I admit it: I collect hippie books. Optimistic books about making things published by very small presses in the 1970s. But I only recently realized that I can download PDFs of many of these books from the Library of Radiant Optimism for Let’s Remake the World, and I’m so glad I did. Because I’ve now [...]
Posts on Curiosities
The Library of Radiant Optimism for Applying Hippie Knowledge to Web Product Development
14 Jan 2011
The Timeless Way of Designing for Play
27 Dec 2010
“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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The Freebase Parallax View
28 Jun 2009
I listened to a Jon Udell podcast with David Huynh regarding Huynh’s Freebase Parallax project a while back but it’s something you really have to see in action to appreciate. I just saw it in action and now I appreciate. Freebase Parallax is an interface for browsing related sets of data on Freebase, a Wikipedia-like [...]
Sketchbook Secrets
15 Apr 2009
Julia Rothman regularly showcases fascinating book objects on Book By Its Cover but the sketchbook category is especially special. Look at what she’s talked people into sharing: Jim Stoten’s madly detailed secret drawings. Andrés Sandoval’s accordion fold-out sticker collages. Reka Kiraly’s thick bold lines. Calef Brown’s characters. Etsy seller Iris Schwarz’s delicate line drawings. The [...]
The Player
14 Apr 2009
Excerpt from the text I created by clicking around Whitney Trettien’s combinatorial thesis on seventeenth-century digital poetry: Harsdörffer used pieces of wood to make anagrams, designed letter-dice to teach children to build word combinations, and assigned numbers to letters to unlock a poem’s hidden values, earning him the title Der Spielende, or “the Player,” in [...]
