Modern & Im/material Things

chicagopubliclibrary: Chicago Public Library Welcomes City’s...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:44:31 -0500

Chicago Public Library Welcomes City’s First “Maker Space”

From Crain’s Chicago Business:

Next month, the Chicago Public Library will open the city’s first free “maker space” on the third floor of Harold Washington Library in the Loop. The pop-up fabrication lab will offer the public access to 3D printers, laser cutters, a milling machine and a vinyl cutter as well as a variety of supporting design software.

The facility is the first to come out of the CPL Innovation Lab, an effort to introduce new technologies to city residents. And the library is the first in a large city to experiment with a “maker space,” the city says. Though it will be similar to maker spaces at the Museum of Science and Industry and Pumping Station: One, this fab lab will be free to all.

The space opens July 8 and will close at year-end. After its six-month run, the library says it will consider hosting labs in neighborhood branches.

The space fits into a growing movement of hands-on collaborative learning environments that allow people to come together and exchange ideas in the pursuit of innovation, and was funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services in Washington.

“We are thrilled to be able to offer Chicagoans the opportunity to learn firsthand new technologies and skills used in today’s manufacturing at the library,” Library Commissioner Brian Bannon said in a statement. “The maker lab is the first of several ideas we plan to test over the next few years in the Innovation Lab, as we focus on expanding access to 21st century ideas and information to our communities.”

I know where I’ll be hanging out in for the next six months.

Funyuns: Driving Hate in the G8 Since Forever

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:13:00 -0500

Funyuns: Driving Hate in the G8 Since Forever

"With effort and cost excised from the equation, photos have become too plentiful. And at the same..."

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:52:22 -0500

“

With effort and cost excised from the equation, photos have become too plentiful. And at the same time — as more and more pictures are taken on smartphones, “shared” on social media if at all, then lost to the cacophony of the digital universe — meaningful images have become too scarce. Many of my friends, forever switching among their laptops, tablets and smartphones, can no longer even say where their photo files are located.

Ultimately, the loss is maybe less about numbers than about quality and permanence. Printed images are crisper than pixelated ones. They are also tangible: material objects that can be grasped, pasted, or leaned against a dresser mirror. Digital images have a distant, once-removed quality — kind of like dead fathers, come to think of it. In any case, many of us no longer look to print photos to safekeep our memories. In some respects, maybe it’s for the best. When you gaze at the same snapshots over and over again during the course of a lifetime, the images become part of the recollection itself until the two are interchangeable, and it’s hard to say what you remember at all.

”

- From “A Lament for the Photo Album”

"i got this new strategy: it’s called no strategy. i got an idea how to sell more music: it’s called..."

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:54:52 -0500

““i got this new strategy: it’s called no strategy. i got an idea how to sell more music: it’s called make better music.””

- Kanye West (via mixtapelaser)

One of the more cogent things that this man has said in awhile.

Bob van Vliet: Judging Design

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 16:30:45 -0500

Bob van Vliet: Judging Design:

Key bit: “It seems to me that the process by which a thing – a book, a cake, a car – came to be, should be largely irrelevant to our appraisal of that thing.”

bobvanvliet

Some good thoughts. Definitely worth a read.

"The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing."

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 15:05:56 -0500

“The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.”

- Meg Wolitzer, “The Uncoupling” (via mcscully21)

This was, without question, one of my favorite passages from The Uncoupling, a witty and clever take on Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, intimacy and technology.

"I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is..."

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 16:56:34 -0500

“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?
What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know where it will end.””

- Michel Foucault (via zenhumanism)

"The biggest mistake a product designer can make is to dismiss any behavior performed by a..."

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 09:29:57 -0500

“The biggest mistake a product designer can make is to dismiss any behavior performed by a significant number of people as fad, vanity, immaturity, etc. (selfies, oversharing, digital hoarding, even *sexting). There is always more there there.”

