Modern & Im/material Things

"The biggest mistake a product designer can make is to dismiss any behavior performed by a..."

"The biggest mistake a product designer can make is to dismiss any behavior performed by a significant number of people as fad, vanity, immaturity, etc. (selfies, oversharing, digital hoarding, even *sexting). There is always more there there."

-

"A Working Definition of Product Design" by Keenan Cummings on Medium

(via shoutsandmumbles)

Putting Big Data In Context - Performics

Putting Big Data In Context - Performics:

We need to remember there is always a context for the data we analyze.

My post on the importance of contextual thinking is up on my agency's blog. 

And this is why ad placements based on the biggest audience...

And this is why ad placements based on the biggest audience reach don't always make sense in practice. But thanks for the lullz.

"'The right to privacy is often understood as an essential requirement for the realization of..."

"'The right to privacy is often understood as an essential requirement for the realization of the right to freedom of expression. Undue interference with individuals' privacy can both directly and indirectly limit the free development and exchange of ideas. An infringement upon one right can be both the cause and consequence of an infringement upon the other.'"

-

From "Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue*"

Via The United Nations General Assembly

Note: Link points to a PDF of the report.

"Some of the start-ups being created are designed for people who have rung the cash register..."

""Some of the start-ups being created are designed for people who have rung the cash register already…They are not necessarily bad ideas but they are not the ideas the world needs more.""

-

Nick Bilton, on Why Silicon Valley Needs to Stop Fixing Fake Problems

Via NYT

"Data is something we create, but it's also something we imagine."

""Data is something we create, but it's also something we imagine.""

-

Kate Crawford on "Why Big Data is Not Truth"

Via NYT

The Novelist: A Trailer Some random thoughts: Digital marketers...

The Novelist: A Trailer

Some random thoughts:

Digital marketers are obsessed with the 'gamification' of everything. Make everything a game and people will be interested, ya dig? You get the drill here. It's lazy and dated strategy. The industry's approach is basically the equivalent of killing a cow in order to milk it: instead of working with a trend, we strive to own it and in the process render it useless. And instead of looking to see where we might have failed, we look for more cows to kill in the name of milk.   

The Novelist is the most clever combination of design, storytelling and gaming I have seen in some time. It gets right what so many of us in the industry get wrong:

- It combines interaction and emotional design in a meaningful way. The player is directly implicated in the story and the actions of the characters. You feel morally obliged to stop writing and put together the boy's toy car.

- It allows the player access to the interior world of the characters and allows the user to engage in a kind of dialectical exchange with the characters.

- It assumes the user is smart and uses the player's awareness as kind of baseline for engagement

And the really brilliant part, I think, for marketers: allows players to have agency in a controlled environment without (appearing to) reducing their engagement to a set of limited interactions with the game (i.e., click this and get that)

It seems to me that a lot of digital design experiences fail because marketers (and others) assume users are too lazy for anything complex and too stupid to be emotionally engaged without complete manipulation.  Maybe if we give people more credit they might actually surprise us. 

"Like Slow Food, Slow Web is concerned as much with production as it is with consumption. We as..."

"

Like Slow Food, Slow Web is concerned as much with production as it is with consumption. We as individuals can always set our own guidelines and curb the effect of the Fast Web, but as I hope I've illustrated, there are a number of considerations the creators of web-connected products can make to help us along. And maybe the Slow Web isn't quite a movement yet. Maybe it's still simmering. But I do think there is something distinctly different about the feeling that some of these products impart on their users, and that feeling manifests from the intent of their makers.

Fast Web companies want to be our lovers, they want to be by our sides at all times, want us to spend every moment of our waking lives with them, when sometimes that's not what we really need. Sometimes what we really need are friends we can meet once every few months for a bowl of ramen noodles at a restaurant in the East Village. Friends with whom we can sit and talk and eat and drink and maybe learn a little about ourselves in the process. And at the end of the night get up and go our separate ways, until next time.

"

- Jack Chen, The Slow Web 

"A hacker is, quite simply, someone who messes around with stuff…It doesn't have to be a computer. It..."

"A hacker is, quite simply, someone who messes around with stuff…It doesn't have to be a computer. It doesn't even have to be technology. A hacker is someone who figures out how to get around barriers, won't take no for an answer, asks an insane amount of questions and believes in sharing the information he or she discovers."

-

Emmanual Goldstein, editor and publisher of 2600 in 

http://www.amazon.com/Hack-This-Incredible-Hackerspace-Projects/dp/0789748975

(via notational)

"Personal libraries have always been a biopsy of power."

"Personal libraries have always been a biopsy of power."

-

via CEO Libraries Reveal Keys to Success. (NYT, Circa 2007)

Takeaway: Diversity in ideas (and books) can help make people successful leaders. 

My reaction: Really? Is this something that needs to be said? Why would knowing only one field to the exclusion of everything else ever be considered a good thing? The ability to think and generate ideas is incredibly powerful. But maybe I'm naive in my personal desire to know a lot about a lot, which ultimately proves I don't know much and is a truth I'm more than happy to admit. 

"'Everyone' isn't an audience. 'Everyone' is a byproduct of an incredibly successful thing that was..."

