A new favorite:
Highly beautiful photo series Winter Berlin by Matthias Heiderich
The philosophy behind much advertising is based on the old observation that every man is really two men - the man he is and the man he wants to be.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
This is not a photo. It’s an oil painting. Seriously.
I love this challenges standard perceptions. On first glance you assume this is a photo. Something so detailed and refined, so similar to a photograph, is a photograph. But when told it’s an oil painting you look for more. Not finding any signs of evidence or reason, you naturally assume a sense of what Arthur C. Clarke calls, magic.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
A quote better known for it’s association with Apple. I love how this art embodies that very same feeling, but through almost anti-technological innovations.
Oh Apple. Just when I begin to tire of your ads, you bring out this little cracker.
Beautiful.
Notorious SIRI
SiriProxy is used to intercept the communication with Apple’s servers. Notorious Siri then sends Notorious B.I.G.’s Hypnotize to the device.
Siri’s speech synthesis is synced to the beat using the timestamps obtained from the Echonest API. Easy Peasy.It’s like Biggie’s back in the room…
Observations of a Dreamer
Recently stumbled across a Google doc I started over 4 years ago where I fairly listed random observations and points about business, work and making stuff. Unsurprisingly alot of it is naive dribble, observed by someone who very had little real world experience at the time.
There was however a little wheat amongst much chaff. These couple of quotes jumped out at me. Which seem particularly poignant around the passing of Steve Jobs.
Hire the best people you can find.
Let people do what they love to do.
If this little gem were available for Christmas it would be stratospherically high on my festive wish list. Unfortunately it’s not. But I keenly await the time when it can sit on my desk, or even maybe my bedside cabinet. Feeding me little social occurrences I’d otherwise miss. Prompt me for my next training run. And generally highlight significant points from the vast passive data plumes that envelope us daily.
I for one am extremely excited about this product. Sitting at the junction of data, digital and realworld. I see Little Printer as a passive conduit. A quiet friend who softly whispers in your ear, in a room that’s otherwise deafening.
Yet again, fantastic work from the Jack and co at Berg.
Don’t strive to make your presence noticed, make your absence felt.
Finding the rulespace is the thing that is the real work – and that is product invention through making a simulation.
Product design has really struck a chord with me recently. No doubt partly down to the Steve Jobs effect, but also everyone seems to be getting into micro-product development.
I’m really interested in making real-world things with a digital, networked nervous system. It could be something as simple as boolean reaction to an online state, or something far more complex like Berg’s Little Printer or Sonos.
Whilst the product Duncan speaks about in his Pecha Kucha talk isn’t digital in anyway. It’s a great example of how something simple can be start from home. In your own time, with inexpensive kit you can buy. And can lead to something more.
Sometimes it’s much bigger to think small. Inspirational stuff.
It’s an often overlooked point that design can be a power for evil, just as much as for good. And I’m not talking about 10px drop shadows and bevelling.
Creative Review pose a fantastic question in their recent article. Does the worlds most popular weapon of war, the AK47, dwarf the human impact of the iPod. It’s hard to disagree.
After the death of Steve Jobs, a great deal was written (including by me) about how he and Apple had changed the world. But the global significance of the iPod on the lives of the world’s citizens pales in comparison with that of the AK-47. It’s a grim, depressing thought, but, post-war at least, did any designer have a greater impact worldwide on the Twentieth Century than Mikhail Kalashnikov?
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