"The New Aesthetic is an art movement obsessed with the otherness of computer vision and information processing. But Ian Bogost asks: why stop at the unfathomability of the computer's experience when there are airports, sandstone, koalas, climate, toaster pastries, kudzu, the International 505 racing dinghy, and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner to contemplate?"

[Nice selection of quotes chosen and comment by @litherland below]

Yes.

Rather than wondering if alien beings exist in the cosmos, let's assume that they are all around us, everywhere, at all scales.

Why should a new aesthetic [be] interested only in the relationship between humans and computers, when so many other relationships exist just as much? Why stop with the computer, like Marinetti foolishly did with the race car?

Being withdraws from access. There is always something left in reserve, in a thing.

Cf. Derrida, e.g., “L'annihilation des restes, les cendres peuvent parfois en témoigner, rappelle un pacte et fait acte de mémoire.”

"In Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing, Ian Bogost develops an object-oriented ontology that puts things at the center of being; a philosophy in which nothing exists any more or less than anything else; in which humans are elements, but not the sole or even primary elements, of philosophical interest. And unlike experimental phenomenology or the philosophy of technology, Bogost's alien phenomenology takes for granted that all beings interact with, perceive, and experience one another. This experience, however, withdraws from human comprehension and only becomes accessible through a speculative philosophy based on metaphor."

[See also; http://www.amazon.com/Alien-Phenomenology-What-Thing-Posthumanities/dp/0816678987 ]

"There are many ways in which interactions with designers can benefit artisans. Designers can improve the quality of objects being made, and sometimes reduce the use of raw materials. They can be effective communicators to consumers back home, and explain intangible qualities of an object such as its historical context. …

Borges further counsels that “the potential dangers of a badly carried out intervention are many, and their effects can be damaging. The older a tradition is, and the more “away from civilization” the community it belongs to, the greater the dangers and the greater the necessary care”.

The basis for these north-south interactions, for Borges, must be respect – “respect for the work rhythm of the artisan, respect for the signs that have resisted over the years, respect for the whole system of symbols that culminates in an object”."

"Original and world-changing design was long considered the product of solitary geniuses, masters and heroes, but recent research has argued that cultural innovation is often the result of everyday actions by ordinary people. This course critically and creatively examines the dynamic and collaborative networks that characterise professional and amateur design today, and prepares students to face the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead."

[Course aims, course content, course assignments (4 of them) follow, all worth reading]

To get started, students are required to complete the following task (adapted from The Exercise Book) for the first tutorial:

1) Go for a walk with a notebook and pay close attention to what’s going on around you.

2) Compose one written page with three sections. Start the first section with “I see…”, the second section with “I remember…” and the third section with “I imagine…”."

"In any case, what seems more provocative here, on the level of design, would be to appropriate this protective stance and reuse it in the design of future objects, but emphasizing the other end: to allow for the scanning of any object designed or manufactured, but to to insert, in the form of watermarks, small glitches that would only become visible upon reprinting.

We might call these object cancers: bulbous, oddly textured, and other dramatically misshapen errors that only appear in 3D-reprinted objects. Chairs with tumors, mutant silverware, misbegotten watches—as if the offspring of industrial reproducibility is a molten world of Dalí-like surrealism.

Put another way, the inadvertent side-effect of the attempted corporate control over objects would be an artistic potlatch of object errors: object cancers deliberately reprinted, shared, and collected for their monstrous and unexpected originality."

“‘This trade’, he said, ‘was not the trade as you Europeans know it. Not the business of buying and selling for profit! Our people’s trade was always symmetrical.’

Aboriginals, in general, had the idea that all ‘goods’ were potentially malign and would work against their possessors unless they were forever in motion. The ‘goods’ did not have to be edible, or useful. People liked nothing better than to barter useless things - or things they could supply for themselves: feathers, sacred objects, belts of human hair.

