“The more living patterns there are in a place—a room, a building, or a town—the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name. “This quality in buildings and in towns cannot be made, but only generated, indirectly, [...]
Posts by Sean Flannagan
Transit Map Matters
16 Jun 2010
Jake Berman makes better transit maps. I found this beautiful late-night subway service map of his on the New York City Subway Wikipedia article. It reminded me of the famous 1972 Massimo Vignelli map which hangs in my kitchen, but turns out it’s primarily influenced by the relatively obscure 1966 system map. That map is [...]
The Sun Rises in the East
24 Apr 2010
Etsy’s Treasury is something I’ve long been fascinated by. It’s an ever-changing, member-curated shopping gallery with some unique constraints. Treasury lists only live for 48 hours. Each list has a limit of 42 comments. You can only create a list if the total number of lists falls below 333 (shorthand for
Reading List
16 Feb 2010
Books follow me around and accumulate in stacks: by my desks, bed, coffee table, couch. If I could have the current active lot organized into a single stack based on pages viewed, notes taken and ideas generated, it would look like this: 1. A few months ago I started picking up books on architecture, urban [...]
The Providence Curse
14 Dec 2009
The European Street Team, an Etsy Team, asked for a photo tour of a favorite place. You’ll never guess which place I chose.
Consciousness, Pleasure and Website Addiction
11 Dec 2009
I was first alerted to the work of Irving Biederman, professor of neuroscience at USC, via this WSJ article on the nature of addictive websites. I’ve been a fan since. His experiments are fascinating, probing everything from the neural basis of shape recognition—with members of remote African tribes with no exposure to uniform, manufactured objects [...]
Opening Search
29 Sep 2009
A few weeks ago we had a “handmade code” hack day at Etsy, wherein many interesting features were born, large and small. One of the small hacks I crossed off on my to-do list that day because it didn’t exist yet was this Etsy search add-on for Firefox, for searching Etsy from within your web [...]
Playing Favorites
04 Aug 2009
There are many strategies people use to make discoveries on Etsy. This is my favorite. Find a shop you like? Check out the shop owner’s favorites. Find an item in their favorites that you like? Check out that shop owner’s favorites. Repeat until you realize three hours have gone by and you have 26 browser [...]
