NICE DREAM

Think Like a Dandelion

admin — Wed, 07 May 2008 13:30:39 +0000

Cory Doctorow: Dandelions and artists have a lot in common in the age of the Internet. This is, of course, the age of unlimited, zero-marginal-cost copying. If you blow your works into the net like a dandelion clock on the breeze, the net itself will take care of the copying costs. Your fans will paste-bomb your works into their mailing list, making 60,000 copies so fast and so cheaply that figuring out how much it cost in aggregate to make all those copies would be orders of magnitude more expensive than the copies themselves.
(more…)

Stop Designing Products

admin — Mon, 05 May 2008 12:54:41 +0000

Peter Merholz: When you start with the idea of making a thing, you’re artificially limiting what you can deliver. The reason that many of these exemplar’s forward-thinking product design succeed is explicitly because they don’t design products. Products are realized only as necessary artifacts to address customer needs. What Flickr, Kodak, Apple, and Target all realize is that the experience is the product we deliver, and the only thing that our customers care about.

(more…)

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

admin — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:07:42 +0000

Clay Shirky: If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time. And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

(more…)

Desire’s Design

admin — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:11:46 +0000

David Barringer: The exchange might describe the dilemma of any representative hominid over the last 13,000 years of our self-conscious existence. We have our primitive needs, yes—our needs for food, shelter, clothing, kinship, affection. But we are not hunter–gatherers anymore. We are not farmers in a feudal system. We are consumer–traders. Yet when our survival is no longer at stake, we still balk at defining our desires and, instead, substitute our primitive needs, the fulfillments of which are no longer primitive, no longer basic, no longer about survival. What do you want? I don’t know, but how about weapons and wealth, conquest and concubines, slaves and sugar? I don’t know, but how about a hamburger and a hydrogen bomb, a cool drink and a new frontier? The substitutions are temporary because the need to substitute remains. Why? Because the question has not been answered, only deferred.

(more…)

Punk Capitalism

admin — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 01:23:19 +0000

Matt Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma: Today it is the driving force behind a new generation of D.I.Y. entrepreneurs who are raising hell once again. Disruptive new D.I.Y. technologies are causing unprecedented creative destruction. The history of punk offers us valuable insights into how this new world works. Punk was an angry outburst, a reaction to mass culture, but it offered new ideas about how mass culture could be replaced with a more personalized, less centralized worldview.

(more…)

Underground Mainstream

admin — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:47:35 +0000

Design Observer: Advertising has been a favored target of social critics. In the 1930s, Ballyhoo, a popular newsstand humor magazine, and the prototype for MAD magazine, which in turn was the father of sixties’ Undergrounds and the granddaddy of contemporary zines, savagely ripped the façade off the hucksters on Madison Avenue. Ballyhoo took original quotidian ads for automobiles, detergent, processed foods, you name it, wittily altered the brand-names (a la Adbusters) and caricatured the product pitches to reveal the inherent absurdities in the product claims. Likewise, in the fifties and early sixties, MAD magazine skewered major brands by attacking the insidious slogans endemic to advertising. They came up with such classics as “Look Ma, No Cavities, and No Teeth Either,” a sendup of Crest Toothpaste’s false promise of cavity free teeth, and “Happy But Wiser,” a slam at Budweiser beer through a parody ad that showed a besotted, forlorn alcoholic whose wife had just dumped him. MAD was the influence behind Wacky Packs (created by Art Spiegelman), which came inside Topps Bubblegum packages, that used puns on mainstream product brand-names to attack society, politics and culture (i.e. Reaganettes, a take-off on the candy Raisinnettes that looked like the former American president). Paradoxically, Ballyhoo, MAD, and Wacky Packs were all mass-market products, but because of their respective exposure each had an influence on the kids who grew up to produce the icons of alternative culture.

(more…)

Design is Dead

admin — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:49:59 +0000

Philippe Starck: I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact. Everything I designed was unnecessary. Design, structurally seen, is absolutely void of usefulness. A useful profession would be to be an astronomer, a biologist or something of that kind. Design really is nothing. I have tried to install my designs with a sense of meaning and energy, and even when I tried to give my best it was still in vain…. I will definitely give up in two years’ time. I want to do something else, but I don’t know what yet. I want to find a new way of expressing myself …design is a dreadful form of expression…. In future there will be no more designers. The designers of the future will be the personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant…

(more…)

The Ultimate Book of Band Logos

admin — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 01:07:40 +0000

Band ID: From the Rolling Stones’ tongue-and-lips trademark to the Grateful Dead’s lightning bolt skull to Prince’s glyph, logos embody an identity and experience shared between musicians and their fans, who proudly display these graphics on T-shirts, posters, pins, stickers—even tattoos. Collecting more than 1,000 rock, hip hop, metal, pop, reggae, and country music logos from the 1960s to today, this catchy design survey captures the coolest and most powerful examples of music made visual. Including interviews with key logo artists and presenting the graphics large and over extended gatefolds, BAND ID will wow music fans and designers alike.

The Economy of Abundance

admin — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 01:38:52 +0000

David Hornik: The basic idea is that incredible advances in technology have driven the cost of things like transistors, storage, bandwidth, to zero. And when the elements that make up a business are sufficiently abundant as to approach free, companies appropriately should view their businesses differently than when resources were scarce (the Economy of Scarcity). They should use those resources with abandon, without concern for waste. That is the overriding attitude of the Economy of Abundance — don’t do one thing, do it all; don’t sell one piece of content, sell it all; don’t store one piece of data, store it all. The Economy of Abundance is about doing everything and throwing away the stuff that doesn’t work. In the Economy of Abundance you can have it all.

(more…)

Rumor’s Reasons

admin — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:48:40 +0000

New York Times: Consider, for starters, this paradox of social psychology, a problem for myth busters everywhere: repeating a claim, even if only to refute it, increases its apparent truthfulness. In 2003, the psychologist Ian Skurnik and several of his colleagues asked senior citizens to sit through a computer presentation of a series of health warnings that were randomly identified as either true or false — for example, “Aspirin destroys tooth enamel” (true) or “Corn chips contain twice as much fat as potato chips” (false). A few days later, they quizzed the seniors on what they had learned.

(more…)