‘Trade goods’, he continued, should be seen rather as the bargining counters of a gigantic game, in which the whole continent was the gaming board and all its inhabitants players. ‘Goods’ were tokens of intent: to trade again, meet again, fix frontiers, intermarry, sing, dance, share resources and share ideas.”

With Bruce Chatwins quote as a starting point, a group of friends got together to explore storytelling through the trading of objects…"

"The Object Ethnography Project aims to show how stories influence the value, meaning and circulation of objects. It is a creative laboratory where participants–like you– determine the outcome of the cultural experiment.

The team behind the Project will look at the objects and stories accumulated through the project for trends, patterns and insights about the types of objects people donate, the kinds of stories they tell about them, and how those stories influence the object’s value and subsequent exchange. The results of these studies will be presented at a conference at New York University in March 2012."

"So the N9 is not so much a product as a pointer. It will soon be impossible, or perhaps pointless anyway, to buy. Meego is a dead man walking and the hardware will live on in a new cloned and cared-for body, as the Lumia…

The Citröen DS was ultimately destined to befall the fate of mummification as a 'design icon' rather than a major commercial success. Numerous beautifully-maintained examples are still just about running, maintained by obsessives who spend their Sunday mornings patching up fuel sumps, buffing white leather interiors and browsing eBay for increasingly rare spare parts.

Perhaps as with the DS 19, the N9 will also end up maintained by an army of enthusiasts, a lost classic filed away in some museum of digital artefacts, an open-source movement supporting and extending Meego as a kind of avant-garde alt.OS, augmented by 3D-printed replacement physical parts or modded components, as with Leicas and Polaroids."

"I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new."

"Do you have an object whose story you would like to share? An heirloom, an artwork, a toothbrush, a stone? An object which has inspired you, dominated you, educated you, exalted or degraded you? For our second exhibition of the Migration year, we invite you to lend us your object and include with it everything you know about its migratory story.

These objects will be our starting point for a three-month exploration of the Migration of Objects. We will view them as independent beings with stories of their own, stories that began before the object’s encounter with you and that will likely continue long after you part. Your story of the object may start with you but may necessarily migrate into the economic, the industrial, the political, the historical, the geologic, the environmental and so on.

Anyone can play. Here’s how it works:…"

"[This is the intro/explanation/something to a new site I’m working on about my relationship with the objects around me.]"

"What to do? The Actor Network Theorist might smirk and say that we should be putting the HDTVs and trainers in jail, rather than the poor human actors who sought to liberate them. Maybe the mortgage-backed CDOs should themselves be appearing before Congress, explaining what they were up to in the years leading up to 2007. The bankers were merely their servants. Or else we need to rediscover the virtues of a boring, inanimate economy, as the basis for an animated social and cultural world, as Marx intuited. The tedium of the old socialist block - laughable cars, unchanging fashions, steady incomes, pitiful growth - was always at the heart of its apparent legitimacy crisis. But it strikes me that it's precisely this tedium that we now need more of, to escape the tyranny of financial and consumer objects."

"A twitter feed for the book 21st Century Dodos. Follow this account on Flipboard for an array of articles, pics and comments about endangered inanimate objects."

"Inhabitat's Jill Fehrenbacher interviews MoMA design curator Paola Antonelli about her latest MoMA exhibit on the future of interaction design 'Talk To Me'"

"MiiU is a collection of all the objects, products, and places that make personal, family, and community resilience possible." [A John Robb production, I think.]

"This site uses objects to tell a history of the world. You’ll find 100 objects from the British Museum and hundreds more from museums and people across the UK."

"…2 devices each person will carry are one general purpose combination device, & one specialized device (per your major interests & style)…

At the same time the attraction of a totem object, or something to hold in your hands, particularly a gorgeous object, will not diminish. We may remain w/ one single object that we love, that does most of what we need okay, & that in some ways comes to represent us. Perhaps the highly evolved person carries one distinctive object—which will be buried w/ them when they die.

