Emily Chang – Designer

Kevin Kelly on maximizing the opportunity of others…

In every aspect of your business (and personal life) try to allow others to build their success around your own success. If you run a hotel, what can you do to permit others–airlines, luggage retailers, tour guides–to be part of your network? Rather than viewing their dependency on your success as a form of parasitism, or worse, as a rip-off, understand this tight coupling as sustenance. You want to entice others to create services centered around the customer attention you have won, or to supply add-ons to your product, or even, if it is a new-fangled idea, to create legal imitations. This is a counter-intuitive stance at first, but it plays right into the logic of the net. A small piece of an expanding pie is the biggest piece of all. Software is especially primed to work this way…

Via New Rules for the New Economy.

8-Bit Trip is a stupendous stop-motion Lego tribute to classic video games (chiptune soundtrack, of course) filled with wicked in-jokes. It reportedly took 1500 hours to create. I believe it.

Via BoingBoing and PicoCool

I’m so excited to have bought the OneLessDesk just now, in red!  I posted the OneLessDesk by Heckler Design in PicoCool a while back and it’s often crept up in my mind (side note, look for the PicoCool logo at the bottom of their page. That was a nice surprise :).  When we first moved to SF, we bought two used DWR stainless steel Quovis work tables from our building landlord at an amazing price.  We’ve always used them as desks at Ideacodes and loved them. But over the years, especially with the increase in monitor size (30″ display), I’ve started to realize just how close the screen is and how there’s just not enough depth to accommodate the screen and my keyboard.  Since it’s a work table on wheels, it’s also a bit too high for a keyboard.  Enter the OneLessDesk, with it’s sleek minimalism, and free-standing keyboard table.  Since I’m also obsessive about hiding cords, I also love the built-in, vented cord shelf in the back of the desk.  When we’re not working (yeah, that happens occasionally), we can slide the table underneath the other to save space. The Quovis tables will now become a big conference table.  Can’t wait for the new desks to arrive.

The Apple and tech blogs have been buzzing with this week’s early arrival of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, available this Friday, August 28, 2009. We’ve already pre-ordered our family pack upgrade. If you haven’t yet, it’s worth the upgrade at only $29 for an individual (or $25 at Amazon; $43.99 for the family pack upgrade at Amazon). Why? David Pogue covers this in his review today.

Either way, the big story here isn’t really Snow Leopard. It’s the radical concept of a software update that’s smaller, faster and better — instead of bigger, slower and more bloated. May the rest of the industry take the hint.

Via David Pogue’s State of the Art – A Leap Forward With Snow Leopard – NYTimes.com

Update Aug 28: If you’re unsure whether your software will be compatible with the upgrade, check here.

I have a healthy obsession with self-documentary, data-streaming and collecting, so you can imagine my delight when Mark Krynsky twittered that he had just posted about 75-year-old Gordon Bell, lifestream pioneer, who was covered in the Wired article, Microsoft Researcher Records His Life in Data.

Over the course of a lifetime, humans take in more information and memories than their brains can handle. Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell believes this to be a bug, not a feature. And as he chronicles in his new book, Total Recall, he’s working on an upgrade. Since 2001, Bell has been compulsively scanning, capturing, and logging each and every bit of personal data he generates in his daily life.

This trove includes Web sites he’s visited (221,173), photos taken (56,282), emails sent and received (156,041), docs written and read (18,883), phone conversations had (2,000), photos snapped by the SenseCam hanging around his neck (66,000), songs listened to (7,139), and videos taken by him (2,164). To collect all this information, he uses a staggering assortment of hardware: desktop scanner, digicam, heart rate monitor, voice recorder, GPS logger, pedometer, smartphone, e-reader.

Called MyLifeBits, the project is feasible only because of the shrinking cost of storage, but creating the archive is just half the battle. “The problem isn’t putting it all in. The problem is getting it out,” says Bell, who works at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Research Group. “When I started, I couldn’t find anything!” A classic file-and-folder hierarchy forces you to shoehorn multifaceted data into specific, rigid categories. Bell’s solution is to make everything miscellaneous. He switched to a database that lets info exist in multiple categories and began full-text indexing, which increased his metadata—and, therefore, potential search terms—by orders of magnitude.

