- Conscious computing | "Such are the annoying ironies of work and play in the 21st century: more and more of us are 'knowledge workers', doing jobs that require deep concentration, yet we do so on machines that seem deliberately designed to interrupt us all the time and to keep us on edge." Tue, 14 May 2013 04:59:25 -0400
- On Thingpunk | "Thus far, instead of approaching these (extremely difficult) questions directly, traditional design thinking has lead us to avoid them by trying to make our digital things more like physical things (building in artificial scarcity, designing them skeumorphically, etc.) and by treating the digital as a supplemental add-on to primarily physical devices and experiences (the Internet of Things, digital fabrication).... The result of this Junk Food Technology has been that digital technologies, and especially the web, have degraded into an endless series of elaborations on social media, making physical technologies seem more innovative by comparison." Tue, 14 May 2013 04:43:20 -0400
- This is water | An excerpt from an address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College by David Foster Wallace. Full transcript available here: http://j.mp/10UT1VD Wed, 08 May 2013 14:51:22 -0400
- Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface | "The assumption driving these kinds of design speculations is that if you embed the interface–the control surface for a technology–into our own bodily envelope, that interface will ‘disappear’: the technology will cease to be a separate ‘thing’ and simply become part of that envelope. The trouble is that unlike technology, your body isn’t something you ‘interface’ with in the first place. You’re not a little homunculus ‘in’ your body, ‘driving’ it around, looking out Terminator-style ‘through’ your eyes. Your body isn’t a tool for delivering your experience: it is your experience. Merging the body with a technological control surface doesn’t magically transform the act of manipulating that surface into bodily experience. I’m not a cyborg (yet) so I can’t be sure, but I suspect the effect is more the opposite: alienating you from the direct bodily experiences you already have by turning them into technological interfaces to be manipulated." Tue, 30 Apr 2013 07:20:23 -0400
- Some thoughts on the real world by one who glimpsed it and fled | "We're not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery-it recharges by running." Bill Watterson. Kenyon College Commencement. May 20, 1990. Wed, 24 Apr 2013 08:43:09 -0400
- The Martian Chroniclers | "The search for life on Mars is now in its sixth decade. Forty spacecraft have been sent there, and not one has found a single fossil or living thing. The closer we look, the more hostile the planet seems: parched and frozen in every season, its atmosphere inert and murderously thin, its surface scoured by solar winds.... On November 26, 2011, NASA sent the world’s most sophisticated mobile science lab to explore it: the robotic rover Curiosity. The project’s scientists were quick to lower expectations: they were just looking for places that might once have been habitable, they said. Yet Mars, even dead, may answer some very old questions about life: What sets its machinery in motion? Why here and not there? Why us and not them?" Sun, 21 Apr 2013 21:58:44 -0400
