The Overexamined Life: Finding Bits of Ourselves in Digital Ghost Towns: 'If I were to log into Friendster today I would see a perfectly preserved document of my life in 2003. The people I was friends with then (most of them, sadly, I'm no longer in touch with) and the inside jokes we shared, not to mention the photos of me at that age. It makes me really want to not log in or log in and destroy it all.' See also Caterina's defence of participatory media in the face of Jaron Lanier's contention that digital collectivism and 'making everything open all the time creates what I call a global mush.'

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The iPad as a 'device for cities'. It's also demonstrating that the 'perfect computing device' is becoming more, not less, impossible to achieve. Convergence is an increasingly discredited idea: 'That 'Swiss army knife' model may well be on the way out.' Apple is a purveyor of unabashed design elitism. From an NYT piece, quoted by CoS: "Great products, according to Mr. Jobs, are triumphs of "taste." And taste, he explains, is a byproduct of study, observation and being steeped in the culture of the past and present.'

In this respect, the company is akin to the patrician approach of early design Quangos like the Council of Industrial Design, which railed against the vulgarity of popular taste with films like 'Deadly Lampshade' ('In the table lamp section of a department store, the salesman persuades a female customer to buy, against her better judgement, a badly designed table lamp in the shape of a Viking ship. The manufacturers, Kosi Glim, are pleased that this particular line is selling well, but their chief designer, Spencer, is aware that it is rubbish and shows his new design for a simple and efficient table lamp to the managing director, Millbank. Millbank, though he too dislikes fancy designs, turns down Spencer's idea on the arguments of the sales manager.')

It's not entirely unknown for a company to state baldly that it knows best for its consumers - the success of many major brands is entirely predicated on their self-stated authority. But Apple's authority rests not on its championing of a particular aesthetic but its disavowal of anything even remotely at odds with an ascetic approach (drawing attention to its employment of typographers, for example). Until now, perhaps. From CoS again: 'That [iBook] shelf interface is particularly horrible... Why would a Rams-fan such as Ive settle for clumsy faux-wooden shelving? Particularly when you might have referenced the Ram's designed 606 shelving system, which is about as perfect as shelving-as-modular-interface can get?' The answer perhaps lies in Apple's mastery of minimalism, a movement that in other genres is frequently derided for its 'blandness' or 'simplicity' (think Andre's bricks or a Pawson interior). Of course, no designers would deny the time and skill that it takes to create less out of more. Where iBook appears to fail is in the sudden metaphorical gulf between the minimalism of its physical product design and the increasingly popular use of real-world symbolism and imagery in operating systems. The Microsoft Bob system was a disaster, but the basic visual architecture - a room, objects, characters - is there in iBook.

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Other things. All about Branjengilina, through the eyes of the gossip magazines / popular, revisiting British hit singles. It's all about the comments / love it: copypastcharacter.com, for when you need tick or a snowflake / the myth of 'Broken Britain' / design a house for Lady Gaga / bookspaperscissors, an illustration blog / A petit bruit, a weblog focusing on design for children / the cost of New Modern construction at Modern South Florida, further proof that 'modernist' is the new bourgeouis-style decried by its original practitioners. See also Miami Modern.

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Hitchens on A Nation of Racist Dwarfs: 'Kim Jong-il's regime is even weirder and more despicable than you thought.' From the piece: 'a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean' / Modern Capital, modernism in Washington / Kickcan and Conkers, a tumbler / photography by Elli Ioannou / Significant Objects looks at underwater things from New York /

Neat Pelican mash-ups. We wonder where they found the source images? Via ffffound / Tessellations, a weblog / works by the Future Mapping Company / all about the 747 / all about Battersea Power Station / all about Dennis Wheatley / a weblog by Caitlin Burke / Artybuzz, an artists' community.

Labels: computers

posted by things at 13:00 / 1 comments