…I don't think we'll normally carry more than a couple of things at once, on an ordinary day. The # of devices will proliferate, but each will occupy a smaller & smaller niche. There will be a long tail distribution of devices.

50 yrs from now a very common ritual upon meeting of old friends will be the mutual exchange & cross examination of what lovely personal thing they have in their pocket or purse. You'll be able to tell a lot about a person by what they carry."

"It’s natural to assume, after tearing open a newly-bought object’s packaging, that we’re the first ones to touch it. <br />
<br />
The assumption is wrong, of course, and a photography project by Lorena Turner is asking us to reconsider the notion by unearthing these ignored histories. With the finesse of a CSI agent, Turner dusts objects—all packaged in China and sold at US stores—before photographing them. The resulting fingerprints, of which there are many, act as evidence of the manufacturing cycle often invisible to us. <br />
<br />
“This process allowed for the evidence of another’s touch, quite possibly the person involved in constructing and packaging the item, to be revealed,” the photographer wrote. <br />
<br />
She added that the project, tersely titled Made in China, “highlights the human factor and invisible history in each object’s production”."

"New branches of design practice have emerged in the past decades that combine design’s old-fashioned preoccupations—with form, function, and meaning—with a focus on the exchange of information and even emotion. Communication design deals with the delivery of messages, encompassing graphic design, wayfinding, and communicative objects of all kinds, from printed materials to three-dimensional and digital projects. Interface and interaction design delineate the behavior of products and systems as well as the experiences that people will have with them. Information and visualization design deal with the maps, diagrams, and tools that filter and make sense of information. In critical design, conceptual scenarios are built around hypothetical objects to comment on the social, political, and cultural consequences of new technologies and behaviors."

"NuPenny exists as a traveling art installation under the guise of an inaccessible toy store. On the surface, & viewed as a retail establishment or typical sales model, NP seems fundamentally flawed in connecting w/ those who desire to take its products home. True enough. But on another level the storeʼs reason for being is as a realm of carefully manufactured objects of desire that have not (or perhaps cannot) find either their place or time in the world. The first appearance of this toy store installation was in Waterville, Maine in January of 2010. Four months later & w/out notice NP closed in Waterville & moved to another town."<br />
<br />
"Conceptually each toy is my interpretation of a song lyric, poem or literary work that has affected me. By using the NP/Teletype code card that is available on this site you can easily (though perhaps not quickly) read the ʻtextʼ on each toy, box & placard. More toys will occur, & arrive in the store over time, as I have the means to make them."

"Science begins with a subject and an object.<br />
Religion begins with a creator and the created.<br />
The illusion is the same.<br />
There is dogma in any.thing that claims to contain every.thing.<br />
<br />
God is a verb<br />
not some omnipotent ruler looking down on all of this.<br />
And if there was a big bang, <br />
you and I aren’t something at the end of the process;<br />
You and I are the big bang …<br />
The original force of the universe.<br />
We are the creator and the created<br />
Inseparable from the creating.<br />
<br />
-x—x-x—-x-x-x-x-x—x-x—x—x-<br />
<br />
Yet the conflict between science and religion drags on … while …<br />
on the streets, the Beatles are still more popular than Jesus Christ, <br />
quantum physics reads like a zen riddle,<br />
and techno teenagers rely on rhythm and rhyme, <br />
- not reason - <br />
to make sense of living at the speed of light."

