How rich are you? >> I’m loaded. It’s official. I’m the 54,675,565 richest person on earth!

A simple, powerful idea; well-executed and illustrated. Well done Poke.

» http://www.globalrichlist.com

Experience design:

“Any self-respecting Japanese woman will tell you that it is an affront to her sensibilities to consume sweets from anything other than “kawaii” (cute) packages. To the Japanese aesthetic, a sweet must first be tasted visually. The design of the box or container it comes in is just as important as that first bite; the experience of consumption begins first of all with the gentle prying open of an attractive package.”

and:

“The Japanese are so design-conscious they’ve become extremely picky. We can pick up the mood of the consumers and interpret it onto package designs, but that doesn’t mean consumers will be seduced into buying them. They need an extra, invisible something attached to the design.” Yoko Morinaga, a product stylist, says that “something” is authenticity: “The young female consumer is a lot more romantic than designers and manufacturers think. They hanker for the genuine. Not re-enactments, but the real thing. The most popular designs are those that have remained unchanged through the years, from smaller companies that refused to bow to the times and stuck to their design policies.”

Kawaii: a companion-concept to Oblaat?

» IHT: Thinking outside the cookie box

Walter Jefferies, immortalised though the use of the term “Jefferies Tube” in the Star Trek Universe has died.

» BBC News: Star Trek Enterprise designer dies

This struck me in the Star Wars Galaxies review on Gamespy:

” As many have mentioned, there are still quite a few bugs in Star Wars Galaxies … but I tend to think of it as a service rather than just a game: They are improving it every day, working at an intensity that is unlike that of any subscription service in memory.”

» Gamespy.com: Star Wars Galaxies: Pile-On!
[found via many-to-many]

…but you could apply his arguement to a lot of things that people get very excited about at the moment…

“Every technology invention has been touted as the key to peace and understanding. Dynamite (which Nobel truly thought would simply make construction safer), the telegraph (world peace because at last, world leaders could communicate), telephone, phonograph (everyone would learn languages effortlessly, said Edison), radio, TV, movies, internet, …

The notion that enough is understood about the psychological, sociological, anthropological, political, cultural dimensions of humankind to embed them in a sort of XML goes beyond comprehension.”

and he goes on:

“Fortunately, these committee exercises never go anywhere. They allow lots of people to travel to lots of conferences in exotic places in the world. It’s a great job, when you want to retire, to get on international standards committees. The price is a few boring meeting[s], but the benefits are world travel.”

» CHI-WEB : Re: HumanML?

» Nieminen.com: World’s first magazine made with mobile phones

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, on the ‘digital-divide’:

“When printing was invented, somebody said this is very interesting but what good is it when nobody can read?”

And yet-to-be-knighted Steve Jobs on tablet PC’s and the non-demise of the keyboard:

” There are no plans to make a tablet. It turns out people want keyboards. When Apple first started out, People couldn’t type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.”

» BBC News: Arthur C Clarke sees e-mail for all
» Interview with Steve Jobs

From my old school’s first year:

“The first project of the autumn semester invovles a trip to the beach to explore placemaking. Through the manipulation of natural materials and the use of found objects students are encouraged to create a place that expresses something of their response to the coastal environment.”

See also the good professor Unwin’s work… from the “ARCHITECTURE AS IDENTIFICATION OF PLACE” section, this corker relating back to my whole “navihate” thing:

“Place is to architecture, it may be said, as meaning is to language.”

“Information Architecture” could be said to set us up for a fall by mixing the semantic with the spatial from the get-go. Mixinyermetaphors is bad – rabbits die of it.

Egon:”I just remembered: DON”T CROSS THE STREAMS!”
Peter:”Why?”
Egon:”It would be BAD.”
Peter:”I am fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing… what do you mean BAD?”
Egon:”Try to imagine all life as you know it, stopping instantaneously,and every particle in your body exploding at the speed of light.”
Ray:”(gulp) total protonic reversal”
Peter:”Ok right that’s BAD, important safety tip thanks Egon.”

… but I will try and type up my notes from last night’s iSociety presentation this weekend whilst on trains to-and-from Stratford-Upon-Avon to visit my best mate from college and see if we can find an architectural design competition worth entering…

In the mean-time, Phil has reflected upon the evening, and there are some very good links in the comments field about ‘social capital’.

“These pages are about the work, on morphogenesis in general and Fibonacci phyllotaxis in particular, which was carried out by Alan Turing in the four or so years before his death, and which remains somewhat obscure.”

» http://www.swintons.net/jonathan/turing.htm and a related blog here.
[found via the awesome Hecklerandcoch]