(via wildcat2030)
Majority report: looking through the digital hype
In this era of economic uncertainty, in contrast to the zeitgeist, technology has become a beacon of hope. It’s cool, synonymous with success and promises to enhance life. Like alchemy in the Renaissance, technology brands offer a potent combination of wonderment, distraction and optimism. Their CEOs are evangelistic figures; revered and admired. They promise a brighter future on a rainy day and we believe it because we want it to be true. They show us what is possible. Herein however, is the crux of the problem. Technology is tech-centric. There is the assumption that because something can be done, it will be popular, important and useful. However, ‘We are now able to…’ is not the same as ‘People now want to…’. Possibility is mistaken for demand.(via @BBHLabs & @inahil)
Everyone’s Mixtape’s celebrates the art of creating mixtapes. You can add to an existing mix, or start one of your own. Share with the world, your friends, or that girl from science class.
Everyone’s Mixtape is not about adding songs and hitting shuffle. It’s about the time you looked at a cassette’s length as a challenge. About the time you stayed up most of the night making sure all the tracks flowed from song to song. It’s about the time your heart skipped a beat when the boy from science class handed you your first mixtape.
It’s more than a playlist.
Like it like that. (via Bul Boes)
Marissa Mayer addressing Google designers, as quoted in “In The Plex” by Steven Levy (via buzz)
(via benkraal, Dan W)
(via slavin)
(via wildcat2030)
Sometimes simply being able to see something allows us to wonder at it. Sometimes, as with Twitter, it’s about making the connective tissue — in their case messages and conversations — a living part of the service. Sometimes, as with Soundcloud, it’s the idea of having a visual or physical representation of a previously invisible concept.
This isn’t always new. The truth is that we’ve often had physical representations of sound — a piece of vinyl, a tape, a CD — and it’s only in the last few years, with the move to non-physical formats that we’ve lost the conception of what music looks like. But Soundcloud’s adoption of the waveform is perhaps the purest we’ve seen. It’s not just a package: you feel like this is what music would actually look like (in a way, it is).
Is the data exoskeleton a brutal industrial statement? Is it the equivalent to architecture’s structural impressionism, like Richard Rogers’ Lloyd’s building, or the Pompidou Centre? Or is it gentle reminder that the service is based on something real, like having a room with exposed brickwork that simply shows the craft that went into production?
