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[image from Citizen Kane] Borges concluded by quoting Chesterton, “there is nothing more frightening than a labyrinth that has no center.” [72] I wondered about the labyrinth with no center. For me, it is a mystery without a solution. A murder without a murderer. A world without answers, without truth or falsity. It is the…
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Trading Atoms for Bits The most basic way to make materials more ecologically friendly is to simply use less of them. Digital technology, for example, allows us to put songs, books, magazines, newspapers, TV shows, movies, most any kind of media, onto increasingly smaller computer chips. By trading in the atoms of the books, CDs,…
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That’s the choice we need to make: are technologists and designers here to enable people to do meaningful things in their lives in community with their fellow human beings or are they here as an elaborate dopamine delivery system, basically drug dealers for users? If it is the latter, I’m really not interested. We should…
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A while back I heard Jimmy Wales discussing what makes Wikipedia work and he said he rejected the term ‘crowdsourcing’ because the people who write Wikipedia aren’t a ‘crowd’ of people whose role is to be a source of material for Wikipedia: they are all individual people with families and friends and aspirations and ideas,…
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Gamification turns everything into a novelty and a game (duh). Meaning-making turns the trivial into something you make a commitment to for the long haul; it turns the things we do on the web into a much more significant and meaningful part of our lives. Tom Morris – I’m not an experience-seeking user, I’m a…
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I’ve been hearing about ‘gamification’ for a while and it irritates me a lot. Gamification gets all the design blogs a-tweeting and is a lovely refrain used at TED and so on, but to me it all looks like “the aesthetic stage” from Kierkegaard applied to technology. That is, turning things into games and novelties…
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shuzluva: SmallStuffStudio’s Pepe has designed these awesome wood toys called Heartwoods. They are available in either maple or walnut and have an adorable brass birdie sitting on them. They’ll be available on Monday November 22, and a very special set will be available on vinylhearts.com with the proceeds going to help out Andy at TOYSREVIL.…