Letters Remain

Category: Uncategorized

  • The Urban Paradox

    With all the benefits cities bring to their inhabitants there are also numerous drawbacks; drawbacks that could, if not accounted for and studied, spell the end of cities as we currently know them. That’s the view of Geoffrey Westā€”president of the Santa Fe Instituteā€”as he discusses what needs to be done to safeguard the future…

  • The Places We Live

    The Places We Live exhibits awe-inspiring photos of slums in combination with stories from the people who inhabit them. Well worth enduring the Flashtastic interface for. In 2008, for the first time in history, more people will live in cities than in rural areas. One-third of these urban dwellersā€”more than 1 billion peopleā€“live in slums.…

  • The Trough of No Value

    The trough of no value is the concept that most objects go through fluctuations in their real-world worth: the trough is that seemingly never-ending time between used/junk and antique/collectible. Unfortunately the majority of my possessions fall into this category, including, it appears,Ā those vintage Wharfedale speakers that I was looking for this past weekend (apparently I…

  • Two Reasons to Travel (Rational and Emotional)

    These two stories have had a powerful effect on me: Why economist Alex Tabarrok (of Marginal Revolution) decided to travel to Machu Picchu spontaneously: At lunch with Bryan and Tyler last week the question arose as to what we would do differently if we were immortal. Ā [ā€¦] Ā I answered that I would travel more. Later…

  • Portfolios Instead of Diplomas

    Jeff Jarvis agrees with teacher Mark Pullen’s opinion that the education system should be modified to produce portfolios instead of, or in addition to, qualifications. Perhaps we need to separate youth from education. Education lasts forever. [ā€¦] What if we told students that, like Google engineers, they should take one day a week or one…

  • Designing for the Poorest 90%

    The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%. ā€”Dr. Paul Polak, International Development Enterprises Design For the Other 90% is a design exhibition aiming to…

  • Survey Art: The ‘Most Wanted’ Paintings

    After surveying thousands of people around the world and online, artists Komar and MelamidĀ produced a series of paintings portraying the respondents’ results. The project was dubbed People’s ChoiceĀ and consisted of the 30 most and least ‘wanted’ paintings for 14 countries and the web as a whole. Interestingly, the Dutch (and the Italians, to some extent)…

  • Working for Free as Promotion

    Could working for free be one of the best promotional tools available to an individual or SME? 37signals believes so, saying that their 37Better Project was “one of the best promotional things [they] ever did”. To illustrate their point they also take a look at R.BIRD’s excellent consumer packaging patterns, stating: If you’re looking to…

  • Timeline of a Car Crash

    In designing the Falcon XT, Ford engineers set out to discover the anatomy of a car crash and found that the accident is typically over before we’re even consciously aware of it happening. This is a reconstruction of a crash involving a stationary Ford Falcon XT sedan being struck in the driver’s door by another…

  • The Psychology of False Confessions and Punishment

    A recent instalment of Scientific American’s ’60-Second Psych’ discusses a series of articles on why innocent people confess to crimes they didn’t commit, and the problems this can pose. Scientists had 206 subjects witness a “staged” crime and then were asked to pick the perpetrator from a line up. They were later told that their…