Category: inspiration
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Designing With Constraints
"You know this moment: time is running out, the team is down by one, a player arcs the ball from downtown just as the buzzer sounds—and sinks it. it’s exhilarating. It’s heart breaking. And most of all, it’s good design." Much has been written about how an astute use of constraints can help focus problems and promote…
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This Is Water
"There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way…" I remember the first time I read David Foster Wallace's commencement speech, given to a graduating class at Kenyon College, Ohio. This video is an evocative ten minute snippet of that wonderful talk, which is all…
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Longplayer, and the Long-term View
Longplayer is Jem Finer's intriguing project to write and perform a one thousand year long musical composition: "It began playing at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again". As part of…
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‘Find What You Love and Let It Kill You’
"We seem to have evolved into a society of mourned and misplaced creativity… Charles Bukowski, hero of angsty teenagers the world over, instructs us to 'find what you love and let it kill you'. Suicide by creativity is something perhaps to aspire to in an age where more people know Katie Price better than the Emperor concerto." This piece,…
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The 3D Printed Building
I've written a couple of times about Enrico Dini, the Italian who has developed a 3D printing machine that is big enough to print houses. At Next Berlin I saw a talk from architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars (from Universe Architecture) whose vision is to take this technology and 3D print not just a small dwelling, but…
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On Meaning
“Life is without meaning. You bring meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.” Joseph Campbell Thanks to Swissmiss
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On Inventing Your Job
I guess it's not such a new story that when my daughter's generation enter the workforce a far higher proportion of them will find themselves with the need (and also the means) to invent their own job. And given the pace of change that surrounds us, then to reinvent it, probably many times. Perhaps Thomas Friedman…
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Falling Into The Audience
I did like this new TED talk from activist-performer-singer-songwriter-blogger-provocateur (people who defy description make me happy) Amanda Palmer. She talks evocatively about the art of asking for support (financial and otherwise) from your following, and how that process can help build powerful connections with people. She calls it 'falling into the audience' which is a…
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Nike and WireWAX
I don't often talk here about stuff I get sent (sorry PRs), but I've been following the work of Dan Garraway and the smart folk at WireWAX since they started out a few years back. WireWAX is a fascinating piece of technology that enables dynamic and clickable tagging of video content (more here). Nike have…
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Slow
A few things about slowness. A while back Matt Steel wrote a powerful post about how easy it is, in the rush of life, to lose perspective and forget that when we slow down, priorities often become clearer: "The story I told myself was that slowness and emptiness were the same thing. I couldn’t have…