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“I returned to New York. Tired. Sad. The world is coming to an end. What to do? What to do?
I know what to do.
Spend the day on the subway.
The wonderful life-affirming two-dollar subway ride.
I go with Rick. He wears a hat and he will take pictures.
It is August. Hot, but not too hot..
We take the F train to Coney Island.
Two girls on their way to the Aquarium have T-shirts around their heads and they are dancing.”
-Maira Kalman in The Principles of Uncertainty. A new favorite book that I will read a billion times.
Image via NY Times.
“Universe attempts to create new constellations for today’s night sky by continually analyzing the contents of over 20,000 international news sources, suggesting a modern mythology based on global media coverage.
Universe portrays all information as being interconnected. Any word, quote, person, photo, topic or story can become the “center of the universe”, causing all other items to rearrange themselves in relation to the selected item. This treatment of information is reminiscent of the way we, as humans, experience reality — each of us from our own individual perspective. Universe gives data this same privilege.”
-Jonathan Harris.
WORLD BUILDERS- JONATHAN HARRIS:
“The digital world, like the physical world, belongs to all of us, and not only to the companies who currently dominate it.
The digital world is not some magic land that evolves alone. The digital world is composed of the things we build there. Just as architects define the built landscape of a country, digital architects define the built landscape of the web.
Unlike the physical world, the digital world can support a boundless set of worlds within worlds—worlds for every human need. Many human needs are already answered online (though the elegance of the answers can always be improved), but many others are still without good online answers.
Human needs that have to do with authenticity, self-reflection, depth of communication, and real relationship-building are especially poorly answered online (at least currently). Maybe these needs cannot be answered online and require physical contact in all cases, but my sense is that they can, if only we design the right worlds to encourage and support them. Some such worlds probably exist already (indeed, the web is so vast that one can find examples of just about anything), but even if they do exist, they have not become widespread, and the predominate thrust of today’s web is not around satisfying these needs.
Today’s web feels more like one giant cocktail party, full of chatter, gossip, and he said, she said.
It is often called the social web, but “garrulous web” might be more appropriate. Yes, there is more social communication now than at any other time in the history of the world, but much of that communication is chatter. There is nothing wrong with chatter (and beauty often hides in chatter), but there needs to be a place for deeper, longer-lasting communication too.
You could argue that people will do what people will do, and that trying to change people’s behavior is arrogant and foolish. There is truth to that, but people’s behavior is largely influenced by the context in which they live. People who live near a ski slope are more likely to ski, as people who live in a city are more likely to hang out at bars. When we design spaces (real or virtual), we need to take responsibility for the types of behavior those spaces are likely to encourage.
We cherish our capitols, cathedrals, museums, monuments, and parks, but who will build structures of this stature in the digital world?
Ancient and beloved fields like journalism, publishing, and music are drowning in this tsunami of change. Students of journalism are wondering whether they should study computer science to stay afloat. But they should have patience. It is the job of journalists to do great journalism, and not to build platforms to disseminate that journalism. They should be able to trust those who build platforms to build them great platforms. But this has not happened yet—the digital world needs great builders.
Speaking especially to young students of computer science, art, architecture, and design—I would encourage you, as you imagine what you want to become, to consider becoming digital world builders.
Help construct our future digital world. Build honestly, naturally, authentically, beautifully, not motivated by page views or ad revenue but by what the digital world should be, in its purest, noblest sense. Articulate digital spaces that nurture the soul and the spirit.
Don’t leave it to today’s companies to solve these problems, as they will only perpetuate the same habits they have already adopted. There needs to be a new vision for the future of the web, one that is sensitive both to the human individual and the human collective, just like real life.
Toward the end of his life, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright often said that with 20 more years he could rebuild America, and give it an architecture that was organic, natural, and truly its own. Others called him arrogant for making these claims, but he would respond that a great nation should expect its great architects to build it great buildings.
The same is true for the digital world. The rest of the human race—the struggling journalists, the embattled authors of books, the makers of music, the normal folks who have been robbed of their individuality by today’s web—should expect its digital world builders to build them beautiful, honest, nourishing worlds.”
I love Jonathan Harris.
“I Want You To Want Me is an interactive installation about online dating, commissioned by and installed at New York’s MoMA on Valentine’s Day 2008, as part of their Design and the Elastic Mind show.”
Feet first “Tom Robinson, an English photographer, takes photos of his and his girlfriend’s feet as they travel the world (from Mexican beaches to Chilean volcanos to New Zealand’s thermal pools). Don’t his photos make you want to take your feet somewhere fabulous?”
Keira Knightley (via weneverstopwaitingforsomething)
Yesterday over lunch with @matthewdclay, Jenn and her friend, we talked about our three imperatives in relationships and attraction. Mine were: he has to be intelligent, hungry (for more, for better, for something less comfortable…) and he can’t feel entitled (he has to retain a wide-eyed, “I can’t believe this is happening” perspective that comes from being self-made rather than entitled).
I believe in science and art, and the promise and potential of design to bring them together to change the world.
In our intellectual institutions, and our society in general, science and art live mostly separate lives- developing separate worldviews, distinct methods, specialist language, and segregated communities of thought and practice.
But the more I work as a designer- a practice that demands the constant negotiation of the boundaries and intersections of these two worlds, where every creative relies on a scientific base- the more deeply committed I am to the foundation of science.
The historic scientific project has built a common language of human knowledge that allows any scientist working anywhere to challenge and revise and add to our shared resource. It was open source before that idea was named. And it is on this human foundation of knowledge that we solve the challenges we face as a global society.
It is science that has opened up the electromagnetic spectrum so that we can explore the universe in all its complexity. It is science that has allowed us the wonders of communication so that you can read my words, and we can connect across borders and cultures and time zones. And that has built the tools to overcome diseases like smallpox and SARS, and soon polio and others. And that has also built the pathway out of the dark night of ignorance, mythology, and superstition, allowing us to replace imaginary stories with hard-won empirical knowledge.
But my commitment to scientific knowledge in no way diminishes my belief in the mystery and power of the arts.
It is art that sings to us and opens our hearts to one another. It is art that gives meaning to things that would otherwise go unnoticed. And that connects us to our past. And that laughs at our hubris and limitations, while speaking to us of the darkness we cannot say out loud.
In the end, it is art that allows us to understand, express, and share science. While science works to order the matter of the world, art orders the meaning of the world.
In my practice of design these two worlds of meaning and matter, of aesthetics and scientific knowledge, of quality and quantity, of mystery and certainty, of intuition and expertise, come together to create new possibilities for shaping our world.
As a designer, everything I do draws on the arts and the aesthetic dimensions of cultural life, and also rests on the foundation of the scientific project. Everything I do summons up the mystery of beauty and the history of form, but demands the technical base of knowledge for its success. Nothing we make can succeed that does not draw on our technical expertise and the science of material and energy and process. Nothing we make is relevant if it doesn’t “work”. But nothing we make is relevant if it is not cultural, and beautiful in some dimension.
Buckminster Fuller once wrote, “When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty, but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”
Without the dimension that we call art- color and texture, form and material, juxtaposition and composition, humor and metaphor- the full potential is somehow unrealized. No matter how efficient or effective, no matter how “smart,” without language of art, the things we make are limited in meaning and potential. It is art that connects to our life, to human needs and emotions- and that allows us to build a bridge to new possibilities.
At no time in human history has the potential for designing solutions that contribute to the benefit of humankind been greater than it is today. Because of the glowing knowledge in both science and the arts, our possibilities will be even greater tomorrow.
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