"Schöneberg itself was a genuine delight. Dieter noted how the area was, to some extent, demarcated by “male prostitutes in that direction, female prostitutes in that direction, and transvestites over there”, a form of municipal boundary that is exactly how citizens think of cities and exactly not how administrators and politicans do."
What remains intriguing about Futuro, however, is that it’s the closest housing ever came to product design. In the 1960s, the mechanisation of the domestic interior, particularly the kitchen, was in full force, as we accumulated labour-saving gadgets like washing machines and blenders. Suuronen’s plastic capsule had the moulded integrity of a mass-produced consumer product, it was the house-as-gadget, a device for the nomadic lifestyle.
"Ravintolapäivä is essentially a set of instructions, and you can hardly arrest a set of instructions. Coordinated by Facebook and Twitter, and disappearing as fast as they appeared, the restaurants were also essentially untouchable. It’s not as if the City could send round fleets of public works operatives playing a form of urban ‘Whac-a-Mole’, scooping soup kitchens, pizza ovens and cooks into the back of their vans. RP is a demonstration of the easy power of an emergent urbanism, an opportunistic urbanism, enabled through social media and mobile apps and driven by a desire for participation in the city at the hyper-local level. The sense of a somewhat conservative city opening up to possibility is palpable."
— City Of Sound - Journal: Ravintolapäivä, Restaurant Day, edible urbanism and civic opportunism
"That is the reason we bought Flickr—not the community. We didn’t give a shit about that. The theory behind buying Flickr was not to increase social connections, it was to monetize the image index. It was totally not about social communities or social networking. It was certainly nothing to do with the users."
"The milestones for that acquisition were all based around integrating that local event data into Yahoo. Yahoo didn’t care about Upcoming’s users—the community that created the data. Yahoo’s approach turned out to be completely backwards. The value of the the company was determined by the index itself, rather than how the index was built—which is to say, by the community."
"The panelists talked endlessly about the “culture” of their various agencies, an interesting word choice to replace “H.R. activities.” Talk of advertising agency employees coming up with ideas for advertisements to help make money for clients is verboten; the process is one of “creatives” manifesting “creativity.” In this world, that creativity exists in a bubble, allowing it to be admired and marveled at by peers without making the dreary connection to its actual societal function. The Most Interesting Man In The World, yes; the fluctuations in the market cap of Heineken International, no."
— Creative Destruction: How Advertising Is Swallowing the Creative Class
notes.unwieldy: The $144,146,165 Button
During payment, the user is presented with three default buttons for tipping: 20%, 25%, and 30%. When cabs were cash only, the average tip was roughly 10%. After the introduction of this system, the tip percentage jumped to 22%.
"It’s like, well there is no future, so why should I even take a picture? Why should I record anything? Why should I think about it? And maybe I live in the future more than many, but I realized that sort of not having a future was inhumane in that part of what meant to be human was to have a future, was to look forward, was to in some ways be future oriented and live in the future a little bit. I think that is part of what being human means because when I didn’t have a future I felt my humanity shrinking. I think that a big lesson I got from that experience was the vital importance of the future."
— Such a Long Journey: An Interview with Kevin Kelly - Boing Boing
"You must never forget though, that nobody enjoys looking at something that feels like it was created through lifting weights while doing math. It is crucial that once you have solved the problem you spend just as much time making things look like you just came up with it as you were sitting in a pretty café, dreamily slurping your macchiato."
Deconstructivism
När de byggde upp en låt så kunde Jocke sjunga grundversionen och man bara satt där och kände att ”här föds något, fy faan vad vackert” – och sedan bröt de ner låten i smådelar, bara totalt förstörde den, tyckte jag. Fast sedan drog den där Kentmaskinen i gång, timme efter timme och så, till slut, så var låten fantastisk igen.
Adrià’s desire to question everything can even be seen in how he describes his craft, rejecting the name molecular gastronomy, and instead favoring the title “deconstructivist.”
In a few slides, he’d spelled out the nine essential components of a university education: admissions, lectures, peer interaction, professor interaction, problem-solving, assignments, exams, deadlines and certification.
"But when we moved the follower count to another page, it bothered a lot of people. Data would show that the number of visits to the page dropped off dramatically. Both of those facts would indicate that we should move the page back up front, but we made a conscious decision: We just don’t want to show the number so prominently."
—
Long term!
Peter Vidani On The Evolution Of The Tumblr Dashboard
And looking forward to the future:
How do you conceive of the Dashboard evolving over the next year?
It should get bigger. Our photos and videos are too small. We’ll still be stripping stuff away, still whittling posts down to something simpler. On a photo post for example — it’s a white box. First there’s a line of blue stuff, then a photo, then words, then maybe more blue stuff if it’s tagged. We could bleed the photo to the edges of the white box. We could hide things you don’t need immediately, like tags and source and username and post icons — the blue parts — until you hover over them. What you’re left with is an avatar, a photo without a border, and a caption (if that). If we can get rid of the right column, we can center these things on the page. That bothers me now — that once you get down the page, everything is off center. We can add more distinction to the post types, give them a bit more personality — so a link with a description doesn’t have to look the same as a text post with a title and body, a quote doesn’t have to look like a text post, links can stand out more.
"On the bus recently a middle-aged, middle-class, middleweight woman peered out of the window at the stalled traffic and furiously bellowed; “Oh my God, is there no end to these improvements?” It was the authentic voice of London, and I thought it could be the city’s motto, uttered at any point in its history, embroidered in gold braid on the uniforms of every petty official."
"
Jeff Bezos once famously declared that, in the service of innovation and its long-term success, Amazon is “willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.” He was being a bit modest there; Amazon is not merely “willing” to be misunderstood, it often tries to actively sow widespread misunderstanding. This works it its advantage; if competitors don’t know what Amazon is up to, if they can’t even figure out where and how it aims to make money, they’ll have a harder time beating it.
But all this misunderstanding can’t be an unalloyed good. Amazon is so opaque, with so many mysterious businesses and revenue streams, that you’ve got to wonder whether the people who work there even understand what it’s up to. In business, simplicity often wins. Selling me a device to get me to buy a membership in order to get a book for free. Is Bezos crazy like a fox? Or is he just plain crazy? We have no idea
"