- “A Working Definition of Product Design” by Keenan Cummings on Medium

(via shoutsandmumbles)

Putting Big Data In Context - Performics

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 09:15:57 -0500

Putting Big Data In Context - Performics:

We need to remember there is always a context for the data we analyze.

My post on the importance of contextual thinking is up on my agency’s blog.

And this is why ad placements based on the biggest audience...

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 10:19:59 -0500

And this is why ad placements based on the biggest audience reach don’t always make sense in practice. But thanks for the lullz.

"‘The right to privacy is often understood as an essential requirement for the realization of..."

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 10:04:03 -0500

“‘The right to privacy is often understood as an essential requirement for the realization of the right to freedom of expression. Undue interference with individuals’ privacy can both directly and indirectly limit the free development and exchange of ideas. An infringement upon one right can be both the cause and consequence of an infringement upon the other.’”

- From “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue*”

Via The United Nations General Assembly

Note: Link points to a PDF of the report.

"Some of the start-ups being created are designed for people who have rung the cash register..."

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 10:25:02 -0500

““Some of the start-ups being created are designed for people who have rung the cash register already…They are not necessarily bad ideas but they are not the ideas the world needs more.””

- Nick Bilton, on Why Silicon Valley Needs to Stop Fixing Fake Problems

Via NYT

"Data is something we create, but it’s also something we imagine."

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 09:22:51 -0500

““Data is something we create, but it’s also something we imagine.””

- Kate Crawford on “Why Big Data is Not Truth”

Via NYT

The Novelist: A Trailer Some random thoughts: Digital marketers...

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 22:18:09 -0500

The Novelist: A Trailer

Some random thoughts:

Digital marketers are obsessed with the ‘gamification’ of everything. Make everything a game and people will be interested, ya dig? You get the drill here. It’s lazy and dated strategy. The industry’s approach is basically the equivalent of killing a cow in order to milk it: instead of working with a trend, we strive to own it and in the process render it useless. And instead of looking to see where we might have failed, we look for more cows to kill in the name of milk.

The Novelist is the most clever combination of design, storytelling and gaming I have seen in some time. It gets right what so many of us in the industry get wrong:

- It combines interaction and emotional design in a meaningful way. The player is directly implicated in the story and the actions of the characters. You feel morally obliged to stop writing and put together the boy’s toy car.

- It allows the player access to the interior world of the characters and allows the user to engage in a kind of dialectical exchange with the characters.

- It assumes the user is smart and uses the player’s awareness as kind of baseline for engagement

And the really brilliant part, I think, for marketers: allows players to have agency in a controlled environment without (appearing to) reducing their engagement to a set of limited interactions with the game (i.e., click this and get that)

It seems to me that a lot of digital design experiences fail because marketers (and others) assume users are too lazy for anything complex and too stupid to be emotionally engaged without complete manipulation. Maybe if we give people more credit they might actually surprise us.

"Like Slow Food, Slow Web is concerned as much with production as it is with consumption. We as..."

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 12:22:57 -0500

“

Like Slow Food, Slow Web is concerned as much with production as it is with consumption. We as individuals can always set our own guidelines and curb the effect of the Fast Web, but as I hope I’ve illustrated, there are a number of considerations the creators of web-connected products can make to help us along. And maybe the Slow Web isn’t quite a movement yet. Maybe it’s still simmering. But I do think there is something distinctly different about the feeling that some of these products impart on their users, and that feeling manifests from the intent of their makers.

Fast Web companies want to be our lovers, they want to be by our sides at all times, want us to spend every moment of our waking lives with them, when sometimes that’s not what we really need. Sometimes what we really need are friends we can meet once every few months for a bowl of ramen noodles at a restaurant in the East Village. Friends with whom we can sit and talk and eat and drink and maybe learn a little about ourselves in the process. And at the end of the night get up and go our separate ways, until next time.

”

- Jack Chen, The Slow Web

"A hacker is, quite simply, someone who messes around with stuff…It doesn’t have to be a computer. It..."

