Fantastic Worlds and Cinematic Spectacle

Here are some of the most fantastic landscapes and worlds from movies/documentaries/films/animations I've seen:


Paprika Parade

a hodgepodge of walking appliances, oversized frogs, creepy toy dolls, robots walking around in an inexplicable parade from the psychological thriller anime, Paprika best encapsulates the sense of wonder and schizophrenia of a particularly incomprehensible dream



Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (because the landscapes of love is amazing)



Maborosi seaside

Koreeda Hirokazu's film about loneliness and redemption has a quiet tranquility especially in the rural seaside landscapes




Tetsuo's mutation spawned a new genre of anime



A great movie about the subsconscious and death


Unbelievable hand drawn animation from Studio Ghibli





Little Nemo and adventures in Slumberland

Nemo's flying bed was always something I wanted to travel through when I was little


Baraka



The Ocean and the whale in Pinocchio



Richly gilded and fantastic images in the fall


Urban decay in Watchmen


Old Boy


Beautiful Landscapes of Dil Se


Hitchcock's SF



Kung Fu Hustle



Forbidden Planet


The Forest in the wizard of Oz


Akira Kurosawa's dreams


The country side in Modern Life


Herzog's La Soufriere



Another film about urban growth and globalization


Violence and urban decay


The city of the future


the future of immersive user interfaces in minority report



Parrots and telegraph hill



peaceful (and cute) country side of Komaneko

Book Summary 1: In the Beginning was the Command Line

Here are some of the memorable quotes from this book. I will revise later to come up with my own spin on things.

Around the time that Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, and Allen were dreaming up these unlikely schemes, I was a teenager living in Ames, Iowa. One of my friends' dads had an old MGB sports car rusting away in his garage. Sometimes he would actually manage to get it running and then he would take us for a spin around the block, with a memorable look of wild youthful exhiliration on his face; to his worried passengers, he was a madman, stalling and backfiring around Ames, Iowa and eating the dust of rusty Gremlins and Pintos, but in his own mind he was Dustin Hoffman tooling across the Bay Bridge with the wind in his hair.

In retrospect, this was telling me two things about people's relationship to technology. One was that romance and image go a long way towards shaping their opinions. If you doubt it (and if you have a lot of spare time on your hands) just ask anyone who owns a Macintosh and who, on those grounds, imagines him- or herself to be a member of an oppressed minority group.



The other, somewhat subtler point, was that interface is very important. Sure, the MGB was a lousy car in almost every way that counted: balky, unreliable, underpowered. But it was fun to drive. It was responsive. Every pebble on the road was felt in the bones, every nuance in the pavement transmitted instantly to the driver's hands. He could listen to the engine and tell what was wrong with it. The steering responded immediately to commands from his hands. To us passengers it was a pointless exercise in going nowhere--about as interesting as peering over someone's shoulder while he punches numbers into a spreadsheet. But to the driver it was an experience.
For a short time he was extending his body and his senses into a larger realm, and doing things that he couldn't do unassisted.


The division of responsibilities implied by all of this is admirably clean: computers do arithmetic on bits of information. Humans construe the bits as meaningful symbols. But this distinction is now being blurred, or at least complicated, by the advent of modern operating systems that use, and frequently abuse, the power of metaphor to make computers accessible to a larger audience. Along the way--possibly because of those metaphors, which make an operating system a sort of work of art--people start to get emotional, and grow attached to pieces of software in the way that my friend's dad did to his MGB.

The important thing is that no matter what splendid multimedia web pages they might represent, HTML files are just telegrams.

Were GUIs a brilliant design innovation that made computers more human-centered and therefore accessible to the masses, leading us toward an unprecedented revolution in human society, or an insulting bit of audiovisual gimcrackery dreamed up by flaky Bay Area hacker types that stripped computers of their power and flexibility and turned the noble and serious work of computing into a childish video game?


Anyway, a Macintosh had to switch individual bits in the memory chips on the video card, and it had to do it very fast, and in arbitrarily complicated patterns. Nowadays this is cheap and easy, but in the technological regime that prevailed in the early 1980s, the only realistic way to do it was to build the motherboard (which contained the CPU) and the video system (which contained the memory that was mapped onto the screen) as a tightly integrated whole--hence the single, hermetically sealed case that made the Macintosh so distinctive.



