Paper Bits

Ring Of Fire – Bryan Jones

Thu, 24 May 2012 09:59:37 -0400

Ring Of Fire – Bryan Jones

"A customer is a novel and stable pattern of human behavior. […] An innovation is a stimulus that..."

Wed, 23 May 2012 13:58:19 -0400

“

A customer is a novel and stable pattern of human behavior.

[…]

An innovation is a stimulus that causes a novel and stable pattern of human behavior to emerge.

”

- Marketing, Innovation and the Creation of Customers

"Marketing and innovation play a zero-sum game driven by the clarity of the “customer.” When the..."

Wed, 23 May 2012 10:01:02 -0400

“Marketing and innovation play a zero-sum game driven by the clarity of the “customer.” When the “customer” has been created with great clarity, marketing leads innovation and you get sustaining and/or incremental innovations. When the customer is a mystery, innovation leads, and you get disruptive and/or radical innovations.”

- Marketing, Innovation and the Creation of Customers

"Never underestimate the basic laziness of people before handing them tools."

Tue, 22 May 2012 16:18:16 -0400

“Never underestimate the basic laziness of people before handing them tools.”

- Scott Foe’s Web Log: Opinion: What The Fuck N-Gage?

"For a few minutes, the most-watched stock in the world behaved like a malfunctioning computer..."

Tue, 22 May 2012 13:59:03 -0400

“For a few minutes, the most-watched stock in the world behaved like a malfunctioning computer program. The stock that convinced untold thousands of regular people with E-Trade accounts to get back into investing behaved according to rules that literally none of them understood, traded at volumes that none of them could conceive of and effectively followed contradictory orders from two sets of screaming robots. This is what future shock feels like.”

- How Facebook’s IPO Got Hijacked by Computers (via iamdanw)

dot-ed: Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset A growth mindset will...

Tue, 22 May 2012 09:34:25 -0400

dot-ed:

Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset

A growth mindset will help you achieve more, according to Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck.

Challenges: embrace them

Obstacles: persist in the face of setbacks

Effort: see it as the path to mastery

Criticism: learn from them

Success of others: find lessons and inspiration in others’ success

"Writing is the connective tissue that creates understanding."

Fri, 18 May 2012 13:57:42 -0400

“Writing is the connective tissue that creates understanding.”

- Please Learn to Write is Rands at his concise best.

"Design must be functional and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics, without any..."

Fri, 18 May 2012 09:58:00 -0400

“Design must be functional and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics, without any reliance on gimmicks that have to be explained.”

- F.A. Porsche on Design

thepenguinpress: Vladimir Nabokov’s note card, c. 1969.

Wed, 16 May 2012 20:10:54 -0400

thepenguinpress:

Vladimir Nabokov’s note card, c. 1969.

"If you think about the tone of my story, some of the main themes were time pressure, worry,..."

Fri, 11 May 2012 13:46:02 -0400

“

If you think about the tone of my story, some of the main themes were time pressure, worry, risk-taking, embarrassment, and recovery from embarrassment. For me at least, this is what real life user experience design is like. It’s nothing like the vision we normally portray outwardly to graduates and newcomers to the field.

There’s no pristine CSI laboratory stuff going on here – and we didn’t magically innovate using multi-coloured post-it notes and impressively well drawn sketches. We simply had the stamina to keep going through that cycle of making mistakes, analysing them and trying again.

”

- [From Print to iPad: Designing a Reading Experience

"[T]he world that produced Friedman and Thomas no longer exists. Their expertise and their insight..."

Thu, 10 May 2012 13:58:01 -0400

“[T]he world that produced Friedman and Thomas no longer exists. Their expertise and their insight have become completely obsolete. Rather than admit that they no longer possess relevant expertise and set themselves to being curious about the future, these writers are choosing to express advice from a bygone age, one in which they still possess authority. To do otherwise would be far too personally painful. And to a majority of their audience, which formed its ideology in an America than no longer exists, hearing the old myths repeated brings comfort. After all, in the America of the 20th Century, a solid work ethic and an education was enough to bring most people a career that would provide a lifestyle filled with the goods and services of the Middle Class. It was a good system, and it attracted the attention of the world. Who wouldn’t want to go back to that land, however mythical, in their mind?”

- The coming bubble of obsolete advice | Eric Garland

"Only recently have I come to understand that the real-life feeling of “romance” is really just the..."

Thu, 10 May 2012 09:37:08 -0400

“Only recently have I come to understand that the real-life feeling of “romance” is really just the tension and release that occurs when a series of seemingly unrelated events suddenly all make sense. Think of a relationship like a long flip book—yours might be filled with years of makeouts and petty fights and amazing records and intellectual arguments and good sex and bad sex and takeout Thai curries and Netflix Instant screenings. But as time passes, our memory has a tendency to dog-ear select pages, so that when we flip through again we only see certain story lines. If we’re not careful, our flip book will be flagged into one of those big romantic narratives. It will encourage us to dwell on the private moments that conform most closely with public ideas about how a relationship should be, and where it should go.”

- How to Ditch Happily-Ever-After and Build Your Own Romantic Narrative - Lifestyle - GOOD

"The plethora of online Photoshop tutorials demonstrate its power and its flexibility, but I believe..."

Wed, 09 May 2012 20:19:38 -0400

“The plethora of online Photoshop tutorials demonstrate its power and its flexibility, but I believe they also demonstrate its poor design. Think about it like this: what if each time you plunked down in front of World of Warcraft, you had to spend an hour trying to remember, wait, how do I play this?”

