Can we create new senses for humans
March 22, 2015This is pretty amazing.
Seth Godin on teaching commitment, not techniques
March 21, 2015We’d be a lot more successful if organized schooling was all about creating an atmosphere where we can sell commitment (and where people will buy it). A committed student with access to resources is almost unstoppable.
(Seth Godin)
Love this quote.
Elon Musk: How I Became The Real ‘Iron Man’
February 25, 2015This guy is just fucking amazing.
A Year from Now You May Wish You Had Started Today
(Karen Lamb)
Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple – The New Yorker
February 22, 2015Finally found some time on this lazy Sunday afternoon to read the New Yorker’s profile of Jonathan Ive by Ian Parker which gives some very inspiring insights into the way the design team at Apple works. Also, i really enjoy the way Ive seems to be obsessed by the geometry of rounded corners. It’s exactly that obsessive attention to detail that separates Apple from most other product companies.
“At the risk of sounding terribly sentimental, I do think one of the things that just compel us is that we have this sense that, in some way, by caring, we’re actually serving humanity,” he said. “People might think it’s a stupid belief, but it’s a goal—it’s a contribution that we can hope we can make, in some small way, to culture.”
One of the things that resonated with me is this idea that good design is first and foremost about respect. Respect for the person that will eventually use what you build. Not about the style and look of something, not about selling something but about deeply caring how to best solve a problem. I honestly never really thought about design that way before reading “Design for the Real World” by Victor Papanek a while ago. Which by the way is one of the best books about design and you should read it right after this article. But i digress.
Won’t spoil you with any more quotes. It’s a very long read, but totally worth it. Grab yourself a cup of coffee, sit back and read the whole thing.
NYT on Laptops in 1985
February 19, 2015This article in the New York Times from 1985 with predictions about the use of laptops made me smile.
Yes, there are a lot of people who would like to be able to work on a computer at home. But would they really want to carry one back from the office with them? It would be much simpler to take home a few floppy disks tucked into an attache case.
Of course i’d love to take some floppy disks with me, neatly tucked into my attache case.
But the real future of the laptop computer will remain in the specialized niche markets. Because no matter how inexpensive the machines become, and no matter how sophisticated their software, I still can’t imagine the average user taking one along when going fishing.
Sentences like these demonstrate very well how hard it is and how utterly bad we humans are at predicting the future. And those rare people who have big visions often get laughed at in the beginning. Today we may think it’s crazy to think about colonizing mars. But i’m pretty sure in 20 to 30 years we will look back and laugh at some of todays articles and predictions about the future.
A Real Time, Open Data powered Traffic Map
June 23, 2014Watch real-time traffic in your city, beautifully visualized. It’s just amazing to see what’s possible with a bunch of open data feeds.
Brad Frost on Bullshit
August 12, 2013Great Presentation by Brad Frost talking about bullshit in our information overflowed world today.
There are decentralized alternatives to any of the services and platforms above. Self-hosted, open source solutions. But hardly anybody uses them. They will forever rot in the forgotten world of nerd tools on SourceForge, BitBucket or GitHub. A few idealists may try to give them a chance and probably will give up sooner or later, realizing that it’s all about global adoption.
But does this really mean that a more open, decentralized approach to a social web and all these tools we use will always be doomed to fail? I don’t think so. It’s up to us. We have the chance to make a big impact on the future of the web.
I just recently played around a bit with app.net, and i loved the decentralized idea behind tent.io when i read about it. But many of those tools are too complicated and too geeky for normal users to use today.
Bastian Allgeier did a very good job in not only pointing out problems we have today but also a solution which might not be a reality in a few weeks or months, but could definitely be possible. I would love to see something like this becoming a reality. And i’m sure it will, in some form or another!