It was seen as not only a superb piece of engineering, but an embodiment of certain ideals about the use of technology to benefit mankind, while Windows was seen as a pathetically clumsy imitation and a sinister world domination plot rolled into one. So very early, a pattern had been established that endures to this day: people dislike Microsoft, which is okay; but they dislike it for reasons that are poorly considered, and in the end, self-defeating.



CLASS STRUGGLE ON THE DESKTOP


It follows that if Microsoft sells goods that are aesthetically unappealing, or that don't work very well, it does not mean that they are (respectively) philistines or half-wits. It is because Microsoft's excellent management has figured out that they can make more money for their stockholders by releasing stuff with obvious, known imperfections than they can by making it beautiful or bug-free. This is annoying, but (in the end) not half so annoying as watching Apple inscrutably and relentlessly destroy itself.


All of this is perfectly congruent with membership in the bourgeoisie, which is as much a mental, as a material state.


Apple therefore had a monopoly on hardware that could run MacOS, whereas Windows-compatible hardware came out of a free market. The free market seems to have decided that people will not pay for cool-looking computers;


It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them.






In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all life on earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which is trapped between thousands of miles of dead rock underfoot, and cold dead radioactive empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already become free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed, or that is too crazy and speculative to be productized just yet. Like the Earth's biosphere, the technosphere is very thin compared to what is above and what is below.

But it moves a lot faster. In various parts of our world, it is possible to go and visit rich fossil beds where skeleton lies piled upon skeleton, recent ones on top and more ancient ones below. In theory they go all the way back to the first single-celled organisms. And if you use your imagination a bit, you can understand that, if you hang around long enough, you'll become fossilized there too, and in time some more advanced organism will become fossilized on top of you.

The fossil record--the La Brea Tar Pit--of software technology is the Internet. Anything that shows up there is free for the taking (possibly illegal, but free). Executives at companies like Microsoft must get used to the experience--unthinkable in other industries--of throwing millions of dollars into the development of new technologies, such as Web browsers, and then seeing the same or equivalent software show up on the Internet two years, or a year, or even just a few months, later.

By continuing to develop new technologies and add features onto their products they can keep one step ahead of the fossilization process, but on certain days they must feel like mammoths caught at La Brea, using all their energies to pull their feet, over and over again, out of the sucking hot tar that wants to cover and envelop them.

Survival in this biosphere demands sharp tusks and heavy, stomping feet at one end of the organization, and Microsoft famously has those. But trampling the other mammoths into the tar can only keep you alive for so long. The danger is that in their obsession with staying out of the fossil beds, these companies will forget about what lies above the biosphere: the realm of new technology. In other words, they must hang onto their primitive weapons and crude competitive instincts, but also evolve powerful brains. This appears to be what Microsoft is doing with its research division, which has been hiring smart people right and left (Here I should mention that although I know, and socialize with, several people in that company's research division, we never talk about business issues and I have little to no idea what the hell they are up to.
I have learned much more about Microsoft by using the Linux operating system than I ever would have done by using Windows).




Never mind how Microsoft used to make money; today, it is making its money on a kind of temporal arbitrage. "Arbitrage," in the usual sense, means to make money by taking advantage of differences in the price of something between different markets. It is spatial, in other words, and hinges on the arbitrageur knowing what is going on simultaneously in different places. Microsoft is making money by taking advantage of differences in the price of technology in different times. Temporal arbitrage, if I may coin a phrase, hinges on the arbitrageur knowing what technologies people will pay money for next year, and how soon afterwards those same technologies will become free. What spatial and temporal arbitrage have in common is that both hinge on the arbitrageur's being extremely well-informed; one about price gradients across space at a given time, and the other about price gradients over time in a given place.

Never mind how Microsoft used to make money; today, it is making its money on a kind of temporal arbitrage. "Arbitrage," in the usual sense, means to make money by taking advantage of differences in the price of something between different markets. It is spatial, in other words, and hinges on the arbitrageur knowing what is going on simultaneously in different places. Microsoft is making money by taking advantage of differences in the price of technology in different times. Temporal arbitrage, if I may coin a phrase, hinges on the arbitrageur knowing what technologies people will pay money for next year, and how soon afterwards those same technologies will become free. What spatial and temporal arbitrage have in common is that both hinge on the arbitrageur's being extremely well-informed; one about price gradients across space at a given time, and the other about price gradients over time in a given place.