- Rands In Repose: Two Universes (via nikf)

Paging James Paul Gee…

"Exposition and condensation are in fact the fundamental learned behaviors that constitute literacy,..."

Mon, 07 May 2012 13:53:56 -0400

“Exposition and condensation are in fact the fundamental learned behaviors that constitute literacy, not reading and writing. One behavior dissolves densely packed words using the solvent that is the extant oral culture, enriching it, while the other distills the essence into a form that can be transmitted across cultures.”

- Rediscovering Literacy

"I was shocked to read [Ted Nelson’s] justification for why Xanadu must be built from scratch,..."

Mon, 07 May 2012 10:01:06 -0400

“

I was shocked to read [Ted Nelson’s] justification for why Xanadu must be built from scratch, completely and perfectly: “Existing systems do not combine well; hooking them together creates something like the New York subway system.”

The New York Subway system?!

In my System Design class, we lauded this as one of the most functional examples of emergent design ever. New York could’ve suffered from some clunky, overdetermined, shortsighted, top-down transportation plan. Instead, a number of transportation companies competed to get the people where they needed to go. Competition between companies and the lack of an overall design vision led to a shift in emphasis: not what makes sense, but what works well.

”

- Casey A. Gollan: Notes + Links: Weeks 12, 13, and almost 14.

These posts are long (I must have spent ten to fifteen minutes this morning reading this one) but I love the insight into what he’s thinking about. This part in particular of a longer set of thoughts on Ted Nelson’s Xanadu and similar systems was well worth the read.

(See also: A Big Idea Called Legibility, by Venkatesh Rao:

Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city

Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works

Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations

Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like

Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality

Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary

Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly

as widely quoted from by notational and paperbits)

Oh, Ted Nelson. You are forever the love child of Gary Gygax and Don Quixote.

One day, I hope to have a museum of utopian visions of computer systems. It will feature Nelson’s Xanadu, Engelbart’s NLS (and Hyperscope), Donald Bitzer’s PLATO, and Jef Raskin’s Canon Cat and Archy.

Beautiful, doomed visions of what might have been, all of them.

toffeemilkshake: On the subject of shipping containers: Here’s...

Sun, 06 May 2012 14:01:34 -0400

toffeemilkshake:

On the subject of shipping containers: Here’s a papercraft BBC News branded shipping container! (pdf link) It was made by a fan of this project our team was involved with a few years back.

Quite probably the best response to anything we’ve produced.

"If modern science has learned anything in the past century, it is to distrust anecdotal evidence...."

Sun, 06 May 2012 10:01:40 -0400

“If modern science has learned anything in the past century, it is to distrust anecdotal evidence. Because anecdotes have a very strong emotional impact, they serve to keep superstitious beliefs alive in an age of science. The most important discovery of modern medicine is not vaccines or antibiotics, it is the randomized double-blind test, by means of which we know what works and what doesn’t. Contrary to the saying, “data” is not the plural of “anecdote.””

- Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science

prostheticknowledge: Bulavkus USB Flash Drive A memory...

Sat, 05 May 2012 14:01:04 -0400

prostheticknowledge:

Bulavkus USB Flash Drive

A memory stick in the form of a safety pin:

Bulavkus—a USB flash drive disguised as a classic safety pin—keeps your data safely pinned.
For finding Bulavkus in a flash, simply fasten to any fabric material and spare yourself frustration of digging through pockets.
Wear your data proudly.

You can find out more here, and can see the conceptual development process of the idea here

"I’ve noticed today, that quite a few people were coming here after googling Eamespunk, and it got me..."

Wed, 02 May 2012 17:54:11 -0400

“I’ve noticed today, that quite a few people were coming here after googling Eamespunk, and it got me thinking. What if this thing really took off? That a throwaway line by Bruce Sterling would usher in a whole new meme. Boing Boing and Wired would start posting galleries of people modding their computers with bent plywood, and then the purists insisting that they must be mass produced and maybe even modular for it to be called true Eamespunk. This says nothing for those that got into Eames before it went all punk, but there’s no point in being into anything unless it’s post post modern (two orders of simulacrum at least for kids these days). The mid century modernists would get all up in arms at all these newcomers driving up the price of second hand chairs.”

- Nevolution: The Eamespunk Manifesto (via iamdanw)

Let’s make this happen.

prostheticknowledge: Touchy Experimental social technology...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:01:10 -0400

prostheticknowledge:

Touchy

Experimental social technology project involves helmet installed with camera, yet wearer cannot see without physical touch:

About

This project is a phenomenological social interaction experiment that focuses on the relationship of giving and receiving by literally transforming a human into a camera. Touchy, (the person wearing the device) is blind most of the time until you touch his/her skin. Once vision is given to Touchy, he/she can take photos for you. This human camera, with its unique properties, aims at healing social anxiety by creating joyful interactions.

Social Concern
It is common for humans to be separated into social bubbles, to avoid sharing social space and to connect to strangers. However, technologies like Internet social networking or the mobile phone loosens social boundaries, hence dehumanizing physical communication. To a certain extent, it generates social anxiety such as the one experienced in the “Hikikomori” and “Otaku” cultures in Japan. Touchy criticizes this phenomenon and suggests a solution by transforming the human being into a social device: a camera. The Touchy project investigates how such a device improves social life, presupposing that a camera is a known tool for sharing memories, valuable moments, enjoyment, emotions, beauty and so forth.

Here is the project’s trailer:

You can find out more about the project here