"classical liberal arts are arts of the word, products of the book, letter, lecture…Renaissance added plastic arts of painting & sculpture, & modernity those of laboratory…new liberal arts are overwhelmingly arts of the DOCUMENT, & the photograph is the document par excellence.<br />
<br />
Like exact sciences, photographic arts are industrial, blurring line btwn knowledge & technology…Like painting & sculpture, they are visual, aesthetic, based in both intuition & craft. Like writing, photography is both an action & an object: writing makes writing & photography makes photography. & like writing, photographic images have their own version of the trivium—a logic, grammar & rhetoric. <br />
We don't only SEE pictures; we LEARN how they're structured & how they become meaningful…<br />
<br />
Photography is science of the interrelation & specificity of all of these forms, as well as their reproduction, recontextualization, & redefinition…"

A boundary object is a concept in sociology to describe information used in different ways by different communities. They are plastic, interpreted differently across communities but with enough immutable content to maintain integrity. The concept was introduced by Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer in a 1989 publication:[1]<br />
<br />
“ Boundary objects are objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. They may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable means of translation. The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds."

"Which brings me to consider a question someone asked me after a lecture I gave last year: Is it preferable to design adaptive devices that are elegantly designed to be camouflaged (think hearing-aid jewelry), or beautiful & conspicuous, like the legs above? &, with Wallace in mind, should we ethically aim more design research toward near-future applications, rather than wildly speculative gear that may never see the light of day?<br />
<br />
Well—yes. To quote Maile Meloy: Both ways is the only way I want it.<br />
<br />
I think our energy can go in all these directions, provided we’re reflective enough. I’ve already affirmed the inherent value in playful experimentation. But the bigger challenge is to make extensive machinery that is truly extensive, truly outward in its posture. I think design matters crucially to these questions, because design for disability has the opportunity to critique the weakness of all personal technologies: its tendency to hermetically seal its user from engaging…"

"How can technologies demonstrate an outward posture? I mean, how might they extend their forms and also their functions, beyond a single user? Couldn’t they both resolve & reveal, pose more questions than answers?…"<br />
<br />
"A built environment, a city that accommodates—& indeed demonstrates—physical or cognitive interdependence doesn’t only call for limbs & ramps. We need wholly-spectacular impracticalities, & artistic research & collaboration, & public interactive art, & we need the most durable accessibility equipment we can design."<br />
<br />
"Moreover, we might take the long view in order to get the short view more clearly in focus. This has long been said of science fiction in literature—that our ideas about the future are really an index of our attitudes in the present. I’m interested in futurism in prosthetics as an inquiry & spectacle, & I also want to make projects that help us harness our technologies for a more inclusive world."

"At IDEO…international interdisciplinary team…included engineers, designers, and even a clinical psychologist."<br />
<br />
"tossed around the idea of inviting weekly speakers to make meetings productive. Fukasawa…thought it would be more useful if team members spoke about their own philosophies & how their cultures influenced them. They all agreed on one condition: that Fukasawa go first."<br />
<br />
"…result was a presentation on hari…Eastern philosophy, distilled down into design language…"usually translated as ‘tension,' but that’s not correct…It’s very hard to explain.” [Explains.]"<br />
<br />
"“That’s why it was important for him to go back to Japan,” Brown says. “One of the things that released him was the ability to work and tell the story of his work in his own language. Naoto has gone from somebody who crafts objects to somebody who crafts relationships with objects.”"<br />
<br />
“I think objects or things are shifting toward the surrounding walls for integration or otherwise into our body for integration,”

At one point during City Tracking, I commented that I still felt a connection to London during my time in San Francisco through the bike-key on my keyring (above)…<br />
<br />
The bike-key has no functionality without the service: it’s just an RFID tag inside a piece of plastic. The service itself is unavoidably located in London. The computer systems that run it do not have to be, but the bikes themselves – the critical hardware within the service – cannot be located anywhere else.<br />
The city and the service are tied together.<br />
And so, for me, that keyfob that I pass through my fingers when I pick my keys up, or fidget with them in my pocket, is not just a service avatar; it’s an avatar for a city…<br />
<br />
On my keyring, everywhere I go, I carry a piece of London."

