Notes

For Retrace Our Steps French photographers Carlos Ayesta and Guillaume Bressio took residents of Namie, now a ghost town like many others in the region, back to their old settings as if the 2011 Tohoku earthquake never happened.

This is zaku zaku, japanese for the crunching sound that stepping on ice might make. It’s one of a set of chocolates designed to represent japanese words for certain textures, by studio Nendo for the Maison et Objet design show in Paris. Go see the rest of them on Nendo’s site because they’re all fantastic.

Rodeny Mullen invented the flatground ollie in 1982 based on Alan “Ollie” Gelfands no-handed airs on vert. For the uninitiated it looks like magic, the board seemingly glued to the skaters' feet. For the initiated, it feels like magic — successfully popping your first ollie is an endorphin cocktail rivaling the best.

Aathis Batia goes all sciency for Wired and shows the forces at work while popping an ollie.

Peter Merholz writing about how the conversation around (digital) design has increasingly become about the superficial, often neglecting the deeper underlying layers that make up a product:

It  plays into the still-prevailing attitude among business and technical types that designers don’t grok the deeper concerns in these complicated  systems, and are best to bring in when it’s time to make something look good. Still, we must be vigilant in maintaining similar attention to those deeper layers, precisely because their abstraction makes them more challenging to discuss.

An Excerpt from "Some Instructions to the New Guy Concerning the Preparation and Presentation of My French Toast", by Stanley Kubrick.

Chestnut brown crust marks are an indication that great  care has gone into preparing the French toast, and above all, this is  what concerns me the most: that you care. You must care about the French  toast. If you don’t care about the French toast, then perhaps you don’t  care about anything is my train of thought on the matter, and if you  don’t care about anything, then working for me doesn’t seem feasible, as  I have an insatiable desire to be surrounded by people who care as much  as I do.

via Jason Kottke

Great article by Kathy Sierra on how limited our cognitive resources are:

Spend hours at work on a tricky design problem? You’re more likely to stop at Burger King on the drive home. Hold back from saying what you really think during one of those long-ass, painful meetings? You’ll struggle with the code you write later that day. Since both willpower/self-control and cognitive tasks drain the same tank, deplete it over here, pay the price over there. One pool. One pool of scarce, precious, easily-depleted resources. If you spend the day exercising self-control (angry customers, clueless co-workers), by the time you get home your cog resource tank is flashing E.

The Guardian, a newspaper, has bravely published an article on how news is actually bad for us. Not investigative journalism, but the fast, sensationalist media  bombarding us with “bite-sized” bullets of news that’s designed to interrupt and mislead and in the end leave us desensitized and in a chronic state of stress.

From the article:

News misleads. Take the following event (borrowed from Nassim Taleb): A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What’s relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. That’s the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in other bridges. But the car is flashy, it’s dramatic, it’s a person (non-abstract), and it’s news that’s cheap to produce. News leads us to  walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads.

Now go read a book or take a walk, nothing bad will happen to you because you missed the news, something good might instead.

Folders are hard. Organising information into deep hierarchies with a structure that makes sense and navigating it later takes mental energy.

The mental burden of it might be small and unnoticable, much like the simple fact of having gears on your bike reserves some of the cognitive resources of your brain to constantly think about them. You may not notice it and if someone tried to tell you it’s so, you might even disagree. But these things add up, and you really should use your brain for more important stuff.

Folders are also hard in the sense of being unconditional. You’re taking some stuff, putting it into a drawer and closing it. It’s  hiding things from view, making you remember where, in which drawer that thing you’re looking for is.

I’m not entirely against folders - big complex projects need this level of organisation. But at times I find myself wishing for a softer way of organising files. Continuing  with the drawer metaphor, I’d like a way to just group items on my desk, so they’re always visible, but still organised to some extent. What I’m wishing for is something like Fences, but not limited to the desktop. Windows 7 allows grouping by a myriad of criteria, but I can’t define my own groups.

Working on a design project I might have multiple iterations of the design as Photoshop or Illustrator files, multiple preview jpeg’s, reference files, stray ideas and wild guesses plus specs from the client and, last but not least, the finished work. I might stuff all these into respective folders and that would give me a nice clean desk, but I would  also lose the one glance overview. Out of sight often means out of mind.

Here’s how I imagine it could work.

Let’s start off with the aforementioned imaginary project. It’s a folder with other folders and miscellaneous files in it.

Instead of stuffing the loose files into respective folders (previews, feedback, client etc.) one would select the files to group by either drawing a box around them or ctrl clicking on the files. One could also right-click anywhere and create a new group from a context menu.

The groups would be collapsible and show how many files they hold just like the current way groups work in Windows 7. You could rename a group any time and also change it’s color, for example you could decide that groups containing preview files are always blue and groups of client files are red, making them easy to distinguish by a glance. Deleting a group would not delete the files in that group. You could also have empty groups for visual clues of the projects structure before all files get there.

And that’s it, a more lightweight way of organising files.

By the way, I recommend reading Oliver Reichensteins blog post about getting rid of deep folder hierarchies in Apple’s Mountain Lion OS.

Have you ever had the feeling that you didn’t really know  what you were doing, and it was just a matter of time before someone realized it and exposed you as a fraud? Turns out  it’s not just psychological, there’s also biology behind this nasty feeling that you’re a fraud about to be exposed, explains Olivia Fox Cabane.

I often get goosebumps from music, most of the times it's songs that build up to "really big", Minnie Ripertons "Les Fleurs" is one that immediately comes to mind. Well, now I know why that happens—I get scared.

According to Huron, researchers have discovered that several of the frisson’s acoustic correlates—things that seem to induce the sensation in listeners—are fear-related. These correlates include rapidly large increases in the loudness of music, abrupt changes in tempo and rhythm, a broadening of frequencies and an increase in the number of sound sources, among other factors.
– phys.org

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I launched this site in it's current form in early 2021. The previous incarnation was a fully static HTML site without a blog engine and I used Tumbrl to host the blog. Tumblr was super easy to set up and get going, including using custom domains, a no-brainer at the time. When building this new site I looked into ways to convert and import the archive from the Tumblr blog but eventually decided against it and opted instead to cherry-pick some posts and leave the Tumblr version as it is. I don't maintain it in any way, and have no plans to make an effort to keep it alive, should Tumblr go away or whatever. Here it is: rednas.tumblr.com