January 2012
7 posts
“Drama doesn’t need to affect people’s behavior. There’s a great and very, very...”
– David Mamet
“Beauty is context.”
– Sruli Recht
Choosing an Idea
‘After a painfully rapturous brainstorming session, you have a huge list of ideas in front of you. This is where many designers trip up. They have so many ideas they like, they aren’t sure what to pick. Or, they have a lot of mediocre ideas, but nothing spectacular, so again they aren’t sure what to pick. So they float around for too long, in a vague haze of indecision, hoping...
“Smoking is actually just like yoga. You are constantly aware of your breath and...”
– Kai Kühne, a member of the design collective As Four
“Good editors are geniuses, gifted with sight, and, with the exception of people...”
– Grant McCracken
December 2011
12 posts
“The unconscious rules us, however hard we try to become conscious of a little...”
– Jaap Dawson
The Streets
As I walk around the streets of Seattle this evening, looking into the faces of strangers, I realize there’s a whole world out there that I know absolutely nothing about.
Program or Be Programmed
It’s easy to take how the world works for granted. As Christof remarked in The Truman Show: “We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.”Steve Jobs spoke to this idea and shared his thoughts about it. Douglas Rushkoff shares his thoughts, as well, in this very readable book. Although he touches on the subject of programming-as-coding, the book mostly deals...
November 2011
5 posts
A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design →
The Lean Startup
I recently left a large corporation to work for a small startup. I was at my previous employer for 17 years, so the switch has been both a significant change and an interesting adventure for me. I now have more responsibilities in my current role, while getting paid much, much less for fulfilling them. Why did I decide to make such a switch? Mostly for the sake of my sanity. Big Corporate...
Lean Logic
I love dictionaries. And I love to collect them. Earlier this year, my wife and I spent a weekend in Victoria. We had about an hour before we had to board our seaplane, so we took a stroll nearby the terminal. By chance, we came upon a used bookstore, and there I found and purchased a beautiful nineteenth century volume of Barclay’s Universal English Dictionary. It was a hefty book, and...
August 2011
1 post
July 2011
1 post
PIG 05049
The moral virtue of frugality seems to take on an unsettling meaning when scaled out to a global level. At least that’s what I took away from reading Christien Meindertsma’s book. Meindertsma is an artist and designer who decided to research all of the different products made from one pig (#05049). The products range from the expected (hamburger) to the downright surprising...
June 2011
2 posts
Far Out isn't Far Enough: Life in the Back of...
In a Paris Review interview, Guy Davenport remarked that “the illustrated text goes back forever. The Victorians wouldn’t buy a book if it didn’t have woodcuts in it. And the same for the Middle Ages, I think—the more pictures the better.”
If that’s the case, then the Victorians would have bought Tomi Ungerer’s book in a heartbeat. Virtually every page...
Make It Bigger
Paula Scher is a partner at the prestigious Pentagram. She built her reputation mainly from her early graphic designs, which includes the iconic Boston album cover (for those of you old enough to have experienced that musical era) and the Citigroup logo. The book is an entertaining account of one female designer’s rise through what was (and arguably still is) a male-dominated business, and...
May 2011
4 posts
The Believer
This is a magazine published by the people at McSweeney’s. The articles and essays feel fresh and quirky (the latest issue covers Bulgaria’s street necrologues and the Barkley Marathons); the reviews are concise and insightful; the poetry accessible. Grab an issue and give it a try. Here’s a blurb from their website: The Believer is a monthly magazine where length is no object....
Finite and Infinite Games
I’ve encountered this book on several occasions in the past on the bookshelves of different bookstores, but had never reached the point of actually purchasing a copy - until a couple of days ago.I think it caught my eye for a couple of reasons: 1) the title was intriguing; 2) the book’s cover always brought to my mind Paul Fussell’s hilarious book Class, which I loved...
April 2011
3 posts
Office of Blame Accountability
I came upon this book by serendipity at a local Barnes & Noble. Its simple design and retro graphics caught my eye. A project started by artists (and self-designated Blame Accountants) Carla Repice and Geoff Cunningham, the Office of Blame Accountability is a public space for people to express and to record their blame towards a person, group, or system - and then point to their own role in...