"Mixi Real Check is potentially more interesting: this function allows users not only to share websites with friends but any object in the real world that has an NFC tag attached to it. Tapping or waving the phone near NFC stickers found on i.e. books or posters is enough to share the information on Mixi, in real-time. This could be anything from further information on the products to details on promotion campaigns a brand wants to run on Mixi.<br />
<br />
Bringing social functionalities to the real world is a great idea for a social network, but there are two downsides at this point: Mixi users interested in these new functions must own a Nexus S (the only Android device with the necessary hardware for NFC so far) and have Taglet (a special NFC app for Android) installed. The Nexus S isn’t even officially available in Japan currently, which means almost all Mixi users still must wait for the future."

"Everyone is mesmerized by Apple’s ability to revolutionize the way we think about IT products. With the iPhone, for example, Apple has morphed a mere communication device into a platform that includes a music player, a video recorder, a note transcriber, and the capacity to handle thousands of other apps that each bring the phone tantalizingly close to a personal computer.

But Apple is doing something far more radical to us as a nation, something that might even outlive the innovative firm itself: it is singlehandedly transforming us into a society that will one day feel comfortable having emotional relationships with machines."

"past year is culmination of decade-long effort to change museum's character, to turn it "interactive," place where people come to see, but also be seen; to not just look at art but participate in it. MoMA has made its mission to transform "into a social space from an treasure trove," according to the director…

But a resulting influx of people through the doors has lead influential art worlders like Robert Storr to lament rise of "Death Star Museums." These are places where "uninterrupted contemplation" is impossible. More people may be coming to contemp art museums, Mr. Storr wrote…, but "the mechanisms in play are horridly like those of a sci-fi monster that ingests people in great gulps."

"Museums of modern art are a kind of inherently unstable space," Mr. Lowry said. "If you're going to follow flow of contemp art, you have to constantly tweak & adjust. You can't lock it down & say this is what it should be for the next 10 years. Artists are moving much faster than that.""

"the materiality of objects comes with a high price tag: i don’t care if your journal is free there, i will not be able to read it here. that is great for you, but your conversation will remain local, or regional, or limited to the global few who can afford you—it’s your loss. the nostalgia for objects ignores their exclusive nature. the digital does not have such limitations. people who can afford to, can keep lamenting the waning of objects. the rest of us will download as much information as we can."

"In “Design Fiction Studio,” we will focus on experimental ways to combine science fiction story telling w/ new forms of media production. The students will be asked to write a short science-fiction story & expected to illustrate it in an experimental book. We will explore ways to combine alternative materials–such as very basic electronic elements, conductive inks, phase-&color-changing materials– w/ new kinds of fabrication & production techniques to learn both about materials & way they can be used in different kinds of fictional products.

"The application of a heuristic gizmo is an act of pattern recognition - the intuition that some set of undifferentiated circumstances is isomorphic to some other set that was previously encountered, even if the context was wildly different. ... It has been said that things hardly "exist" before the fine artist has made use of them, they are simply part of the unclassified background material against which we pass our lives. The application of gizmo metaheuristics requires a certain kind of approach to interdisciplinary work and expertise: try it first, then read the manual. Like a western tourist using chopsticks, there is an attitude of being cheerfully out of one's depth, but willing to learn, and eager to add this new technique to the repertoire and impress the folks back home."

"A fun and social way to attach digital content to real world objects."

"We’re in the pre- era of publishing and media. Some consider it the era of pre- digital dominance or pre- death of printed matter. Others hear the talk of change, clutch their hardcovers and shrug it off as a bunch of hype: the pre- not worth worrying about it era. Whatever we consider this pre- era to be, it’s undeniably post- many things that defined publishing until about ten years ago. It’s post- having to bend to big distributors. It’s post- ignoring the screen as a viable reading space. And we’re rapidly closing in on post- printing mass-market throwaway books (they’ll work great digitally)."

"As I’ve said before, we break stuff before we know what replaces it, and we invent things before we know what they are for. Maybe we’re now living in the future tense."

