Everything has to be invented, including pockets. Let’s get better ones.
This was a recommendation from my friend Alvaro Videla on the liminal space of our identities, biology, art, etc. This essay pushes the reader to consider the arbitrariness of the categories and taxonomies in which we organize ourselves and the world around us. It’s about ecological thinking, and an argument in favor of nuance over clear cut definitions.
Everyday objects, and how they build a shared language, and a shared context, sometimes across cultures. What happens when we remove those objects, and instead hide their physicality in voice interfaces?
Whether you are trying to create a product or to provide public services, having voices from a representative sample of users matters a lot. It is surprising that people don’t understand this.
I listened to this episode while spending a lot of time taking care of my dad at the hospital last year. The different kinds of beeps and boops that were maddening at first ended up just being background noise after weeks in the ICU. Someone should fix this.
We take details of urban design for granted. I bet you had never thought about the fact that someone had to put those little ramps on street corners. I surely hadn’t.
If you have watched Narcos, you should listen to this episode. Exploiting the dark past of a city for tourism is an interesting moral problem. Reviving the city is a more interesting challenge.
Have you ever opened some settings menu in an old computer, and been surprised with how the results reminded you of some previous experience? Here’s a long list of interesting UIs that unintentionally do that exact thing. From your wifi history, and your phone’s alarms to your Gmail drafts, and more.
One of the amazing things of working at a large corporation like Apple is that a seeminlgy small or inconsequential task can end up affecting the way millions of people interact with the world. In this post, Guzman tells the story of her internship at Apple ten years ago, and how she and her mentor changed language forever. The way we communicate with each other is now permeated with their ideas, forever. Emoji are essential to language today. This is the story of the couple of people at Apple who made the first icons on our phones.
A great episode on the surprising origin story of air conditioning. I never would have thought that the original purpose of A/C was to control moisture content in the air for publishing plants, where paper and ink alignment would constantly go out of whack. Human pleasure quickly took over, of course.
With everything happening in Cataluña right now, this was a timely podcast. I did not know the back story behind the cathedral, but now that I’ve learned a bit more about it I am even more excited about visiting Spain at some point in the near future.
It is always strange to hear about how much thought and effort went into the development of products that I don’t use and totally take for granted. One of the things I like the most about Roman Mars’ podcast is that it exposes me to stories that I would never wonder about on my own.
Design meets history, meets civil unrest, meets politics.
5 stories in 1. A Standard Oil gas station in San Francisco to comply with trademark law, “desire paths” and how user experience beats designers wishes, 50-Hz vs 60-Hz electrical systems, and a whole section on local design solutions, followed by a strange story about street naming.
Posted without comment.
Necessity is the mother of invention, quite literally. This episode makes it easy to imagine what the village might look like, but after seeing the photos I think the audio doesn’t do it justice. An excellent idea, and an important example of why the US sometimes lags on the innovation side.
Apple, the fashion company.