While I’ve been collecting my social network behavior through my data stream for a couple of years now, and have attempted to record my design processes and pondered why My OS Doesn’t Work Like My Mind, I’m nowhere near documenting the comprehensive e-memory that Gordon Bell has collected. I’m particularly enamored with the SenseCam. I remember when Justin Kan certainly gave the real-time lifestream a go in 2007 by broadcasting his waking life for several months, but the SenseCam takes a more automated, edited and subtle approach to collecting images at random moments. When pieced together, those snapshots create a story/memory.

From the Total Recall site:

What if you could remember everything? Soon, if you choose, you will be able to conveniently and affordably record your whole life in minute detail. In Total Recall, Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmel draw on their experience from the MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research to explain the benefits to come from an earth-shaking and inevitable increase in electronic memories.

Total Recall is available on September 17, 2009 and you can pre-order now!  I’m excited to read it. Keep up with Gordon Bell’s thoughts on the Total Recall Blog.

ART & COPY is a powerful new film about advertising and inspiration. Directed by Doug Pray (SURFWISE, SCRATCH, HYPE!), it reveals the work and wisdom of some of the most influential advertising creatives of our time — people who’ve profoundly impacted our culture, yet are virtually unknown outside their industry. Exploding forth from advertising’s “creative revolution” of the 1960s, these artists and writers all brought a surprisingly rebellious spirit to their work in a business more often associated with mediocrity or manipulation: George Lois, Mary Wells, Dan Wieden, Lee Clow, Hal Riney and others featured in ART & COPY were responsible for “Just Do It,” “I Love NY,” “Where’s the Beef?,” “Got Milk,” “Think Different,” and brilliant campaigns for everything from cars to presidents. They managed to grab the attention of millions and truly move them. Visually interwoven with their stories, TV satellites are launched, billboards are erected, and the social and cultural impact of their ads are brought to light in this dynamic exploration of art, commerce, and human emotion.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about advertising. On the one hand, it’s highly creative and often the master medium for creating change, inspiring, influencing and commenting on popular culture.  On the other hand, it’s an industry that can be a slave to corporate agendas, has spurred a culture of over-consumption (buy your way to a perceived happiness) through constant bombardment in our daily lives, and is often, just bad.

I’m excited to see Art & Copy.  It’s evident from his director’s statement that Doug Pray has found some distinct connections to the best advertising as subversive, creative, poignant and socially relevant.  I missed the San Francisco screening back in April, but see it’s showing in LA in Sept. If you’re in NYC, you can catch it this week through Aug 27 (see screenings).

[Via]

Naturally, I’m drawn to the minimalism of the QLOCKTWO, a physical clock ($1,268.20 USD) and an iPhone/iPod Touch app ($.99, iTunes link). But I also love the human quality – why not tell the time in words?

This is QLOCKTWO, the fourth dimension squared. A clock that tells time in words. It has a quadratic matrix of letters, where some of the letters are illuminated. The time is displayed as text in five minute intervals. If you need to have a more exact time, look in the corner at the illuminated dots. QLOCKTWO has a brightness sensor; with its help the illuminating power of the letters is automatically adjusted.

It comes with replaceable synthetic glass fronts, in luscious vibrant colors like red (cherry cake), lime, purple (frozen blackberry), yellow (light caramel), and subdued shades like silver (vanilla sugar) and the always bold, black (black ice tea).  Can be wall-mounted or placed on a surface with glass holders.

[Via PicoCool]

“Spanish designer Arturo Marin presents 79-b, a set of pictures documenting what looks like ink or food coloring seeping into water.” Gorgeous.

[Via my site, PicoCool]

Reading this and re-realizing that I live in a bubble of technological affluence: One in four songs sold in U.S. is from iTunes

NPD MusicWatch’s report indicates that audio CDs remain the dominant format, responsible for 65 percent of all music sold in the first half of 2009. But digital music, which makes up the remaining 35 percent, is steadily gaining ground—NPD MusicWatch says that’s up from 20 percent of sales in 2007 and 30 percent in 2008.

The iTunes Store can claim 25 percent of all music sold in the U.S., according to the report, up from 21 percent in 2008 and 14 percent in 2007. Walmart is number two with 14 percent, combined with their downloads, sales through their Web site and in their retail stores.

Compared to other digital music retailers, iTunes is far and away the market leader, according to NPD MusicWatch: the iTunes Store owns 69 percent of the digital music market. Amazon’s MP3 store is a distant second with 8 percent.