"We live today in a world of ever more stuff - what sometimes seems a deluge of goods and shopping. We tend to assume that this has two results: that we are more superficial and more materialistic, our relationship to things coming at the expense of our relationships to people. We make such assumptions, we speak in cliches, but we have rarely tried to put these assumptions to the test. By the time you finish this book you will discover that, in many ways, the opposite is true; that possessions often remain profound and usually the closer our relationships are with objects, the closer our relationships are with people."

"but there is more. granting the papers months and years to mature, to form geological layers of meditation, also means escaping the oppressive mechanisms of the productive system, the compulsive logic of efficiency at all costs. it means affording oneself the subversive luxury of taking all the required time to develop a good project. it means extending the range of research in order to get an overall picture, acting against the increasing hyper-specialization that restrains creative expression nowadays."

"Delivered in Beta: an immediated autodocumentary

"Matt Jones gave a talk called “people are walking architecture“...he introduced the notion of “Mujicomp”, a portmanteau word made of “Muji” (the japanese retail company which sells a wide variety of household and consumer goods) and “Computing”. What does it mean?

"Say no to meaningless bad quality. Buy things from second hand or buy things that last. Imagine ownership as something that passes from one person to other. Ask all brands to launch their own vintage shops.

"Recent Departures is a collection of artifacts from the Project G-581 disaster. The objects on display are pieces to a puzzle. Along with the objects are expert’s opinions and observations of where the pieces fit. " [see also: http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/8/view/8875/come-up-to-my-room-2010.html AND http://comeuptomyroom.com/]

"Telling a history of our world with objects"

"This project explores how objects die. Just as the 20th century was transformed by the advent of new forms of media–the typewriter, gramophone, & film, for example–the arrival of the 21st century has brought the phasing out of many public & private objects that only recently seemed essential to “modern life.” What is the modern, then, without film projectors, typewriters, & turntables? How has the modern changed as trolley cars disappeared & hot air balloons were converted into high-risk sport rather than the demonstration of national pride in science & a crucial tactical mechanism of wartime? But what will our 21st century entail w/out mixmasters, VCRs, or petrol-driven automobiles? Does the “modern” in fact program the death of objects? What is the significance of death for things that live only through such a paradoxical program of planned obsolescence? ..."

"Tim Brown says the design profession is preoccupied with creating nifty, fashionable objects -- even as pressing questions like clean water access show it has a bigger role to play. He calls for a shift to local, collaborative, participatory "design thinking.""

"After studying 1.2 million postings on “Motor Talk”, ­Germany’s ­largest motoring web forum, Rüdiger Hossiep, a psychologist at the ­University of Ruhr in Bochum, concluded this summer that Saab drivers have the highest levels of “psychological involvement” with their cars: more than 10 times the passion of the average Volkswagen driver."

"I did a big reset one year ago moving from New York to New Zealand, and was surprised by the euphoria of liberation from so much stuff I thought I loved. Below are a few tools and resources that were awesome for virtualizing, storing data and getting rid of my stuff – perhaps they may help when it’s your turn."

[more on Sterling's talk here: http://www.zylstra.org/blog/archives/2009/07/reboot_11_the_n.html ]

[transcript of the talk here: http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/02/transcript-of-reboot-11-speech-by-bruce-sterling-25-6-2009/ ]

"A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!"

"This bottle is going to appear in your mouth in two minutes. If you pull the bottle out of your mouth, it will reappear in your mouth in five seconds. If you attempt to prevent the bottle from reappearing in your mouth by filling your mouth with another object, you could choke or burst your cheek when the bottle returns to your mouth and displaces the object. In addition, every time you remove the bottle from your mouth, it will grow in size by one tenth of one percent. Unless you sell the bottle to another person and money changes hands, the bottle will remain in your mouth until you die. When you die, it will go back to where you found it. You must reveal this paragraph verbatim to anyone you attempt to sell the bottle to."

