I’ve spent much of my life in and in love with museums. When I was 10 years old, there was no mention of art in my home. But then my mother began driving me from the suburbs to the Art Institute of Chicago. There, she looked at art on her own for hours, leaving me […]
Design
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Is This the Future? What Dinner With a Disney MagicBand Is Like
Their MagicBands, tech-studded wristbands available to every visitor to the Magic Kingdom, feature a long-range radio that can transmit more than 40 feet in every direction. The hostess, on her modified iPhone, received a signal when the family was just a few paces away. Tanner family inbound! The kitchen also queued up: Two French onion soups, two roast beef sandwiches! When they sat down, a radio receiver in the table picked up the signals from their MagicBands and triangulated their location using another receiver in the ceiling. The server—as in waitperson, not computer array—knew what they ordered before they even approached the restaurant and knew where they were sitting.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Paul Rand Made Companies Care About Design—And Influenced Steve Jobs
In the ’80s, the power of IBM’s visual communications program inspired Steve Jobs, a longtime admirer of Rand’s work, to hire Rand as a designer for NeXT, his educational computer company. “Rand was the first and only designer Jobs looked to,” Albrecht says.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
What It Means for an Object to Be ‘Context Free’
In a recent piece for Vice, Jules Suzdaltsev discussed the ubiquity of white plastic chairs and what that ubiquity means for world culture amidst rapid globalization. Below is a brief excerpt about from the piece: But unlike similar global objects like lighters, televisions, paper clips, cigarettes, transistor radios, and AK-47s, these chairs are “context free.” MIT’s Director of Civic Media […]