decision is a function of the possible choices he or she has and can be expressed as t = b log2(n + 1)
Where t is the time taken, b is a constant and n is the total number of choices.
Hick's Law, from Haacked's, '19 eponymous laws of software'.
Wii product design detail: It comes in two numbered 'drawers', with isotype-style icons clearly demarcating contents (some background reading on isotypes). Otto Neurath would be proud. Aside from a lovely piece of design, it's great fun. Nintendo gets gaming in a way Sony and Microsoft can't even hope to. Now all we need is the release of Katamari Damacy for Wii. I'm waiting...
Live demo of Photosynth (Microsoft Labs) from Ted.
"incredibly noticable, brave and confrontational" - Peter Saville
"a solid gold stinker" - Adrian Shaugnessy
"Don't pay the designers" - Ken Livingstone
Now and again an event thrusts graphic design into the nation's spotlight. This Olympics Logo has got everyone talking about graphics. I welcome that. I don't think the means justify the end here though. In a city so teeming with graphics talent, this is one major fuck up.
Exercise for the reader: Contrast this to, say, Otl Aicher's work on Munich '72.
I love the Guardian front-page redesign. I find it immensely browsable, with enough points of focus and the right balance of images and text. What other mainstream newspaper would invite Fidel Castro to blog on their site? (Link)
Zim - the outliner for Firefox which I've been working on (more here) - now has a home at zimoutliner.com. Free user accounts are now available (store upto 50 lists). Other features I've snuck into the public release:
- OPML Export
- Autosave
- Contextual navigation
- Bundles
For those of you who use lists to organize your life - whether it be with OmniOutliner, scraps of paper, stickies, text editors, notepads - I suggest trying out Zim. Signing up only takes 10 seconds (note: it only supports Firefox right now).
You can head over to the public changeblog for more information, on-going progress reports on development and your chance to submit feedback and bug reports.
Aside from a nice commuting aide, my mini-longboard (it's a Tula) makes for an unbelievably practical book-rest when soaking in the tub. Call me anglicized, but I've taken to having a long soak about once a fortnight this year.
Fatcat have recently released a compilation of Brighton-based Semiconductor's audiovisual work on DVD, and I must say it's great. I particularly like the 'Microclimates' piece, in which real landscapes are subtly altered. You may have seen a number of these pieces before, but it's well worth the compilation. More here.
Half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress. That's how much information we create in a year - 92% of it is stored on magnetic media. It's time we shifted our focus from creating a wealth of information to addressing the ensuing poverty of attention.- Peter Morville, "Ambient Findability", citing "How Much Information?"
Well, it's taken a while, but Google Reader's social features are finally taking shape, though their sharing feature is essentially a 'reblog' feature, simply publishing all the items you want to share on a public page - here's mine. The feature would be better off targeting your gmail contacts and allowing you to share an article with a specific person/group (either via email or via the reader) - after all, 'share' and 'republish' are very different things.
The obvious tagging feature is there, but no powerful tag navigation method is on offer and the search facility is ironically non-existent. So there's still a lot of work to do on the navigation front - the most crucial design problem for a newsreading app. I think the navigation itself needs to have a social dimension (tag-driven content drawn from 'pools' of articles, not just your own explicit subscriptions).
Interesting to note the attention data is now pretty much collected real time, and a lot less crudely than in the first generation of browser based RSS readers - as you browse a particular feed, scrolling through the articles makes the feed 'articles read' count go down article by article, meaning that the reader knows if you really have set eyes on an article or not. Google's concerned with capturing accurate attention data - and it's beamed back at you on the reading habits page; right now an interesting set of trends, but pretty useless until the reader starts recommending articles/feeds based on the data. Kind of like our last.fm profile pages - pre-radio, pre-recommendations. So with a pinch of collaborative filtering and more interface nous, Google Reader is set to be quite a big product. As it is, Gmail still seems to be losing the interface wars against Yahoo! mail (i find Gmail incredibly efficient myself), so it'll be interesting to see how the newsreading attention is distributed amongst the big players. It also depends if they can ever recover from their disastrous first impression (the first version of the Reader was truly a shocker and put lots of people off, myself included).
Whilst i'm not using Google Reader (I use Clippr and NetNewsWire), I've become a regular user of google notebook of late. Very quick to use, and comes with a firefox extension. May have something to do with using 4 computers on a daily basis.
One of our talented data miners, Martin, put these chart arcs up on our data playground last week. They show chart positions and movements of artists in our profile, along with popularity information. Turns out i probably have the least 'mainstream' taste of any of the last.fm staff. For further explanation and all the staff chart arcs, visit the last.fm chart arcs page on our playground.
Phew it's hot in London right now. Heatwave. So i came up with a sleeveless t-shirt design. You can catch me wearing this at Bash on Thursday (Plastic People, Curtain Rd, London) if it arrives on time. If you don't think the design sucks you can even get yourself one. Cafepress do direct printing now so the quality shouldn't be rock bottom. The line belongs to Anil Dash.
![[1]](http://butdoesitfloat.com/media/79287/superstudio5.jpg){kind=link}
![[2]](http://butdoesitfloat.com/media/79287/supersurface-superstudio-008_905.jpg){kind=link}
One of the few books on urbanism that's made a lasting impression on me. Ex-New Yorker and current LSE lecturer Richard Sennett on the design of social spaces. Mixing personal anecdote with broad observation, Sennett sketches out the history of the city, arguing for difference and exposure as fundamental elements of the urban experience. He seems to recognise in these elements the potential for social progress. I read this book about 5 years ago and found myself buying it just last month. Good ideas don't go away in a hurry. Also check the more popular book from this trilogy, The Fall of Public Man.
