Hugh Pearman gets to try out the now-hopefully-fixed millennium bridge, and muses on the British approach to iterative design…
“We departed, happy in the knowledge that we had participated in a great British tradition. That’s the tradition that dictates that you’ve got to have a good idea, get it wrong first time out, then cook up an ingenious, Heath Robinson solution.”
» Gabion: Wobbly no more: testing Foster’s Millennium Bridge.
Javascript ASCII fractal dreams courtesy of The Kleber Conspiracy
And the sticklers, those who swim tirelessly against the riptide of Reductio Ad Absurdum… Like Jeff Raskin.
“As a curmudgeon, I am delighted to point out that the popular term, Information Design, is a misnomer. Information cannot be designed; what can be designed are the modes of transfer and the representations of information. This is inherent in the nature of information, and it is important for designers to keep the concepts of information and meaning distinct.”
» TaskZ.com | ViewPointz by Jef Raskin
[Via the IAslash]
A stellar line-up talk ’emergence’ on the ‘studio360’ radio show, as reported by Dan ‘le homme’ Hill.
Hmm. He probably wasn’t the best guy to shed illuminating insights on what the most compelling 3g killer apps would be…
“We have single mode handsets with browsers and we are loading content. You can walk through the streets and call up the weather and download images,”
Seriously though, if they are as far ahead in terms of network roll-out as Candy states in the interview, 3g companies have to start setting expectations with the market of what it benefit it would actually bring to the populace, over and above talking and messenging, which they can already do perfectly well to their satisfaction.
The kinds of dumb commercials they run at the moment, where existing media paradigms are shoehorned into a mobile context dont cut it [watching a horror movie on a postage size screen on a bus? Dear me... Having said that, I’ve been known to watch DivX Buffy episodes on my vaio on a train…]
They have better, genuinely useful and valuable things to offer. They need to build understanding and demand. The competitior landscape is not what it was, so why not lose the paranoia and share some of the more seductive services they’ve all been working on in order to whet our appetite rather than trot out the same old tired cliches?
Digital radio could be the dark horse delivery medium to enable a whole bunch of interesting wireless and ubiquitous computing apps. The mention of this compact-flash compatible digital radio receiver that can slot into PDA’s in today’s Financial Times starts one conjuring with the possibilities…
Also from OM2k’s website:
» FlashDR: digital radio receiver
Have to find some time to read all these links about ‘small world’ theories. Also a little disturbed by the possible meeting of peter merholz and clay shirky. Like a shower of frogs, it is an omen of the interesting, possibly eschatonic times ahead.
»peterme.com : From the Recurring Patterns of Complex Systems Department.
The internet’s premier (only?) lame-pun-headline game moves to movabletype, allowing snippy comments to be added to the wordplay of the web-wags.
This time about the development of the original Star Wars arcade game, and Lucasfilm’s objections [pdf, approx 60k] to some of the games’ features. A fanatical drive for self-consistency in the creation of alternative universes is always great to see…
[via The Occasional Yay]
An article looking at the return to critical success and popularity of epic narrative – Lord of the Rings, Phillip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy and the Cannes film-festival-award-winning “Atanarjuat the Fast Runner”
“It’s a shift of emphasis from the telling to the subject of what’s being told; from the writing down part to the making up part,” he says. “It’s always more satisfying to use your imagination to explore the business of being alive than to explore language.”
Also – more Phillip Pullman links over at the awesome Linkmachinego.com
Also-Also – another Pullman profile from this week’s Observer courtesy of the Linkmachinego.com
Petafloptimism 