A conversation between Rob Walker and co-founder of Area/Code, Kevin Slavin : Observatory: Design Observer. Questioning the faith placed in AR (like QR, right?), but there’s a bigger philosophy here. My perfect phone is forgettable, saving my gaze for my environment. I don’t want to connect, I want to be connected.

Kickstarter blog, Featured Creator: Adam Grossman of Dark Sky. This is what even more data and context gets you. No comprehension, just the Right Thing happening. (But leave room for happenstance.) We backed Dark Sky.

parislemon: Marco Arment Rips The Kindle Fire

 

supermechanical:

When we crystallize our manufacturing processes and ship them to the factory Over There, we lose the ability to improve them ourselves. This isn’t felt immediately, but outsourcing means you’re paying someone else to get better at it, and then they can use that expertise for their own benefit when new opportunities come along.

But you’ll just move on to the Next Big Thing, right? Unfortunately, you’re at a disadvantage there, because even new product categories are built on expertise in existing ones. Pisano and Shih offer the example of the rechargeable battery market, which is swelling to supply the most expensive component to tomorrow’s electric cars. U.S. companies can’t compete here because battery technology has grown by leaps and bounds in Asia, ever since we farmed it out along with the rest of our consumer electronics in previous decades.

supermechanical:

We spent our weekend like Superman, bending steel. How was yours? What, it’s Thursday? Guess we took a long weekend.

Narrative seems to be required in products these days. Pornographic details of how this chair was assembled, where this jacket was discovered, the machines (not humans!) which carved my laptop out of metal. Lots of adjectives like ‘hand-selected’, ‘rugged’ and ‘refined’.

It’s because above a certain price point, consumers are buying authenticity that bolsters their own narratives. I didn’t make this chair, but I support and am connected to the worker who did. I didn’t find this jacket, but I’m the kind of person who could. Lord knows I didn’t build this computer, but this is my digital canvas, not a digital grindstone. Even buying a generic brand becomes a conscious decision to say, I’m no-nonsense and unaffected.

Most product stories come frozen in a pre-purchase state. Shouldn’t we get more in these malleable times? Designing for post-purchase wear is one branch—impose your own history on the object.

Another direction is to place the object in a fantasy. It acts as a portal to some other wonderful tale, in a very different way from a television. It might be a reminder of some past event.

Bye Bye Bird coffee table, Frøystad Klock. (via Pratt)

Or the object could be caught in the throes of the event.

Buffet Nouvelle Zeland Rencontre des Pôles (Meeting of the Poles), Vincent Dubourg. (via Core77)

Or to better incorporate it into your personal narrative, an object’s state may be relevant to you right now, and hinting at some other story operating in parallel. Perhaps separation, love and loss?

Wherever dual time watch, Denis Guidone. (via Core77)

Inside Google+ — How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social | Epicenter | Wired.com

I don’t mean to pick on Google. But this crystallizes the “memes as virus, humans as carrier” meme to me. Here Google+ claims to do even the work of curation for us, but it’s on all social networks. We exist to pass others’ content on, and pay the network for the privilege, in personal data. The medium is the message, but it’s not our medium.

There’s a whole generation of dumb ass kids who grew up convinced that they’re creative in some way.

— The Atlantic, “The Secrets of Creative Success: An Interview With Rob Long”

I just worry that real creation will no longer be recognized as valuable. Are we creating real value when we retweet? Networks are encouraging us to invest in our “reputation,” which ultimately is as ephemeral as derivatives. But the brokers always win.

I thought I was waiting for reasonable digital prices to finally subscribe to the New Yorker’s fine long-form journalism. Yet now that I can buy an iPad subscription, I’m still weighing it. For $20 less and more of my personal info, I can get all this plus the print copies.

Funny that I thought the new digital price is reasonable until I see how it’s actually more than the physical+digital subscription. (I’m trying to break my habit of maximizing.) Either way it’s a hell of a deal for that much quality writing. I’ll probably subscribe my mom to the paper copies while I read the digital ones.

My lack of enthusiasm for the digital edition is because it isn’t more convenient. Blame goes to Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite. This bolt-on to InDesign is heralded as “the future of publishing,” which sounds like an epitaph once you see what it is.

It renders each page in an existing InDesign layout as an impenetrable PNG. Adobe promises “immersive reading experiences” using “innovative viewer technology,” but it’s not as interactive as PDF, let alone HTML. You can’t search text, or select a quote to share. None of the advantages of digital other than portability are present. Particularly with the New Yorker’s longer, more durable articles, I can see myself wanting to read a piece months later — and I’m afraid it may be quicker to pick up a paper copy and thumb to a dogeared page than to browse a dozen slow-loading digital issues.

Publishers are going with Adobe because it’s the simplest addition to their workflow, but the fundamental differences between text on paper and on a screen remain. At least Quark’s new version looks like it does searchable text. Better yet would be HTML5-based apps (Flipboard does this well).

As the industry tries to catch up with digital media, it’s going through the Flash stage where it thinks that readers want novelty. No, we want content, we want it everywhere, and you’re getting in the way. I’m sorry to say we don’t read your magazines for the layout, and we won’t for the UI either. Stop dicking around with navigation experiments until you can give us the novel new navigation called search.

My sister, featured Brooklyn Flea vendor and like any good hustler, user experience designer. She also has an amazing collection of record players.

YES. This becomes a problem as software becomes the product. Analog Form | Blog | design mind (via slantback)

(via slantback)