Fri, 31 May 2013 16:16:54 -0500

“A hacker is, quite simply, someone who messes around with stuff…It doesn’t have to be a computer. It doesn’t even have to be technology. A hacker is someone who figures out how to get around barriers, won’t take no for an answer, asks an insane amount of questions and believes in sharing the information he or she discovers.”

- Emmanual Goldstein, editor and publisher of 2600 in

http://www.amazon.com/Hack-This-Incredible-Hackerspace-Projects/dp/0789748975

(via notational)

"Personal libraries have always been a biopsy of power."

Thu, 30 May 2013 12:02:16 -0500

“Personal libraries have always been a biopsy of power.”

- via CEO Libraries Reveal Keys to Success. (NYT, Circa 2007)

Takeaway: Diversity in ideas (and books) can help make people successful leaders.

My reaction: Really? Is this something that needs to be said? Why would knowing only one field to the exclusion of everything else ever be considered a good thing? The ability to think and generate ideas is incredibly powerful. But maybe I’m naive in my personal desire to know a lot about a lot, which ultimately proves I don’t know much and is a truth I’m more than happy to admit.

"‘Everyone’ isn’t an audience. ‘Everyone’ is a byproduct of an incredibly successful thing that was..."

Thu, 30 May 2013 09:28:04 -0500

“‘Everyone’ isn’t an audience. ‘Everyone’ is a byproduct of an incredibly successful thing that was made for a far more specific bunch of people. Don’t ever make something for ‘Everyone’ make it for someone. And make that person love it. I listened to an overwhelmingly amazing podcast the other day with Sam Simon, one of the original creators of the Simpsons. Most of the interview focused on his battle with cancer, but he also talked about when he and Matt Groening worked together creating the show. And he mentioned that there were two writers he wanted to bring on board, but they turned him down. And the rest of that season, he wrote the show for them—he wanted them to think it was funny. For Simon, that was the test: Did those two people think it was funny—not network execs, not focus groups, and certainly not ‘Everyone.’ Jesus, I *hate* Facebook, and you don’t get much more ‘Everyone’ than that thing now, but it didn’t get gigantic building for ‘Everyone,’ it got gigantic building for Harvard students, then Ivy League students, then more and more and more. Go ask all your friends on Google Plus how well building for ‘Everyone’ from the start went. When you begin with ‘Everyone’ you’re just stuck: How do you make any honest decisions? How do you solve any real problems? You don’t. You start to invent people and you start to invent their problems and it’s amazing because those people and those problems line up almost exactly with what you’re building and how you’re thinking about it—imagine that. Lying to yourself is amazing for productivity. Real audience is hard. Solving real problems is fucking bananas. But it’s the only way you make something that lasts, because you made something that someone actually cared about. Every amazing comic that Vertigo comics published wasn’t written for ‘Everyone.’ Every person that read them knew what I knew when I read them myself: This comic was written just for me. That. Do exactly that. You’ll be fine.”

- Daniel Sinker (via christinefriar)

Reblogging again because so good.

(via kenyatta)

"The National makes me feel that rock music, like much of American literature and visual art before..."

Wed, 29 May 2013 13:53:16 -0500

“The National makes me feel that rock music, like much of American literature and visual art before it, has died and gone to graduate school. The band delivers certifiable Quality-with-a-capital-Q, a perfect product of the English and music departments—the way that Lady Gaga is a perfect product of the semiotics department and an MBA program, though I definitely prefer Lady Gaga.”

- Carl Wilson, on why he hates The National

Wilson wrote a fantastic book on music and taste, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. Wickedly fun and smart.

H/T To Andrew for that recommendation

I like The National well enough but their whole sad-faced Americana white male malaise is exhausting after awhile. We know, Matt, dreams die and it sucks sometimes.

New Track: Dans La Nuit It’s the first thing I’ve...

Sat, 25 May 2013 10:30:00 -0500

New Track: Dans La Nuit

It’s the first thing I’ve produced since integrating Native Instruments’ Maschine into my Ableton Workflow. Feedback is always appreciated.