INTERFACE CULTURE
DAZZLED BY MANUFACTURED OBJECTS

Since then I've always thought of that man as the personification of an interesting human tendency: not only are we not offended to be dazzled by manufactured images, but we like it. We practically insist on it. We are eager to be complicit in our own dazzlement: to pay money for a theme park ride, vote for a guy who's obviously lying to us, or stand there holding the basket as it's filled up with cosmetics.

Americans' preference for mediated experiences is obvious enough, and I'm not going to keep pounding it into the ground. I'm not even going to make snotty comments about it--after all, I was at Disney World as a paying customer. But it clearly relates to the colossal success of GUIs and so I have to talk about it some. Disney does mediated experiences better than anyone. If they understood what OSes are, and why people use them, they could crush Microsoft in a year or two.


Disney is in the business of putting out a product of seamless illusion--a magic mirror that reflects the world back better than it really is.


The word, in the end, is the only system of encoding thoughts--the only medium--that is not fungible, that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media (the richer tourists at Disney World wear t-shirts printed with the names of famous designers, because designs themselves can be bootlegged easily and with impunity. The only way to make clothing that cannot be legally bootlegged is to print copyrighted and trademarked words on it; once you have taken that step, the clothing itself doesn't really matter, and so a t-shirt is as good as anything else. T-shirts with expensive words on them are now the insignia of the upper class. T-shirts with cheap words, or no words at all, are for the commoners).

In general they only seem comfortable with media that have been ratified by great age, massive popular acceptance, or both.

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself--and more than just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.

But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it.

. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.

The lesson most people are taking home from the Twentieth Century is that, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist peacefully on the globe (or even in a neighborhood) it is necessary for people to suspend judgment in this way. Hence (I would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility towards, all authority figures in modern culture. As David Foster Wallace has explained in his essay "E Unibus Pluram," this is the fundamental message of television; it is the message that people take home, anyway, after they have steeped in our media long enough. It's not expressed in these highfalutin terms, of course. It comes through as the presumption that all authority figures--teachers, generals, cops, ministers, politicians--are hypocritical buffoons, and that hip jaded coolness is the only way to be.


The global anti-culture that has been conveyed into every cranny of the world by television is a culture unto itself, and by the standards of great and ancient cultures like Islam and France, it seems grossly inferior, at least at first. The only good thing you can say about it is that it makes world wars and Holocausts less likely--and that is actually a pretty good thing!




Contemporary culture is a two-tiered system, like the Morlocks and the Eloi in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, except that it's been turned upside down. In The Time Machine the Eloi were an effete upper class, supported by lots of subterranean Morlocks who kept the technological wheels turning. But in our world it's the other way round. The Morlocks are in the minority, and they are running the show, because they understand how everything works. The much more numerous Eloi learn everything they know from being steeped from birth in electronic media directed and controlled by book-reading Morlocks. So many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong direction, and so we've evolved a popular culture that is (a) almost unbelievably infectious and (b) neuters every person who gets infected by it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking stands.



* It simply is the case that we are way too busy, nowadays, to comprehend everything in detail. And it's better to comprehend it dimly, through an interface, than not at all. Better for ten million Eloi to go on the Kilimanjaro Safari at Disney World than for a thousand cardiovascular surgeons and mutual fund managers to go on "real" ones in Kenya.
* The boundary between these two classes is more porous than I've made it sound. I'm always running into regular dudes--construction workers, auto mechanics, taxi drivers, galoots in general--who were largely aliterate until something made it necessary for them to become readers and start actually thinking about things. Perhaps they had to come to grips with alcoholism, perhaps they got sent to jail, or came down with a disease, or suffered a crisis in religious faith, or simply got bored. Such people can get up to speed on particular subjects quite rapidly. Sometimes their lack of a broad education makes them over-apt to go off on intellectual wild goose chases, but, hey, at least a wild goose chase gives you some exercise.
* The spectre of a polity controlled by the fads and whims of voters who actually believe that there are significant differences between Bud Lite and Miller Lite, and who think that professional wrestling is for real, is naturally alarming to people who don't. But then countries controlled via the command-line interface, as it were, by double-domed intellectuals, be they religious or secular, are generally miserable places to live.
* Sophisticated people deride Disneyesque entertainments as pat and saccharine, but, hey, if the result of that is to instill basically warm and sympathetic reflexes, at a preverbal level, into hundreds of millions of unlettered media-steepers, then how bad can it be? We killed a lobster in our kitchen last night and my daughter cried for an hour. The Japanese, who used to be just about the fiercest people on earth, have become infatuated with cuddly adorable cartoon characters.
* My own family--the people I know best--is divided about evenly between people who will probably read this essay and people who almost certainly won't, and I can't say for sure that one group is necessarily warmer, happier, or better-adjusted than the other.