"'Everyone' isn't an audience. 'Everyone' is a byproduct of an incredibly successful thing that was made for a far more specific bunch of people. Don't ever make something for 'Everyone' make it for someone. And make that person love it. I listened to an overwhelmingly amazing podcast the other day with Sam Simon, one of the original creators of the Simpsons. Most of the interview focused on his battle with cancer, but he also talked about when he and Matt Groening worked together creating the show. And he mentioned that there were two writers he wanted to bring on board, but they turned him down. And the rest of that season, he wrote the show for them—he wanted them to think it was funny. For Simon, that was the test: Did those two people think it was funny—not network execs, not focus groups, and certainly not 'Everyone.' Jesus, I *hate* Facebook, and you don't get much more 'Everyone' than that thing now, but it didn't get gigantic building for 'Everyone,' it got gigantic building for Harvard students, then Ivy League students, then more and more and more. Go ask all your friends on Google Plus how well building for 'Everyone' from the start went. When you begin with 'Everyone' you're just stuck: How do you make any honest decisions? How do you solve any real problems? You don't. You start to invent people and you start to invent their problems and it's amazing because those people and those problems line up almost exactly with what you're building and how you're thinking about it—imagine that. Lying to yourself is amazing for productivity. Real audience is hard. Solving real problems is fucking bananas. But it's the only way you make something that lasts, because you made something that someone actually cared about. Every amazing comic that Vertigo comics published wasn't written for 'Everyone.' Every person that read them knew what I knew when I read them myself: This comic was written just for me. That. Do exactly that. You'll be fine."

-

Daniel Sinker (via christinefriar)

Reblogging again because so good.

(via kenyatta)

"The National makes me feel that rock music, like much of American literature and visual art before..."

"The National makes me feel that rock music, like much of American literature and visual art before it, has died and gone to graduate school. The band delivers certifiable Quality-with-a-capital-Q, a perfect product of the English and music departments—the way that Lady Gaga is a perfect product of the semiotics department and an MBA program, though I definitely prefer Lady Gaga."

-

Carl Wilson, on why he hates The National

Wilson wrote a fantastic book on music and taste, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste.  Wickedly fun and smart. 

H/T To Andrew for that recommendation

I like The National well enough but their whole sad-faced Americana white male malaise is exhausting after awhile. We know, Matt, dreams die and it sucks sometimes.

New Track: Dans La Nuit It's the first thing I've...

New Track: Dans La Nuit

It's the first thing I've produced since integrating Native Instruments' Maschine into my Ableton Workflow. Feedback is always appreciated. 

"It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't..."

"It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know."

-

Brooke - There but for the by Ali Smith

(via literaryquotations)

Just finished this book. Easily one of the best books I've ever read. A proper write up to follow. 

metahaven: The Cloud, the State, and the Stack: Metahaven in Conversation with Benjamin Bratton

metahaven: The Cloud, the State, and the Stack: Metahaven in Conversation with Benjamin Bratton:

mthvn:

Benjamin Bratton is a theorist whose work spans Philosophy, Art and Design. He is the Director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. In a previous life, Bratton was the Director of the Advanced Strategies Group at Yahoo! His forthcoming book,…

My mom says I'm not good at making friends. Do Internet friends count?

Internet friends totally count. They might even be superior. You should only give your time to those who are worth it.

You're totally going to remix or cover something from Austra's new record, right?

You know, the possibility had not crossed my mind despite my love of them. I wouldn't dare cover them - Katie's voice is too stellar to touch.

I was thinking about a queens of the Stone Age cover or remix. Something to break up writing a new album.

How is it that creative people also find pop culture so abrasive? And we love to critique it, analyse it, see beyond its superficiality into its nightmarish reality (insert some Lacanian soundtrack here, something from The Matrix perhaps). I am new to Tumbler and will be following you . . . with bells on!

Hi there!

Thanks for your note. I always lamented the seriousness with which my graduate school colleagues approached pop culture. They always seemed so joyless to me, but maybe that's nature of graduate school in general. They were more of the traditionally academic (anthropology, history, etc) bent than the creative kind -I'm not totally sure i understand what you mean by 'creative people' (contemporary artists, designers, etc?), so I'll take some liberties in my response. 

On one hand, we can all take Frankfurt school to the extreme and sit around hating on anything popular, listening to Adorno's atonal orchestral arrangements (which are straight up abrasive. Obvs) Or, you know, we could try and find a middle ground wherein we allow ourselves to indulge in some pleasure (in every Lacanian sense) while we navigate the nightmare with some critical perspective. I think the Situationists' notion of détournement, or the more recent take, culture jamming, are great starting places to think about critique, pop culture and understanding. (side note: I think Hennessy Youngman has completely nailed this critical blend of high/low with his Art Thoughtz series. Total genius). 

Personally, I love the mix of high/low without any kind of irony. I have a deep love of pop culture, especially pop music. They constantly force me to recognize the limits/boundaries of my taste or notions about the world. Why do I really dislike Justin Bieber? Why do I have any feelings about Kim Kardashian AT ALL? At its most base, pop culture is cultural currency. It gives us a way to temporally connect with one another when there is nothing else. How many conversations about the weather should we really endure?

Life is too short not to partake in the pleasures of life, but I do think a little critical perspective is useful in helping us define and identify those 'pleasures.'

And welcome to Tumblr, where there's definitely, definitely, definitely no logic (I joke). 

"Data doesn't spring full formed from nowhere. Data is created, generated, and recorded. And the..."

"Data doesn't spring full formed from nowhere. Data is created, generated, and recorded. And the unifying principle behind all of this data is that it was all created by humans. We create the data, so essentially our data is an extension of ourselves, an extension of our humanity."

- From "The Secret Life of Data in 2020"

Before Storytelling was released as a film, the MPAA asked Todd...

Before Storytelling was released as a film, the MPAA asked Todd Solondz to censor a sex scene. His response was to release the film with a red box over the act (the above image). This, my friends, is how Yumblr! should handle porn: brand sponsored "red box" ads. Can't you picture a giant AXE body spray logo on that red box? Genius, I know.