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Design theory, theory design
Quietly this week, while the UK was in uproar about the activities of the last big media company in a dying industry, something of far greater import happened in the world of media and information. The UK government announced that it would be making all research papers generated within its public universities available openly, online, for free.
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This is amazing news.
UK government make research papers free at public universities | Crikey
But let’s look at the finer things in life, those RedWing boots, heritage style clothes, fine food, furniture and bicycles. Signs of mass production, consistency and homogeneity are undesirable in these products. The movies of the Olde Aesthetic fetishize the machines used in production, but also feature loving portraits of the wise old owls who operate them. Contrast this with the dustmasked anonymity of the Foxconn workers, tethered to their machines producing a blur of cookie cutter devices. Perhaps futurists need to live in the Olde Aesthetic in order to more clearly visualise, synthesize and ultimately understand the New Aesthetic? Perhaps the Olde Aesthetic has arisen as a counter to the reliable fast-food repetitiveness of the digital world? Perhaps the comfort of an Olde Aesthetic life leads to better clarity of thought when considering the future? Maybe they should remain polar opposites, but I think it’s important to understand potential overlaps in the Venn.
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Not entirely sold on the New Aesthetic but this is interesting:
Pattern recognition is incredibly important, but I don’t think the hermetic, almost mystical ways people talk about “deep insights” are healthy. To be honest I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a “deep insight” I thought was useful. People’s choices may not be the result of anything deep - they are more likely to be entirely shallow. An immediate response - “I don’t know”; “It’s what I always do” - is arrived at quickly and most likely true. Patterns emerge by looking on the surface as well as at depth - we need more horizontal metaphors maybe.
Last Dinosaurs set list http://instagr.am/p/KAOsd7uvfz/
It’s an age of unprecedented, staggering technological change. Business models are being transformed, lives are being upended, vast new horizons of possibility opened up. Or something like that. These are all pretty common assertions in modern business/tech journalism and management literature. Then there’s another view, which I heard from author Neal Stephenson in an MIT lecture hall last week. A hundred years from now, he said, we might look back on the late 20th and early 21st centuries and say, “It was an actively creative society. Then the internet happened and everything got put on hold for a generation.
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Some interesting points, but seems to avoid two of the big factors at play - an end to the low-hanging fruit of mechanisation and Fordist modes of production, and the mass defunding of the university R&D sector in the latter half of the 20th century.
When Will This Low-Innovation Internet Era End? | Wired Opinion | Wired.com
I repeat: This is not the case with every column (or tweet, or blog post) criticizing Girls for being too monochrome. For the most part, this line of attack is completely legitimate. But that’s the big problem with the eruption of “too white” as a putdown: It turns real complaints that deserve a fair hearing into part of the nagging buzz of self-satisfied snark that pervades our culture today. There are too many people who disingenuously gripe about how “white” something is when they’re really trying to say that it’s not brassy or badass enough for their taste—that it’s salmon, not a buffalo wing.
But usually I think it’s a bad idea to ask your designer to write production code. First, since many designers can’t code, you’re limiting the pool of candidates. Second, startup teams are typically engineering heavy. The rest of the team is often better at front-end development than any designer. In terms of skill coverage, when you hire a designer that can code, you’re doubling down on engineering, when you could be diversifying and getting other skills on your team. But most important, design is a full-time job. If you’re asking your designer to write code, you’re asking them to spend less time designing, studying users, prototyping, and doing all of the other activities that lead to great products.
A new site for Google, promoting Google Maps and Earth for Enterprise.