Then the interface-makers went to work on their GUIs, and introduced a new semiotic layer between people and machines.

#########################33

Most people who shop for OSes (if they bother to shop at all) are comparing not the underlying functions but the superficial look and feel. The average buyer of an OS is not really paying for, and is not especially interested in, the low-level code that allocates memory or writes bytes onto the disk. What we're really buying is a system of metaphors. And--much more important--what we're buying into is the underlying assumption that metaphors are a good way to deal with the world.

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But because the VCR was invented when it was--during a sort of awkward transitional period between the era of mechanical interfaces and GUIs--it just had a bunch of pushbuttons on the front, and in order to set the time you had to push the buttons in just the right way. This must have seemed reasonable enough to the engineers responsible for it, but to many users it was simply impossible. Thus the famous blinking 12:00 that appears on so many VCRs. Computer people call this "the blinking twelve problem". When they talk about it, though, they usually aren't talking about VCRs.






By using GUIs all the time we have insensibly bought into a premise that few people would have accepted if it were presented to them bluntly: namely, that hard things can be made easy, and complicated things simple, by putting the right interface on them. In order to understand how bizarre this is, imagine that book reviews were written according to the same values system that we apply to user interfaces: "The writing in this book is marvelously simple-minded and glib; the author glosses over complicated subjects and employs facile generalizations in almost every sentence. Readers rarely have to think, and are spared all of the difficulty and tedium typically involved in reading old-fashioned books." As long as we stick to simple operations like setting the clocks on our VCRs, this is not so bad. But as we try to do more ambitious things with our technologies, we inevitably run into the problem of:


Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.

As I've explained, selling OSes for money is a basically untenable position, and the only way Apple and Microsoft can get away with it is by pursuing technological advancements as aggressively as they can, and by getting people to believe in, and to pay for, a particular image: in the case of Apple, that of the creative free thinker, and in the case of Microsoft, that of the respectable techno-bourgeois. Just like Disney, they're making money from selling an interface, a magic mirror. It has to be polished and seamless or else the whole illusion is ruined and the business plan vanishes like a mirage.

Some Very Interesting People with Good Things to Say

Feynman on How to think Like a Scientist--- about thinking and investigating how you think and what you know




Ira Glass on how to create meaningful creative work -- failing a lot, setting aside just as much time for looking for interesting things, and waiting to get lucky -- never settling for mediocrity.




Malcolm Gladwell on why there is no perfect _________ there are only perfect _________'s




Hans Rosling's poignant (and beautiful information aesthetics) on how the world is as flat as ever.



Jennifer Lee on "Chinese" food in America



Secret History of Silicon Valley -- Basically: Terman (of Terman Engineering) is the man: some of the core ideas of silicon valley -- IP Protection, Entrepreneurial Stanford Engineering Students, Venture Capital Models, Education and Startup Cooperation were a brainchild of him --- oh yeah and it all goes back to weapons




Daniel Suarez on our bot mediated reality.




Will Wright and Brian Eno on Generative Systems



Jonathan Haidt on the difference between liberals and conservatives




Randy Pausch on really achieving your childhood dreams -- a little self helpy but this is very good



Steve Jobs's three stories on life


Dieter Rams on revolutionizing the design of objects



Vint Cerf on the future of the interwebs


A.J. Jacobs on living his life following all biblical rules ( of the outsourced life fame)


Marilyn Manson Pwning Bill O'Reilly -- and talks about presentation and the veneer of self


Stephen Hawking on finding good challenges for the mind


Salvador Dali on what's my line (hilarious and absurd)


XKCD guy at Google


Ben Huh on the history of Icanhascheezburger


Seth Godin on Purple Cows


Michael Welsch on the internet



John Cage performs



Milton Friedman on Societies that run on Greed -- the only cases where the masses escape grinding poverty is through capitalism



Stewart Brand on the importance of squatter cities



Steve Levitt on why incentives don't work


Speaking of Carrots -- Ali G's literal interpretation of carrots


Tim Hartford on the Logic of Life


Steven Pinker on reverse engineering Romance


Richard Buckland on hidden messages


Dan Dennet on the power of memes



Stephen Hawking on asking big questions about the universe


Ramachandran on intersection of physical and real


Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on creativity and flow

late night

a cup of coffee that I drank at 9 pm today is the reason why I am still awake, and i thought it was time again for another journal entry. since my last entry, i have found some more interesting activities on seventh and folsom.

