Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas.

Happy New Year.

get tasered

bldgblog library

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

ARCHITECTURE

INFORMATION SCIENCE

SCIENCE

IT ENGINEERING

ENGINEERING

ENGINEERING

engineering

ENGINEERING INFORMATION

.

INTERFACE DESIGN

DESIGN

BOOK DESIGN

DESIGN

GRAPHIC DESIGN

DESIGN

.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

.

buildings and books

books and people

people and machines

machines and buildings

and people

.

Some of these things go together, you know.

Spacetime, mind; meat and machines.

bookischthang

Working on a project now about making the 2.0 stuff work for libraries — advanced tools, qr code, smart xml schemes, social books, wanding w/ arphids.  Trying to gather all the thoughts together, lay them down in one spot with some order.  Will be making some notes to myself here and there.

dontcensorme.com

Oh, just shut it.

‘”I hope to hold websites accountable for their actions and re-balance the power that a user has online. Free speech should be global and not just a concept for the outside world. A virtual forum should be no different than a coffee shop. And we wouldn’t stand for someone getting kicked out of a coffee shop because they said Linux sucks.”‘

No. Quit your whining. If you’re in my coffee shop and you piss me off, I kick you out. It’s my coffee shop. I am the proprietor. You enjoy coffee here on my terms, or you take your business (and comments) elsewhere. Freedom of speech in the public square — but in my coffee shop, I will bounce your ass right out for talking smack, and rightly so.

(via Wired)

yahoo like seadragon

yahoo! design innovation team

Take a look at Bookscape, and the movie demo there… Reminds of Seadragon:

BookScape

“The Open Library project (part of the Internet Archive) has scanned and digitized about 2,600 illustrated books for children, all full of about 250,000 illustrations total. It it hard to see all the pictures without paging through each book however, so this experimental interface uses dynamic resampling of image data to place all the images in one zoomable space, arranged alphabetically by title.”

(via infosthetics

via ishush)

fed questions

Via a Ron Paul site…

ironic design

CSven had me going…

Usually when I surf through the CGTalk forum I see plenty of creativity when it comes to character design, but when it comes to products/objects what I find are mostly attempts to model real world designs. There are plenty of Mercedes this and Ferrari that, but relatively speaking very few original product designs. Thus it’s difficult to not appreciate Kadeg Boucher’s “stupid object #1 : Lawn Mower schumacher” (shown above). What a great piece. For more images, check out the thread on CGTalk (Link).

I was all ready for him to launch into how great it is that the piece is such an excellent joke — that the irony ought to make us a little sad — that the designer is really clever to play on the red-state tension of wanting to zoom-fast-ride-the-hell-out-of-here-like-#3 but is always just stuck… mowing the yard. Clock in, clock out. Going to church. Catching the big race on teevee… never really going anywhere new.

But I don’t think that’s what he was getting at…

Boucher’s fanciful effort once again makes me wonder why corporations - in this case MTD, Toro, Snapper, John Deere and the rest - don’t add a little more flair to their products. To my consumer eye, those riding lawnmowers all look so… plain vanilla. This reminds me of those urban vinyl ketchup and mustard bottle sculptures that made regular condiment bottles seem excruciatingly stale.

This device is not fun — it’s scary. It reminds me for some reason of the Garth Ennis piece from Preacher about the Sheriff’s son who shot himself.

I think the Boucher mower’s title says it all — it’s stupid and really funny because of its stupidity. This mower’s design is great in its black humor. It’s a kind of Steven Barthelme joke. It’s great because it makes us laugh a little and feel sad a little at the same time.

Because it does that so well that it’s a total success. It’s not a success because it has “flair”.

josh casteel

“This is a video of Joshua Casteel, who served eight years in the US Army, including seven months as an interrogator and Arabic linguist in the Iraq War.  Joshua was honorably discharged as a conscientious objector and he is now a dual-MFA candidate at the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program.  On June 19th 2006, Joshua appeared alongside Vaclav Havel, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, and Jeremy Irons on the stage of the Royal Court Theatre for Human Rights Watch’s Cries From the Heart performing a monologue from his play Returns, which premiered at Iowa February 15th-18th 2007 and then at Columbia College in Chicago February 19th 2007.  January 1st 2008 The Essay Press will release a book of Joshua’s war letters entitled Letters From Abu Ghraib; he is also writing a memoir entitled No Graven Image.” (via McCarter Theatre).

architecturally

note to self:

after Zaha Hadid, we need to take a close look at

Ali Rahim

Kostas Terzidis

Sophia Vyzoviti

–

and think, how arbitrary are Hadid’s lines, and why? ain’t it all a bit 90s? the Pritzker just now catching up with post- Spice Girls urban UK?

random spikes paradoxically lifeless. give me some organic purpose — or is this all a bit nihilistic, with an F-you to the good green earth… which is kind of tasty in its own way…  Hadid as rock-n-roll.  War torn.  Rogers as neat and nerdy, “likable”.

Any how. Vyzoviti’s Folding. Time Machine Go. The mean maths of large-scale feng shui boxing.