Loving the simplicity of Jumblr
It’s like a mappy version of Freecycle but with minimal fluff. I hope it gets used and becomes big.
Demolishing Density in Detroit: Can Farming Save the Motor City?
So it’s come to this: Unable to provide basic services for all of his constituents, Detroit mayor Dave Bing is drafting plans starve his city down to a manageable size. Using proprietary data and a survey released by Data Driven Detroit, Bing and his staff will pick “winners and losers” amongst the city’s neighborhoods and seek to resettle residents from …
Chris Harrison’s mind-blowing "Skinput" interface
Chris Harrison’s “Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface” is one of the coolest, most amazing and innovative interface concepts we’ve ever seen, skillfully combining art, design and science.
Harrison’s concept–which works, by the way–uses the body as a sort of echo chamber. Which is to say, when the user taps a particular part of their body, a sensor worn around the upper arm can tell if the tap-point was …
Exhibition: The New Faces
Photographer Dean Chalkley’s exhibition, The New Faces opened last night at The Book Club on Leonard Street in London..
The New Faces is a collection of images Chalkley took late last year of a group of young Mods who he first encountered at his monthly DJ night, Shake!, at The Boogaloo pub in Highgate. Intrigued by their sharp dressing and enviable dancing skills, Chalkley suggested he immortalise …
be here now
05 Mar, 2010 • posts i've written • 7 comments
you may have seen this before
Ever since I put together my slideshare on time (above), I’ve been obsessed with how I personally experience time.
An obsessive fascination with the future makes me good at what I do (thinking about the future) while leaving me almost entirely unable to live in the moment.
I rarely take the time to savor what I’m doing. I think I’ve had the opportunity to sip the finest drinks, eat the finest meals, and meet the finest people – but I can’t really remember as I’m typically trapped in my own head working out a problem or making plans for the future. And if recent conversations are indicative of a larger pattern – I think this future thinking lock-in is a growing trend among people like me.
I watch as we all sit in coffee shops, restaurants, and even movies, with our eyes half glued to our mobile phone. Mobiles quickly went from the thing we pick-up to simply look busy to the things that keep us perpetually busy. I spend a good deal of my time pecking away at my Google Reader; repetitively hitting ‘J,’ exchanging action for stimulus, action for stimulus, planning ahead, thinking about what to share, what to push to my blog, and what will allow me a moment of 140-character performance. I plan my route home, my clothes for tomorrow, my haircut for next week, my speech next month, my thoughts for my next meeting, my schedule for the weekend, my next blog post, my current project, my next project, and anything else that comes orbiting my thoughts.
Being more conscious of this, I’m even more convinced that as designers of experiences, we fail to understand people when we build branded experiences. People are rarely ever prepared to be in the moment when they’re online. Moreover, it’s incredibly difficult to get someone to slow down, breathe, and truly experience the world in front of them. Knowing this, we have two choices: 1) build experiences that play into the future-obsessed state that most people occupy, or 2) break real ground in developing experiences that coerce people into a present-conscious state.
If you’re interested in training yourself to be more present, here are 6 steps from Psychology Today:
- When you’re trying to do something, pay more attention to the activity, the room, the people, anything other than your own thoughts. Get out of your head and into the moment. Here’s a trick: play one of these things is not like the other with things in the room.
- When worried about the future, find things to savor. Much of what we do when we think about the future is collect mental images (often quite negative ones), savoring a momentary pleasure helps you stop catastrophizing future events. As Mark Twain said, “I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”
- Breathe. Yes, it is that simple. Take a moment to take a few deep breathes.
- Find your flow. Give yourself a clear task and focus deeply on your work.
- Accept rather than avoid. If you’ve ever tried to not think about something, you know it’s impossible. Accept your thoughts for what they are.
- Keep a fresh pair of eyes. Don’t let routine turn your life into a haze – try to notice what’s new around you, all the time.
Art Project of the Day: Sascha Pohflepp’s…
Art Project of the Day: Sascha Pohflepp’s “Buttons” is a sightless camera with a big red button that, when pressed, calls up a wireless Internet search for a photo taken by someone else at that moment in time.
Click here to watch a demo video (requires Quicktime).
[make.]
Thunderbird Motel, US 67, Marfa, Texas
This place seemed to access a part of me that I thought was off limits.