first, the mysterious fleet of tiny, middle aged chinese women that peddle what seems like commissioned state food items on bryant and seventh, right in front of the newly opened subway. everyday, it's the same (or perhaps different) chinese lady with several one-off food items laid out over a piece of cloth on the ground. the specific items vary per day, sometimes there will be a small box of cereal, or some canned peaches, or sometimes , mysteriously, a few packets of active dry yeast. each time i always look furtively to scan her items, and get a momentary desire to photograph her. she always looks me in the eye, wondering if perhaps the packets of active dry yeast have caught my interest. it must be a lucrative endeavor if its worth doing everyday. a few weeks ago, when i was running a little bit late to work, i saw that there are a fleet of them, and not just one. i wonder what street intersections these other chinese ladies are stationed, and where they will be going to after they've done their peddling.

moving on to another mysterious phenomenon on seventh street, is the always frothing sea of soap foam that emerges at about 6 pm everyday. my best guess is that it is there to counter the ever pervasive tenderloin city scent (aka pee and poo). I wonder though who is the secret benefactor of this "sea of foam" that washes a stream of frothy, bubbly, springy freshness through the entire alleyway in front of the seventh street bar. I am grateful for this, but then saddened to realize that soon this pristine frothy bubble will eventually merge with the neverending supply of urine from the happy folk that love loitering in this particular street.

orzo is such a delightful food. i made something with orzo, shrimp and basil last weekend. mangoes are also in season which makes me happy. i've been snapping it up by the dozen.

Some really great stop motion videos

GMAIL VIRAL VIDEO
peeps paint a larger than life gmail interface


SHISEIDO
guy paints something in large scale, people come in to form the head's hair



POST-IT VALENTINE
just simple animation + simple story + post its




SCISSORS SINGING MUSIC VIDEO
campy animations of singing scissors has a crafty feel


TIME LAPSE -- DRAWING + ANIMATED PARTS (2 million views)


LEGO MILLENIUM FALCON BUILDING ITSELF


SPEED PAINTING WITH FRENCH FRIES




INTERESTING REFRAMING OF MOVING IMAGE (not really stop motion combo of video )


MOTION GRAPHICS + DRAWING (effects I wanted for the shirt going into person)


HOW TO MAKE A PANCAKE (the pancake makes itself)



SONY ADVERT WITH CLAY and huge BUNNIES IN NYC


LIVE PAINTING (Interesting this one only has 8K views, which might be in the artist masturbatory mode...i.e. impressing only the artists)



BOOK OF SPAM





15 MILLION VIEWS ON JUST HANDS


KELLOGS STOP MOTION with CEREAL



KID AND BALLOON (not stop motion but good)



RINPA ESHIDAN (drawing on walls amazing)



MANUFACTURED BEAUTY ( photoshop tells a really good story)


DAFT PUNK (shirts )

austin is so hot

I spent the weekend in Austin to go to a music festival. It was a nice town.. the weather was warm and balmy and reminded me of my childhood in the Philippines. I went to the Austin City limits festival and according to the local paper, it hosted over 65,000 people in a large outdoor park.

There was a green river that ran through the park. It looked nice and some of the locals were jumping into the river. It made me think of various idealized memories of young midwestern boys jumping through a lake or a creek and wish I had something like that as part of my childhood.

I had Texas BBQ for the three days, a Mohito at a TGI Fridays to get me reasonably buzzed before Jolly, me and two folks we met at the concert sauntered off to a bridge to look at the famed Austin bats. I liked looking at the lake more than i did the spectacle of the swarming bats. There was a nice cool breeze amid the 80 degree Austin weather that night, and again I felt calm.

a beautiful thing

"I realise that I have a recurring interest in notions of ‘belonging’, particularly the finding or losing of it. Whether this has anything to do with my own life, I’m not sure, it seems to be more of a subconscious than conscious concern."

Beyond any personal issues, though, I think that the ‘problem’ of belonging is perhaps more of a basic existential question that everybody deals with from time to time, if not on a regular basis. It especially rises to the surface when things ‘go wrong’ with our usual lives, when something challenges our comfortable reality or defies our expectations – which is typically the moment when a good story begins, so good fuel for fiction. We often find ourselves in new realities – a new school, job, relationship or country, any of which demand some reinvention of ‘belonging’.

