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“It’s a $1 billion gadget…”
“It’s a $1 billion gadget…” parislemon: Cliff Kuang: A few years ago, the CEO of Vertu was showing me the company’s newest $8,000 phone, bragging that the gadget was far more substantial and well-made that any $500 iPhone could hope to be. I stopped him short, pointing out that the iPhone isn’t a $500 gadget.…
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¡Peligro! Rio Bravo, sketch circa 1998, El Paso, Texas USA. rafaelfajardo. Sketch for a proposed work to be deployed along the US-Mexico border in response to the continued engineering of the northern bank of the <i>Rio Bravo Del Norte</i> in order to create turbulent currents and undertows. In the US the river is known as…
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Design fiction’s efforts to create imaginative realisations of technology, which consciously try to evoke discussion that avoids polarising opinion, have a key ingredient, I think. Unlike the new worlds of sci-fi novels, or the ultra-detailed visuals of futuristic cinema, their stories are unfinished. Minority Report is not about critical design because its narrative is closed.…
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The ties between scientific speculation, technological imagination and sci-fi are close, and complex, even if genuinely new ideas most often come up in the tech arena first. Arthur C Clarke is often cited as a techno-visionary for his ideas about geostationary communication satellites, but these were first outlined in 1945 in a technical essay, not…
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“Game makers don’t have established tools for hitting those emotional notes,” he continues. “We don’t think about our work from an emotional place, which limits us so much. The hole is an emotional mechanic, fundamentally… more importantly, the hole is magnetic. It’s enigmatic, it’s simple. It’s so elemental it cannot be ignored. It asks questions…