April 2010
7 posts
collective art →
Allowing for strangers on the web to come together and build architecture.
Transparencies →
In a world where communication in all forms is becoming more and more prevalent, company transparency is turning into a mandate. How a firm operates can no longer stay mysterious.
This architecture firm has taken this transparency a step further and actually has a company twitter account for clients and others to read into their daily activities and events.
identity to identities
It is becoming increasingly popular for people in our day and age to reach out to the escapist avenues technology has brought to our society within the last twenty years. In Japan there is a culture of people called “otaku” who are characterized by their extreme passion for anime. This culture is unique in that the people who make up this otaku population actually rarely ever see...
Numbers make up the smarts!
It used to be that most information would pour out from a small elite, and trickle its way down to the masses. Examples of some members of the elite include Britannica, professors, news anchors, etc… For the common man, acquiring facts about the world was rather difficult since information was not readily accessible.
Now the world has changed. Phenomena such as wikipedia, forums, blogs,...
Anonymity in a loud world
Isn’t it crazy how identity is so linked to responsibility? In a virtual world where identities can be concealed, warped, or fabricated, things can happen to extremes that would never happen in the real world. People can be loud, opinionated, bad, crazy, or curious without any inhibition.
So a question to ask is, is this then some odd manifestation of utopia?
March 2010
6 posts
Objects and Effects
If you could choose between designing an object versus designing the effects an object has on its user, which would choose? Which is more important in the first place? Which should have a stronger influence on the other? Which, the object or its effects, is the chicken and which is the egg?
These are issues that architects have always been grappling with. I would like to argue that we are now...
Eclecticism, Specialization, and Mass Intelligence
Since the ambiguous transition from post-modernism to post-post-modernism (we have yet to find new names for ourselves!) architectural theory has been divided and subdivided many times over into many different avenues of thought. There are the green practitioners, the couture designers, the pre-fab teams, the scripters…the list goes on and on. Because of this, our generation of architects...
Do you know what's behind the Bodega? →
This store is a great example of urbanists chasing after the long tail. People don’t want what everyone else already has!
When you first walk into this store, it appears to be a simple bodega store, selling sodas, snacks, gum, etc. However, if you ask the cashier to “let you through the soda machine,” you will be surprised to find that the soda machine on the back wall is...
We've got a long tail, and we know it!
Maybe our society is much more self-conscious than we have assumed!
Drawing from the Hush Puppies Phenomenon, which parallels the Airwalk story described in The Tipping Point, our society often does recognize that certain things are relatively less mainstream than others, and specifically chooses to value them more because of this very fact. Hush Puppies became wildly popular because they...
Mapping Realities →
I remember hearing a physicist describe how incredible it was that the world could be described by mathematics. It was wondrous to him how variables and formulas could capture behaviors of our seemingly unpredictable and complex world.
However, mathematics cannot describe everything, such as social behavior and randomized human behaviors.
I find it amazing how information graphics can describe...
Un-expectations in a World of Complexity
There used to be a time when the untrained public eye could understand how even the newest inventions worked. The concept of tension and release in a bow-and-arrow and how a stream turns the gears of a watermill are examples of innovations that were visually mechanical and could be understood by people without any special education or training.
Somewhere along the way, understanding the...
February 2010
2 posts
The Falling Point
Malcolm Gladwell’s investigation of the Tipping Point is very interesting and has always convinced me even from the second page of his book. The idea that when a qualified critical mass of participants engage in something an explosion of followers will result seems to explain a lot of the network culture phenomena that we see happen around us. It’s all about hitting the right target...
Blending Boundaries →
With the aid of mass media, different design disciplines get much more exposure to the techniques and developments of other design disciplines. It is much easier now than ever before for architects to be inspired by the handiwork of product designers, and web programmers to take cues from interior designers. Websites such as suckerpunchdaily.com are evidence that we are entering an age of...
January 2010
1 post