Public Therapy Buses
Multiple-Nobel-Prize-winner Linus Pauling once said that the way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away. Steven M. Johnson is someone who has a lot of ideas. A lot of them. His inventions take me back to my youth, when I would see those crazy gadgets in issues of Mad Magazine. This book is no longer in print, but you may still be able to pick up a used copy...
March 2011
5 posts
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
Ronald Reagan has been quoted as saying, “I do not want to go back to the past; I want to go back to the past way of facing the future.” The more I ponder about the future, the more I find myself searching in the past for people who thought about the future. One of these individuals is R. Buckminster Fuller. If you’re not familiar with “Bucky” Fuller, then this...
The Importance of Living - Lin Yutang
I’ve been reading the essays of Ivan Illich lately and, for some reason, I was reminded of Lin Yutang. It’s been years since I last read his words, but his philosophy is still relevant to our contemporary society (maybe even more so). My first encounter with Lin Yutang was in 1990, while I was living in Taiwan, and a friend gave me a photocopied version of this book (from the Lin...
Which "Aesthetics" Do You Mean? - Leonard Koren
I love all of Leonard Koren’s books. I think the last book he published was The Flower Shop, several years ago, a book I still return to occasionally to remind me that business and being human are not mutually exclusive. Koren’s latest book tackles the subject of “aesthetics.” I put quotation marks around that word (and so does Koren) because it can mean different things...
The Mindful Way through Depression - Mark Williams...
I usually don’t read self-help books, but I got this one after reading a blogpost from The School of Life. The sentence that caught my eye was this one: We usually view our emotions as reactions to the outside world, overlooking the fact that our internal dialogue shapes and mis-shapes the world according to how we feel about ourselves. I’ve had an on-again-off again interest in...
February 2011
4 posts
Leading by Design - Ingvar Kamprad, Bertil...
It’s getting harder to find the words “helpfulness”, “thrift”, “humbleness”, and “simplicity” in the business lexicon. Hubris and arrogance seem to be the guiding principles of too many modern enterprises. Kamprad was asked, “What is fundamental in leadership?” He said, “Love.” You can roll your eyes if you want, but I...
The Snow Leopard - Peter Matthiessen
I’ve kept an issue of Time magazine that’s over 18 years old because it has a short article on Peter Matthiessen. In the article, Matthiessen is described as “an environmentalist before the term was fashionable - just as he was a ‘searcher’ before it became a 60’s job description, and an apostle of ‘male wildness’ before Robert Bly got out his...
“I come from the sort of village where the geese walking by can look in the...”
– Saul Steinberg
2600: The Hacker Quarterly
An assertion of the Owner’s Manifesto is “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.” In some ways, I think this is similar to the hacker ethic. And this ethic is becoming more mainstream in practices like IKEA hacking and retail hacking. In addition to the useful technical tidbits, I enjoy the magazine’s essays and letters from readers (and the publisher’s...
January 2011
4 posts
Imagination in Place - Wendell Berry
Near the beginning of George Steiner’s Errata, he writes about his experience with a pictorial guide to coats of arms, and how it overwhelmed him with “a sense of the numberless specificity” and how he “grew possessed by an intuition of the particular, of diversities so numerous that no labor of classification and enumeration could exhaust them.” In this other essay...
“This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Food Rules: An Eater's Manual - Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan is the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, among other books. He also gave an engaging TED talk a while back, where he shared a story about one farmer’s practice that I found very eye-opening and gives me hope about the future of our food. He’s also, unsurprisingly, an admirer of Wendell Berry. In Food Rules, Mr. Pollan gives us a wonderfully simple guide for what...
What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth...
If I were to have any idols, Wendell Berry would be one of the few at the top of my list. I have collected his essays over the many years, and they are a regular source of personal re-centering for me. This past year produced two collections from Berry. This volume and Imagination in Place, which I intend to read in the next few months. The theme for What Matters? is the economy - or, in...
December 2010
10 posts
The Giving Tree - Shel Silverstein
Merry Kwanzukkah! This year, we decided to stay home for the holidays, instead of traveling to see relatives. We kept things pretty simple and low key. Just the way I like it. This time of the year often calls to my mind Mr. Silverstein’s timeless parable. The story is a beautiful and moving reminder of both the joy and the sacrifice in true giving.