This was uppermost in my mind during the long period of work on The Arrival, a book which deals with the theme of migrant experience. Given my preoccupation with ‘strangers in strange lands’, this was an obvious subject to tackle, a story about somebody leaving their home to find a new life in an unseen country, where even the most basic details of ordinary life are strange, confronting or confusing – not to mention beyond the grasp of language. It’s a scenario I had been thinking about for a number of years before it crystallised into some kind of narrative form."

Link: The Arrival by Shaun Tan

the visitors from europe

as you all know my faithful readers, I dutifully buy a blueberry bagel with cream cheese from the corner bakery at market and seventh. this bakery is a weird hodgepodge of homeless people from the tail-end of the tenderloin, the suits at the now recently built deathstar/federal building, and travelling tourists from el-cheapo hotel row on seventh street.

this month especially i have seen a barrage of family tourists from europe. you can tell from the way they carry themselves that they are certainly not american, and certainly not of the market street ilk. the typical set includes, a tall dad in capri pants (?!), a mom, and two teenage children.

as i rush to my daily work, i sometimes idealize what these people's lives are like. i wonder where in germany are they from. i sometimes feel bad that their view of san francisco will be blemished by the first blush of the tenderloin "city scent". i also wonder, why on earth are these middle aged men still wearing capris! i gotta give it to the europeans though, their travelling dads look better than american travelling dads with the signature hawaiian shirt and waist high khaki shorts.

back to the work day.

quote of the day

“The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued - except as a stimulus for further moves.”

--Richard Diebenkorn

point of view

i hate taking a point of view. it takes so much work to take a stake in the ground and say "this is what I am doing for the next year". how does one focus ones adult life in the best way possible.

i've been trying to find a balance in the continuum of being too creative and the other side of being too rigid. the problem with most things is that most people want a clear hook to wrap their brain around you. quite frankly, there is no clear hook around me.

i am a creative person who wants to spread my ideas to the world. the problem with this definition is that often the path from idea to spread ideas to the world, is long and fraught with obstacles, and often involved coordination with many people. i've been mulling over the idea of switching over to corporate land where things are much more stable and regimented in terms of process.

the biggest take away from my implementation class, is that life is about finding the right scope of challenges to take on. now that i have graduated, the world has opened up at an overwhelming speed, but i continue to feel like the opportunities around me are few and far in between. how could one simultaneously have these two feelings? but i do.

my friend chris took his dog who lives in central valley with a nice yard to his small san francisco apartment. i forgot her name, but lets call her dolly. dolly was frightened to death of the new environment so she stayed in chris's room, tail between her legs. chris discovered a neat way to open her up, she put a leash on her neck and soon dolly opened up and walked around the house, bright eyed and willing to explore. after an hour or so chris took the leash out and she was happy to run about the house.

was college supposed to be the leash? i think i need a little more leash time.

one nonsequitur. i have decided to not capitalize any of my sentences for this blog and i must say it has increased my productivity by probably 5%.

Steve Jobs is so awesome. Its really disappointing that he's sort of an asshole as a person. But its ok, he's still pretty damn awesome. I really liked this interview that he did with wired magazine.

Some Cool Things

The Watercone® is a solar powered water desalinator that takes salt or brackish water and generates freshwater. It is simple to use, lightweight and mobile. The technology is simple in design and use and is discribed by simple pictograms. With max. 1,6 liters a day the Watercone® is an ideal device to cover a childs daily need of freshwater. UNICEF: "every day 5000 children die as a result of diarrhea coused by drinking unsafe water"

Link:Watercone





A pretty thing. Some sort of shelving system.


Link:Basaglia and Nodari System


A very cool infographic music video.



This is not bad either

Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto For Growth and other uplifting things

Today I ran into icon magazine's "manifesto" issue. It lists 50 designers and their beliefs on the current state of the design world. I very much enjoy reading these words to inspire and drive me to work harder as a young designer. The first manifesto is from a designer named Peter Saville which very clearly articulates what I feel is wrong with the current state of design -- that is that it is intrinsically tied to having to make a profit.

Morals
The cultural adventure has been consumed by business. Making things better is a moral issue, but morality and business don’t go together – business is, if not immoral, then amoral. We know we should be keeping people out of stores but we all have to work with business. It can’t really be all about idealism and altruism.

