In the Category interesting
Unfinished Swan
Posted October 30th, 2008 at 11:51 am. There are 0 comments.
The Unfinished Swan – Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.
The understated simplicity of this navigation, feeling around in the dark so to speak, is very compelling to me.
muxtape-to-tape
Posted June 30th, 2008 at 4:28 pm. There are 0 comments.
last week I received my muxtape-to-tape from russelldavies. I still haven’t listened to the tape (I cheated and listened to crusty.muxtape.com
Many thanks to Russell for this little gem of internet physicality.
what are you doing, you know, more generally
Posted May 21st, 2008 at 1:09 pm. There are 0 comments.
my first post to dawdlr went up today. dawdlr is set up by one of the more interesting people around, Russell Davies who describes it as such:
I’ve tried to make dawdlr way slower than twitter. I reckon most people I know twitter about twice a day, so dawdlr is going to update twice a year. To try and get people to say what they’re doing, you know, more generally.
Its been over six months since I posted. I must have missed last Novembers posting by a few short days.
big ideas are small
Posted April 4th, 2008 at 9:54 am. There are 0 comments.
d-barcode in Japan design barcodes for the items you see on the supermarket shelf. These are the little flourishes of design that take the banal and make it fresh and that keeps me smiling everyday.
listening to a sign
Posted January 29th, 2008 at 2:56 pm. There are 0 comments.
At the recommendation of a friend, who questioned the very idea that someone would plug their headphones in to a sign, I did just that. The experience was, as you might guess, pretty stupid. This particular sign was in the 42nd street A/C/E Station, where I stood about a foot away from the ad to which I was tethered and listened to a few moments of John Legend. I can’t even say I remember much of the music though I am pretty sure I hated it, but to be fair the experience wasn’t helping. When I pushed my unprotected headphone plug into this skanky 42nd Street subway sign the music was already playing, I had arrived mid song. Maybe I should have waited until the song (or songs?!) looped but the draw of standing uncomfortably close to a sign, listening to new music and thinking that this was supposed to sell me a compact disc was less than strong. I unplugged from the high-tech billboard, thinking of the marketing people convincing themselves that this idea was totally awesome.
Museum für Kommunikation
Posted December 27th, 2007 at 4:00 pm. There are 0 comments.
Last summer when in Frankfurt I visited the Museum für Kommunikation. I had written a reminder to myself very recently that I should write about my experience of visiting and was reminded again today when I read about the optical telegraph, or Semaphore, communication networks. I was familiar with semaphore, as shown in the boy scout manuals and used by lifeguards to signal to each other down the beach. I had not, until visiting the Museum für Kommunikation, known that there existed this very extensive network of towers, through out much of Europe, talking to each other in giant sign-language. At the Museum the exhibit showed examples of towers and the evolution of the tower’s signaling systems as well as the various symbol libraries, and had an interactive piece that one could use to spell out a short word using the virtual tower on a screen. In the context of the museum it fit right in, alongside an exhibit on the Thurn und Taxis mail monopoly (they have an original sealed leather mail bag that was found in a central post office after a few hundred years missing, with letters intact) and the evolution of the telephone. The entire museum is an ode to human communication, from cave paintings, to pencil and pen technology, to mail delivery systems, mechanical telephone switching, radio and television and up to and including the internet.
The amazing feeling I got here was the efforts surrounding these earlier communications. I won’t add to the continuing discourse of how communication now is easier (it is) or how we don’t appreciate this ease (we don’t) or that the magic is lost (not yet), but I will say that I do take less for granted, and can almost fantasize about the specialness of receiving a letter from a mail carrier arriving on horseback, or hearing the clicks of morse code through a wire from far away.
touch: nearfield communications
Posted November 19th, 2007 at 12:26 pm. There are 0 comments.
At nearfield a presentation on RFID as a Material in Design outlines the background, goals and findings of the research into NFC (nearfield communications) using RFID.
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