"Reboot in power. Gen Xers running things. Cultural sentiment: “Dark euphoria.” Things are falling apart, everything is possible, but you never realized you would have to dread it so much...a) Top end: Gothic high-tech...b) low-end: Favela chic...practical advice on bright green geek environmentalism...“Stop acting dead.” You’ve been trained that way; it’s the default for your generation...How do you know...test: Would your dead great grandfather do a better job of what you’re intending to do...Think of objects in terms of hours of time & volumes of space. It’s a good design approach...possessions are really embodied social relationships: made, designed, sold by people...Relationships that happen to have material form...monarch among objects are everyday objects...you’re eager to tell someone about its beauty or meaning. Tools: Don’t make do with broken stuff. You’re not experimenting with it if you’re not publishing the results in a falsifiable form."

[video: http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2009/07/video-from-reboot-11/ AND http://video.reboot.dk/video/486788/bruce-sterling-reboot-11 AND interview: http://video.reboot.dk/video/485250/bruce-sterling ]

[transcript: http://wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/02/transcript-of-reboot-11-speech-by-bruce-sterling-25-6-2009/ ]

"Now let me explain how you can go about doing this, and it really is a different material way of life than any in the twentieth century. It’s a geek-friendly approach to consumption.…

What you need to do is re-assess the objects in your space and time. And I’m going to explain to you how to do this. 00:32:30-6

The king of objects, the monarch among objects are not fancy objects. They’re not high-tech objects, they’re not organic objects, they’re not biological objects, they’re everyday objects. Things that you’re with every day…

Common everyday objects. You need to have the best possible common everyday objects. 00:33:11-4…

Get rid of it. Get rid of it, if you don’t use it! If you haven’t touched it in a year, get rid of it immediately. Sell it, buy real things you really use. 00:35:08-7

Now, you’re going to have a lot fewer things, but the actual quality of your life will skyrocket!…

I’m going to explain to you how you do this…

First you need to make lists. Hackers love lists. A chart. You can make a flowchart. Flowchart it if it makes you any happier.

Four variety of items: Beautiful things; emotionally important things; tools, devices and appliances that efficiently perform some useful function; and category four, everything else…

It’s not that beautiful? It’s not beautiful! Gotta go!…

And everything else. Category four, everything else. Virtualize it, store the data, get rid of it…

It’s not going to hurt you to lose all these things. You don’t need them. After you go through this particular discipline, you will look different, you will act differently. You will become much more what you already are."

"Crossing into a new practice idiom, especially if it offers the chance to feel the process of learning, is a crucial path toward undisciplinarity. The chance to become part of a practice — with all of its history, ideology, languages, norms and values, personalities, conferences — is an invigorating process. Embodying multiple practices simultaneously is the scaffolding of creativity and innovating, in my mind. It is what allows one to think beyond the confines of strict disciplinary approaches to creating new forms of culture — whether objects, ideas or ways of seeing the world." ... "Objects, I have learned, are expressive bits of culture. They make meaning, help us understand and make sense of the world. They are knowledge-making, epistemological functionaries. They frame conversations and are also expressions of possibility and aspiration."

"Nicolas Bourriaud previews his hypothesis that postmodernism is over and that a new type of modern - the altermodern - is emerging."

"The "internet of things" is a concept that describes a wireless network between objects. In a way, it parallels the current network of addressable web pages (aka the "world wide web"), except "the internet of things" would include addressable inanimate objects that could be anything from your home's refrigerator to the shoes on your feet. Although this world of web-connected things has been much discussed for years, we've seen little movement pushing the concept forward. At least, until now."

"What does the platform look like that allows digital architects to layer interaction models from massively multiplayer gaming and wii-like gestural performance onto urban-scale environments? We are building software, initially for an amusement park in Dubai, that integrates the datastreams from thousands of modular sensor nodes into a high-resolution realtime spatial model of people and objects."

"Oddly obsessed with all things robot, married couple Nicholas and Angela from Kansas City, Missouri, decided on a whim one day to do nothing other than to build one themselves.