However, I recently finished reading "Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur" and found some pretty straightforward advice from an entrepreneur named Stuart Skorman. Earlier this year I was working on a project to help mom and pop video stores using design strategy and research and one of our interviews lead us a store owner who had been approached by Mr. Skorman. Skorman created some minorly successful dot.coms and more notably elephant pharmacy and seemed to have some pretty down to earth, straight talking approach to what good design and business. I will elaborate more later.

Here is another case where we are faced with multiple frames to look at this problem. For instance, there is the more local frame of having to make a living, the higher frame of creating meaningful stuff, and of course, every designers dream to create beautiful, functional things that affect people's lives in a positive way. Its a lofty goal and I am always inspired when I see things on Notcot that seem like great ideas.

Bruce Mau was another one of the people who had a great manifesto. I remember stumbling onto his "Incomplete Manifesto for Growth" when I was a senior in high school and being tremendously inspired by it-- it is what ultimately made me want to become a designer instead of a painter.

An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

Written in 1998, the Incomplete Manifesto is an articulation of statements that exemplify Bruce Mau's beliefs, motivations and strategies. It also articulates how the BMD studio works.

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.

12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

17. ____________________. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.

18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you're separated from the rest of the world.

19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.

20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.

21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.

22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

23. Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.

24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.

25. Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.

26. Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.

27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our "noodle."

28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.

29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between "creatives" and "suits" is what Leonard Cohen calls a 'charming artifact of the past.'

31. Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.

32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.

34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea -- I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.

35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You'll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else ... but not words.

37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.

39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces -- what Dr. Seuss calls "the waiting place." Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference -- the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.

41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I've become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.

42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can't be free agents if we’re not free.

Onto more inspiring things, there are always the TED talks. I especially like Dr. Roslings engaging information graphics on the state of the world through lenses of quality of life (such as healthcare, etc, etc).



LINKS:
icon magazine's "manifesto issue": fifty manifestos of today's leading design figures who actually care about the state of the world.


Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur: a great book for any aspiring entrepreneur.

Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for growth: The entire text is in this blog entry. This manifesto has inspired me in so many ways and affected the way I think to this day.

Ted Talks: Ideas of amazing, inspiring and intellegent people who are trying to change the world.


Damn why do I have to be such an idealist.

Weekend Festivities

Were there really wasn't that much...

I did finally finish the last Harry Potter book. I enjoyed most of it, a bit slow-going at the beginning, but the wizard duels etc, etc, seemed appropriate for the finale of a seven book series.

I managed to get my hands on a Swiss version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Having just seen the fifth movie two weeks ago and just finished the final book, I thought it would be fun to contrast how much the actors have grown and also to see if there were anything that would make sense now that I know the entire story that would've been imperceptible back then. The only thing I noted was the use of Dumbledore's deluminator and of coures, Ron receives it in the final book. However, I just started re-reading the first book also and it was certainly called a different name then.


I very much enjoyed the movie.

I also randomly ran across the great website of a webdesigner/graphic designer/coder named Jonathan Harris. Looking at his work, I noticed that he has responsible for many of the things that I find wonderful in interaction design including:
1)10X10 a news aggregator 2) the graphic layout/interface of etsy.com 3)some mints I noticed at the airport called oral fixation

and finally I really enjoyed wefeelfine.org which scours the blogosphere for the phrase "i feel" and creates graphical representations to analyze the data and to look at what people across the world are feeling right now.

friday

I discovered that a lot of people are creating PDF magazines. Its a great way to get graphic design inspiration. I loved the Candy Collective mag's feature on the use of Helvetica font through the years.
This site has a great listing and links. I also really love Adobe's PDF magazine for design professionals.



"You know I dreamed about you
for twenty-nine years before I saw you
You know I dreamed about you
I missed you for
for twenty-nine years"

a more design centered blog

I really ought to have a stronger point of view for this blog.
The last few months have taught me much about the strength of messaging and the importance of a strong point of view.

I thought I would just list some sites that I visit everyday:

Notcot.org

is a very visually stunning and daily updated design journal. I like it because it doesn't have words and I usually just get eyecandy

Popurls

is an aggregator of aggregators. I tried fiddling with Netvibes or with igoogle, but popurls is punchy. Besides I usually only read the Reddit entries , and if I feel like catching up on more webdev stuff, probably delicious.com

Gmail

I love Gmail. It is the best web client out there, and it is awesome, I dont need anythign else

website creation

I dont usually talk about work related things, but I thought I would like to document my webcreation process. Throughout college, I've always been amazed by well-designed websites. It didn't seem that complicated to me, as almost invariably most of these websites were created by "graphic designers", thus, must not be that complicated.

