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.
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
Yoshi Sodeoka, 'Bloodless, Empty Socket' (from 'Noise Driven Ambient Audio And Visuals')
More @c505
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'
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...
"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)
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.
Angela Lorenz vinyl artwork on the wall of my front room (Full Swing series).
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.
Bernd and Hilla Becher constructed a typology of industrial buildings in post-war Germany. It's an amazing body of work. They are the most productive collaborating couple i can think of. Lovegrove says, "industrial design is the art of the 21st Century", and the engineer in me, the one that correlates beauty and function, is tempted to agree. It's the same part of me, however, that fondly recalls the smell and thick layers of white powder inside ammonia chemical plants. Go figure.
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.
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. It works well and very, very quickly for these two functions. It's not for:
Less is less.
Only thing missing is bluetooth... i need to move the sim to an ericsson just to sync. That's about all an ericsson is good for ;)
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.
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