Tech, culture, democracy. Scope, scale, speed. Loyal but disobedient.
“Rational thought clearly counseled the Trojans to suspect a trick when they woke to find the entire Greek army had vanished, leaving only a strange and monstrous prodigy beneath their walls. Rational procedure would have been, at the least, to test the Horse for concealed enemies as they were urgently advised to do by Capys the Elder, Laocoon and Cassandra. That alternative was present and available yet discarded in favor of self destruction.”
From a 2012 interview with Taco Dibbits, Director of Collections, Rijksmuseum
[Starting around 2:50]
The Rijksmuseum is all about images. We want to share these images with everybody using the Internet. The technology is in fact about sharing. Of course, you design your own websites, create your own Facebook account, but in the end it’s all about sharing.
That’s why we have decided to put free to use, up to date information in the best available quality on the Internet. So whatever forum you’re on or what you’re looking for, you can download and use it as you like. The museum is about inspiration, learning, and knowledge. The Internet provides inspiration, when you are able to zoom in and touch the screen. In the museum, you’re not allowed to touch the collect, but on the Internet you are. On your iPhone you can magnify or reduce the museum’s collection, which is very inspiring. You can print them in the highest quality on your bedcover or in a booklet; the possibilities are numerous.
Knowledge needs to be shared. The Rijksmuseum connects people to art and history and that connection, that exchange of knowledge, is of the utmost importance to us.
We have over a million objects in our collection, of which 200,000 can be found on the Internet. We employ over 450 people so it’s impossible for them to know everything there is about our collection. We invite people to have fun with our collection, to get inspired, but also to share their knowledge with us. If a person in India has information that is important to us, he can share this with us and at the same time with the rest of the community. This is why the Internet as provider of knowledge and source of inspiration is crucial for humanity and as such one of the most important inventions in history.
via @LizzyJongma
“The text message and the exclamation point are made for each other, and I’m glad they finally found each other…They’re both one-note forms of communication, without music, without connotation and atmosphere, but they do have their uses. To me, there’s no more shame in filling text messages with exclamation points, three at a time, if necessary, than there is in using strings of expletives while arguing politics at an Irish pub.”
“So how are things different today? If you are a person who routinely uses computers, the Internet, or digital media, imagine a day when you do not create–intentionally and unintentionally–hundreds of temporary, evanescent copies. (If you doubt this, look in the cache of your browser.) Is there a day when you do not “distribute” or retransmit fragments of articles you have read, when you do not seek to share with friends some image or tune? Is there a day when you do not rework for your job, for your class work, or simply for pastiche or fun, some of the digital material around you? In a networked society, copying is not only easy, it is a necessary part of transmission, storage, caching, and, some would claim, even reading.”
“I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work… Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable.”
July 2012 Highlights from the Underground New York Public Library
Each one was its own moment. It’s great to see them all together.
1. “The God Delusion,” by Richard Dawkins 2. “The Birth of Tragedy,” by Friedrich Nietzsche 3. “Mary Poppins,” by Dr. P. L. Travers 4. “The Stranger Beside Me,” by Ann Rule 5. “Queer,” by William S. Burroughs 6. “Just My Type: A Book About Fonts,” by Simon Garfield 7. “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept,” by Elizabeth Smart 8. “Know Thyself,” by Na’im Akbar 9. “Star Wars (The Old Republic): Fatal Alliance,” by Sean Williams 10. “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant,” by Anne Tyler
I’m looking forward to the new characters who will come with their books to the Underground New York Public Library in August!
Just 16 and recently released from a naval academy, Kenji Ekuan witnessed Hiroshima’s devastation from the train taking him home. ‘Faced with that nothingness, I felt a great nostalgia for human culture,’ he recalled from the offices of G. K. Design, the firm he co-founded in Tokyo in 1952. ‘I needed something to touch, to look at,’ he added.
‘Right then I decided to be a maker of things.’ One of the most enduring objects in his 60-year design career — which includes the Akita bullet train and Yamaha motorbikes — is the Kikkoman soy-sauce dispenser.
“It is inspiring to meet with others around something. Around a cause. To work together with others gives you something. I experienced that when running a relay race as a kid: You could run faster when you had that baton in your hand because you had to hand it over to someone else, than if you were running alone. That is a fact: You get something. A force is created between people when they work together around something that they feel makes sense to them. That is the force that manifests itself in sociality.”
Quote:
A drummer mentor of mine mentioned to me that ‘you know now, that there are devices that you don’t have to play…that you can program, and it plays for you.’ And that was the most futuristic thing I ever heard. What wha what wha what what? Drums on a machine???“
— DJ Felix Da Housecat, Planet Rock And Other Tales of the 808 trailer
“…[our] learning institutions, for the most part, are acting as if the world has not suddenly, irrevocably, cataclysmicall, epistemically changed - and changed precisely in the area of learning.”
“Every such meeting, in other words, involves a thousand choices, but not a billion, because most of the big choices have already been made. These frozen choices are what gives institutions their vitality — they are in fact what make them institutions. Freed of the twin dangers of navel-gazing and random walks, an institution can concentrate its efforts on some persistent, medium-sized, and tractable problem, working at a scale and longevity unavailable to its individual participants.”
Shirky continues,
Institutions also reduce the choices a society has to make. In the second half of the 20th century, “the news” was whatever was in the newspaper on the morning, or network TV at night. Advertisers knew where to reach shoppers. Politicians knew who to they had to talk to to get their message out (sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not.) Readers understood an Letters page as the obvious way of getting wider circulation for their views.
That dual reduction of choices masks an essential asymmetry, though. Institutions are designed to reduce they choices for their members, but they only happen to reduce the choices in society. A publisher may want reporters at their desks at 10 am, and to be the main source of breaking news for the paper’s readers. The former desire is under the publisher’s control; the latter not.
“Before [Richard] Owen, museums were designed primarily for the use and edification of the elite, and even then it was difficult to gain access. In the early days of the British Museum, prospective visitors had to make a written application and undergo a brief interview to determine if they were fit to be admitted at all. They then had to return a second time to pick up a ticket–that is assuming they had passed the interview–and finally come back a third time to view the museum’s treasures. Even then they were wisked through in groups and not allowed to linger.”
Richard Owen was the driving force behind the creation of London's Natural History Museum, which opened in 1880. In contrast to the British Museum, the Natural History Museum was dedicated to open access and civic engagement, according to Bryson.
“I think that in general we have a pathological response to anything we measure. We tend not to measure the thing we care about; we tend to measure something that indicates its presence. It’s often very hard to measure the thing that you’re hoping for.”
“Like other museum institutions SMK is used to being seen as a gatekeeper of cultural heritage. But our collections do not belong to us. They belong to the public. Free access ensures that our collections continue to be relevant to users now and in the future. Our motivation for sharing digitized images freely is to allow users to contribute their knowledge and co-create culture. In this way, SMK wishes to be a catalyst for the users’ creativity.”
“The rate of technological change has gotten so fast that we need to inform the design to reflect it."
Ryan Anderson, director of future technology for Herman Miller.
“More hack, less yak”
“More #grok, less talk”
“The only valid measurement of code quality: WTF’s/minute”
“…Attentiveness to detail is an even more critical foundation of professionalism than any grand vision.”
“Clean code is simple and direct. Clean code reads like well-written prose. Clean code never obscures the designer’s intent but rather is full of crisp abstractions and straightforward lines of control”