I decided to take on the challenge of re-designinging my company website. First I had to learn CSS as i had learned from a product designer/ web developer friend that it is the new standard for web design. So I looked it up. I'm not sure what entirely the benefit of it is, other than the actual process of learning CSS "containers", floating and creating layout in general, has afforded a new way of design. It is indeed much more flexible to redesign the individual elements of a website and really, the table based design of HTML days of yore really is quite cumbersome.

So I learned CSS all of last week.
I had a tutorial from my webdev friend a few months ago where he taught me the difference betweens and classes and ids. Pretty much this is all you need to know to do CSS.

I then went and tagged websites that were very well done.
Smashing Magazine has some very good resources for web inspiration. I then also looked for company websites in my company's "category" of products and sought for inspiration there. Most designs in that category were simply lackluster, but it is best to keep this in mind, as our clientelle would probably be more intimidated than impressed by a fashion forward website.

I then had to learn the nuts and bolts of CSS. So I delicioused CSS and true enough, it was a gold mine of resources. For any webdevs out there, I hihgly recommend using delicious for all your researching needs. My two favorite websites for this are:
1) HTML Dog and 2) W3 Schools. These two sites will give you everything you need to know to catch up on sites.

Then came the bewildering idea of how to handle tables now that CSS has completely obliterated tables. For some reason, the idea of floating was completely bewildering to me and some websites were simply floating left and floating right; this is a completely different way of doing it with tables. Somehow this website explained everything I needed to know .

Then came the problem with Menus. I liked the idea of having drop down menus as they look streamlined and allow for easier navigation. I liked Stu Nicholl's site for its amazingly extensive collection of open source Menus completely done in CSS. However, I wanted to do a combination of text and images rollovers and this site albeit butt ugly looks promising.

Finally, I also had to learn flash because my boss wanted me incorprate it into its website. This site was surprisingly the most straightforward way to learn flash. Then I wanted to get ambitious and add clickable elements to my swf. Amazingly Adobe has a very rich collection of video resources that I highly recommend. Talk about taking advantage of their own platform (so awesome).

I absolutely love the internet. If I run into any problem I simply google it and I can pretty much find a little forum somewhere, or a tutorial site that discusses the very problem I have. How amazing when you create an entirely open platform.

globalization and product design

I listened to Fresh Air on NPR today. Terri Gross interviewed a woman who was an international correspondent for some newspaper to India and China. She noted how globalization has created immense wealth in these two countries and how that affects job security in America.

She used the ipod to illustrate the point. She claims that the idea for the "chip" or "brains" of the ipod was developed in a shack in Hyderabad(sp?). Further, the development of the ipod is contracted to Taiwanese and Chinese manufacturers. Then the products are sent to America, where they are marketed and sold. Apple being the brand associated with the Ipod gets the lion's share of profits. However, engineers, accountants, creatives, etc can output the "same quality" of work for tenth of the price of an American engineer.

This is an interesting point. Since in the last 20 years, America's manufacturing industry has certainly collapsed. We have since reshaped ourselves into a service economy, but with the export of white collar jobs as well, the job security of most Americans continue to diminish, and thus the job security of everyone in general.

This makes me think of Snow Crash where in the future, the only things America is good at are: entertainment, pizza, and software. Indeed, it seems those remain to be the few remaining exports we have to offer.

People who I think are cool

1) Muhammad Yunus

founder of Grameen bank. Started the idea that you can lend to poor people and give them a sense of empowerment. Right to credit is the number one right to poor people. Credit means creating self employment. Earning income, and achieving other things becomes easier. Savings is a long time asset building process.

2) Steve Jobs

such a strong point of view. such a good product designer. so totally awesome.

3) Founders of Kiva

more later

things that I like #7

1) mangoes.
manila style mangoes, even if they really are from mexico.

2) skittles.
yum!

3) project runway
I like Laura from project runway even if she seems bitchy and cold.
her designs are impeccable, and she has six kids!

4) the philippines
i love the country!

5) my workplace
light and airy and bright

things that I like #7

1) the feeling I had the winter of 2002. I would listen to blackbird by the beatles and drink lots of green tea. Somehow in my little room in New Jersey, I could escape that world and dream of a grand life ahead of me.

2) being finally friends with my mom.

3) my room being clean.

4) being somewhat ok with loneliness again.

5) reading stories of people who have achieved great things.