"...Neo-nomads embody spaces remotely. Via the Internet they customize their hotel room in advance, bringing in the complementary piece of home, the last piece of the “home” puzzle, with them, their luggage, and transitional objects."

"INSTRUCTIONS: Pick a local public object that you enjoy and leave a note on it describing your feelings in great detail."

"As the internet sensibility hits the stuff in our homes, our product world is undergoing a massive transformation. But once there, what will we build?" see slides and notes at: http://schulzeandwebb.com/2007/plastic/

"Now, the idea that design can play a productive role in managing complexity is hardly new, but I do see a lot of potential in designing and using objects (things) to engage publics around particular issues, or matters of concern."

"Presentation at the conference »Innovationsforum Interaktionsdesign« in Potsdam, Germany. The talk was held on 31. March 2007."

"outdoor playful learning experience. Pervasive technologies are used to digitally augment a woodland in a contextually relevant way, enhancing the ‘usual’ physical experience available to children exploring the outdoor world."

Discover more about worlds of art, history & architecture...Use mobile phones, provided to your whole class, to collect & find out more...Capture memories & create online galleries of your visit...Back at school, your class can see their galleries online,

"Basically Matteo has been roaming the streets of Italy looking for elderly people driving vintage cars. He then asks them if they’ve had the car for many years, and if they took a picture of them posing next to the vehicle when they purchased it."

"compilation of essays, book traces history of veritable toy box of specialized architecture & objects that have molded landscape of children’s private lives...emboldened, coddled, toughened up & manipulated by adults"

"Professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, Richard Sennett, talks about his new book, The Craftsman...first in trilogy about how we relate to people, objects, & the world around us when we make stuff. Listen to the full interview here."

“Why Toys Shouldn’t Work “Like Magic”: Children’s Technology and the Values of Construction and Control “...describes the tension between “ease of use” and user empowerment” that is at stake in kids artifact design."

"dedicated to enriching the play and learning experiences of preschool children at home. We provide families with the products, tools, and experiences they need to support their children's journey toward becoming life-long learners and confident, independ

"We are consigned to communicating through design, but it’s an impoverished language that can only say one thing: “That’s cool.” Design ceases to serve our needs, and the superficial qualities of useful things end up cannibalizing their functional

"I suspect it's my unconscious telling me that I'm not equipped for the world we're going to be living in. My core skill is probably using PowerPoint to persuade people and businesses to do their advertising slightly differently. That's an increasingly ab

"We like things -- books, the plastic arts, schwag, otherwise cheap souvenirs that become valued artifacts -- because they afford mystery and the room for an object to adapt to the world around them and not the other way around."

"Hommage au Sol focuses around the foot and its relation to the ground. It includes accessories extending the body, transitory objects of perception, photos, videos and written documentation."

"I've been looking for examples which describe the love people often show technology. Reader Christopher Quinn submitted a lovely one, and no surprise, it concerns cars."

"I’ll come back to this question of object-oriented programming later, but it has become quite clear to me over the past year that you cannot reach any acceptable level in Processing if you do not teach object-oriented programming as a basis for most wo

"The most important word on the internet is not "Search"...[it] is "Share". Sharing is the driver. Sharing is the DNA. We use Social Objects to share ourselves with other people. We're primates. we like to groom each other. It's in our nature."

"fundamental change that information processing goes through when it becomes ubiquitous. One of the ways I've been discussing this transformation in the last couple of years is by talking about information as a material"

"If you have trouble with intimacies, cyberintimacies are useful because they are at the same time cybersolitudes."

"From renowned design and innovation firm IDEO comes a photographic primer for looking at the world through the eyes of an engineer. An insightful meditation on how ordinary objects and environments behave over time—from humble streetlights to tread-wor

"I wonder if the Bilbao Guggenheim is a work of architecture at all?" - JG Ballard