Many thanks to the good people of The Flirble Organisation.
How to: deliver picnics from high-orbit
Available shortly
Inspired by something that Chris Messina said in a Web2Expo panel
Originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.
(hopefully) to vote for at Threadless, and to buy direct from Spreadshirt. URLs to come.
For designers, hackers, and those that love them.
Saffer And Jones: They fight 8-bit crime!
Borough Market, Good Friday
Spending the weekend enjoying our new neighbourhood, much like the star of this photo, before both of us hit San Francisco for a week.
Joy vs Authority
"It is odd – will I say heart-breaking? – how cheerfulness goes: gaiety of mind, natural free-springing joy. Authority is its great enemy – the assumption of authority. I know few men over fifty that seem to me entirely human: virtually none who has long exercised authority…
…Pomp, an unwholesome diet, a cause of choler, a pleasure paid to late and at too high a price, like lying with a peppered paramour."
Master and Commander, Patrick O'Brian, Chapter Six, P173.
QotD: Strange Little Songs
What are the weirdest song titles in your playlist or music collection?
Submitted by Charline.
"King's Lead Hat" – Brian Eno
"Hair Pie: Bake 2" – Capt. Beefheart
"Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish" – Capt. Beefheart
In fact, I think I'll stop there as Capt. Beefheart kinda pwns this QotD.
Has twitter displaced liveblogging at Etech?
Another blogpost about twitter… yawn.
but – as Trevor says:
"I'm not seeing the frantic, multimodal ETech blog coverage as in past years. Has it jumped the shark or am I just unsubscribed?"
Even the most prolific conference liveblogger I know, Alice, has just been spooling flickr pics with the occasional contextual paragraph.
Chris and I (neither of whom are at Etech) were talking about this yesterday over lunch. I have a different theory – Twitter has given people a backchannel that doesn't require a laptop – which means less time in a blog writing environ.
'Context Spooling' has displaced blogging…?
Discuss!
maximum idea, minimum stuff.
WARNING: this is a bit of ramble, and I realise this is not really about brands, but…
Modern industrial design has always been about maximum idea, minimum stuff – more maximum benefit, minimum stuff. Inject the quicksilver of software into the stuff, and hopefully it ratchets that up further. Unfortunately, over the last 20 years, software has become big and crufty too, but a lot of the 'new wave' (sounds cooler and punkier than web2.0, imho) is lightweight, beneficial small-pieces-loosely-joined. It's not green though in itself – in fact technology typically has a godzilla-like eco-footprint what with the rare-earth metals, extensive refinement, potentially environmentally damaging manufacturing processes and embodied-energy necessary to make most things that involve microprocessors – that's before you even get to switch them on… and leave them on… always-on…
but- like most Promethean gifts, i believe information technology is the best way to bootstrap our way out of ecogeddon.
Read Bruce Sterling's "Shaping Things" for a wonderful vision of how 'things that think' – what he calls 'Spimes' could think about how to euthanise themselves responsible or report for re-use duty to those who need them. He says that spimes are 'Data first and foremost, and objects now and again…' – maximum idea, minimum stuff indeed…
Read "mirrorworlds" for David Gelertner's prescient vision of how tools like google earth teamed with data from our environment could give us simulations that help us to reflexively do the right thing – EcoCognoExoSkeletons…
(plug: i wrote a bit on this a while back: http://web.archive.org/web/20051219144628/http://www.blackbeltjones.com/work/?p=9)
read Alice's transcript from Will Wright's demo of Spore at SxSW: he wants to give kids a toy planet, to learn how to run the only real one we have… Just as his Sim City gave us all model cities to play with (and ended up being used by town-planning students and professionals for learning and community outreach activities)
The trail of data that we're generating about ourselves as we live our lives part-digitally is creating a model of ourselves that we can reflect upon, and change our behaviour if we feel it's not sustainable for us (or the planet)
The work done by RED and the Design Council is a great example of neat ways that products, design and service can combine to make us reflect on our behaviours in playful non-orwellian ways.
Don't worry – it's coming back to brands. maybe. i think.
In my post about 'Practical Mirrorworlds' I've used a picture I took years ago in the sydney opera house: http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackbeltjones/1346008/ which is a caption saying "sometimes we draw pictures or make models to help us understand things" – isn't a brand a model that is created by people to understand the promise that a company is making? And don't the guardians of that brand on the company and its proxies inject politics, dreams and values into that model which they believe will be appealing and increasingly sustainable – in both the sense of that appeal over time, which more and more comes to be the same as sustainable in the environmental sense.
And, in Sterling's Spimeworld, couldn't that promise be all that was necessary to understand until you needed the thing?
In the future, Brands should be interactive market-scale toys – models that we can all play with as individuals or communities to understand what we want in terms of things, services, dreams, outcomes before we get them. Spimes will be brands, invoked, instantiated.
Maximum idea, minimum stuff…
“People fall out of people”
A sketch by Rhys, a colleague and fellow countryman in California…
Petafloptimism 
just saving a rambling comment I made on Russell's blog to work on more…