- John Hejduk, Wall House 2, Crayon on sepia diazotype, one of the Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collection which were exhibited at MoMa as 'The Changing of The Avant-Garde'
From the ibm archives photo gallery.
My father worked with the IBM 1620, the Control Data Corporation's CDC 6600 & the Cray 1 supercomputer, which looks like a monolith.
These last two were designed by Seymour Cray.
The 1620 took punchcards and required the entire operating system to be fed in every time it was switched on, since it lacked anything but 60,000 digits of volatile storage. It got the nickname CADET (Can't Add Doesn't Even Try) through its use of lookup tables instead of adders to perform arithmetic.
A weekend retreat for a classical musician in Japan. Girl plays the violin for Alain de Botton (a popular philosopher with a receding hairline) while he looks out on the forest. This is the scene.
De Botton's main observation in this TV program is that the trite aesthetic traditionalism of the British means most of us aren't living in homes that reflect the age we live in. We seem averse as a society to the idea of modern architecture, whereas the japanese effortlessly blend age-old religious values with modern materials and structures. For the Brits, when it comes to architecture, traditional is good and modern is ugly by default. Potential mass scale post-industrial fallout with design, subjugation to our nation's Most Great History or just plain apprehension. Not sure.
De Botton's TV series - The Perfect Home - is based on his essay, The Architecture of Happiness.
Anyway, this kind of geometric pastoral gets me every time.
Extension Object Pattern implementation for php - uses call overloading (on which i mistakenly called bs a while back) and the reflection API:
I use a variation on this to implement Façade-like objects that present one unified interface to clients whilst delegating requests to appropriate helper objects (extensions) as they come in. You can register new extensions and all the rest. Add context awareness to the extensions (pass a reference to the parent) and you've got a clean implementation of mixins.In reality it's an Extension Object implementation as opposed to a Façade, because façades need provide a high-level interface to a low-level subsystem, whereas this does nothing of the sort.
Façades are used all over the place, including sessions and web services. Extensions are a way of getting round the fact that PHP doesn't implement either multiple inheritance or mixins. They are also dynamic, so you can shape the capabilities of an object to fit its context.
Hard to think one company could come up with design excellence like my old handycam as well as design crimes such as the jewel case (what an environmentally damaging design, aside from its aesthetic and functional problems), all in one decade.
I have a phobia of jewel cases. I had to encode all my CD's to digital format just so i could throw them away.
This handycam features a single battery pack that plugs into the 8mm tape player, the camera and the battery charger as well. That's modular design. The whole kit comes in a metal handycam briefcase. Testament to what was arguably a golden age in technology product design.
Still works to this day (more than 20 years of use). Try saying that of your Sony Cybershot in 2026.
'peopleready' is Microsoft's latest marketing campaign. Balmer wanted to call it 'users users users' but the younger heads wouldn't let him. They blushed and left the room. Once at their desks they booted up their Ubuntu/OS X dual boot Powerbooks, the ones with the DELL stickers to block the glow, and got on with some real work.
Isn't it funny how Apple's HCI guidelines have over the years become a landmark piece of technical literature whilst Microsoft's guidelines (pictured above) don't seem to get referenced at all?
Microsoft have some good products, but people-ready (or user-centric) is not a term you can use to describe their software design practices. Feature-centric is a more apt adjective.
To paraphrase Spolsky (once a program manager on the Excel project, one of MS' most notable success stories) - empathy is the hardest thing to teach a programmer. The MSFT/AAPL divide, in terms of software engineering attitudes, is an instantiation of this fact on a massive scale.
Try this for over-engineering - Windows Vista ships in 5 editions, including 'Business', 'Enterprise' and 'Ultimate'. They should add a 'Leviathan' edition to round it off.
Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
- Doug Mcllroy, inventor of Unix pipes
Japanese for continuous and incremental improvement, a business philosophy about eliminating waste in working practices.
Kaizen is a daily activity whose purpose goes beyond improvement. It is also a process that when done correctly humanizes the workplace, eliminates hard work (both mental and physical), teaches people how to do rapid experiments using the scientific method, and how to learn to see and eliminate waste in business processes.
- Wikipedia
Each week the four of us sit down and throw patterns in each others' faces. Last week i threw adaptor. Things got messy - the pdf presentation the only remaining evidence. UML is not evil btw. Big revelation. Growing pains.
Back to a speedy text-driven no-nonsense nokia. Say no to convergence kids. Use slim, functional, focused tools that can interact. Otherwise known as orthogonal design. This tool is for mobile phone calls and text messages only.
Kernighan & Ritchie's original C manual was under 300 pages long.
PHP declares over 3,000 built-in functions.
Take a guess at which is more powerful.
Ergo:
array_uintersect_assoc -- Computes the intersection of arrays with additional index check, compares data by a callback function
array_uintersect_uassoc -- Computes the intersection of arrays with additional index check, compares data and indexes by a callback functions
array_uintersect -- Computes the intersection of arrays, compares data by a callback function
Design by commitee is tough.
Being a large open source project is tough.
A programmer's main activity is design. His tools should reflect that.
The distinction between native 'types' and objects makes for an amorphous pool of native functions:
There is inconsistency in the naming, arguments and return types. Most of these criticisms are documented by wikipedia.
Most don't think twice about these issues until they start with C and Ruby; both masterclasses in good language design.
Matz designed Ruby. He says,
One way is by looking at what can be done with that language. The other is by looking at how we feel using that language—how we feel while programming.
Dennis designed C. He says,
C is not a big language, and it is not served well by a big book.
Rasmus invented PHP.
He is coming to our local pub for a drink this week.