I ran accross a bunch of interesting articles this past week, and so I share them with you with a bit of my own commentary thrown in…
Return to the Heavens, for the Sake of the Earth
a Washington Post article by Kim Stanley Robinson
This is an op-ed piece written by a science fiction author who points out that our reasons for space exploration are often poor ones, and that rather than thinking about achieving technology that will enable us to “cut and run” from Earth, we should consider ways to use space study to invest in Earth. Here’s a quote:
“I never cease to cringe when space advocates say that the Earth is but our cradle, that our destiny is in the stars. Such reasoning is a fantasy of transcendence. But more literally, it implies that we can transcend simply by leaving the Earth and living elsewhere — and there’s no evidence that this is possible. Our bodies are communities, fully integrated with the rest of the biosphere; only 10 percent of our DNA is human, the rest belonging to fellow travelers, often symbiotic creatures, that share this space with us. Our co-evolution with them and with the rest of the Earth — from its gravity and electromagnetic fields to its thick web of life — may be so extensive that we can never live away from our home planet.”
Robinson suggests that valid reasons for space study and travel would be to study the Earth from off-planet and potentially develop space-based solar power. I loved this closing thought on taking the long view (which I call “thinking like a time traveler”):
“it is useful to take the long view from time to time. This is what science fiction does, and though science fiction has been bad about space, it has been good about time. Taking that long view, we no longer seem like the most sophisticated culture ever; indeed, much that we do now will look silly or even criminal in the future. The long view also reminds us that we are a species only about 100,000 years old, evolving on a planet where the average lifetime of a species is 10 million years. Unless we blow it, humans are going to be around in 1,000 years — and if we make it that far, it’s likely that we’ll last much longer than that.”
Taming the Elephant: Design Critiques with Non-Designers
a Viget Inspire blog post by Tom Osborne
There are some great suggestions here for how to get good feedback from non-designers, some of which I hadn’t considered. One in particular that interested me was the suggestion to have a protocol to the critique session that is role-based. Osborne writes:
“While it isn’t crucial to the critique, it will help things move along quickly and the repetition will help create a known structure. For us, we like to go in the order of a typical project cycle (ex. PM > UX > Visual > Dev > Marketing). Establish a sensible order and let everyone have equal time.”
This seems like a good idea to follow the phases and roles of a project during critique, which should ensure that the group has an overall sense of how to prioritize certain feedback.
A New Page: Can the Kindle Really Improve on the Book?
a New Yorker article by Nicholson Baker
Baker reports that though people think that Amazon has sparked a cultural revolution with Kindle, appealing even to those inclined to read used or library books but avoid them because they are “dirty,” he found many things frustrating about the device: the pale gray of the screen, the “calvinist” font, the poor resolution of images, the text-to-speech feature, the lack of availability of many titles, the pricing, and then an additional slew of complaints about the way the DX handles newspaper content- omitting photography, truncating and removing entire articles:
…here’s what you buy when you buy a Kindle book. You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon… Kindle books aren’t transferrable. You can’t give them away or lend them or sell them. You can’t print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.
I must admit that I want a Kindle- the advertising is working on me. But, I won’t buy one because I know I will be just as disappointed with it as Baker is. I will buy an electronic book device that follows the two-page codex format of the book, that has a more natural page-turning mechanism, that allows text and image zoom on the fly (which implies better resolution), and which allows me to borrow/rent books rather than requiring I own them.
Digital Nomads Choose Their Tribes
a Washington Post article by Michael S. Rosenwald
A quick piece on how many prefer to work from anywhere other than the cube-farm intended for them. Naturally! I think about this all the time when I pass by a few of the local coffee shops near my office in Carrboro, NC: Open Eye Cafe and Weaver Street Market, and begin to see the same group of people sitting at the same tables with their laptops out. The other day, I stopped in to Open Eye and counted only 4 customers without laptops. There had to have been about 50 others in the cafe! Here’s a quote touching on how management needs to think about this trend:
The attraction of working poolside is obvious, but why would an employer let workers pick venues that shout leisure rather than productivity? “It’s a win-win,” said Mary Barnes, Gruber’s boss at AOL, in an instant message chat. “Frank is happy doing what he loves and from a business perspective, we gain valuable industry knowledge, contacts and insights.” Barnes works closely with Gruber to measure his contributions, and both expect to see ever more nomads: “The younger workforce will demand it. That’s how they live.”
Architecture of the Blink
a post from BLDGBLOG
An interesting thought about how blinking tends to be synchronized among groups of people. Here’s a quote:
“On a much larger scale, meanwhile, are there stretches of highway somewhere outside town where the scenery gets a bit boring – and so everyone starts to blink, more or less at the same time, thus visually removing from collective cultural awareness that McDonald’s, or that abandoned house, tucked away over there beside the trees? And could you locate that exact moment of blindness – could you find blinkspots throughout the urban fabric – and start to build things there? Architecture becomes a three-dimensional test landscape for the neurology of blinking. “
I was just thinking about something like this last evening when a friend noticed a “new” restaurant on a nearby street and I reminded him that it had been there for over a year! I’m sure he wasn’t the only one to overlook it, though he’d driven past it numerous times…
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