Obsessionism has three categories:
And it comes out like this:
The above is from NBA Team Heat Maps [Current Obsessions]
I set out with these questions in mind and developed a graph to see if I could find something. Each graph shows who was coaching the team that year, who were the top offensive players on the team, and by how many possessions each team won or lost over a 5 year period.
The house I’m staying in over Christmas has a dining room adjacent to the kitchen. The dining room is small, just big enough for a six-seating dining table and a cabinet for the fineries, and it opens on to the lounge room.
The dining room is never used. I’m writing from it, and my partner has a sewing machine and patterns strewn over the remainder of the table.
The house I grew up in had a similarly placed dining room, connected to the kitchen and lounge room, presumably this also allowed the flow of women back to the kitchen and men to the lounge room. But the main purpose was to cocoon conversation in a space safe from interruptions.
I remember it’s use getting phased out over the years when I was growing up. In fact, it eventually became the TV room. In my upbringing, the television set was marginalised: concealed by cloths, often unplugged to make us think twice about watching it, or put out of sight in the dining room.
So it seems to me that back in the day it was an important ritual to commune with the family in a dedicated room – possibly intentionally disconnected from the day-to-day infrastructure of the house. There children could be interrogated by parents about what they learnt at school that day etc. and parents could conduct coded conversations that protected the children from knowing they couldn’t afford the school fees. Or variations thereof.
This was, in my experience, a space intended to foster connectedness. Our family revived it for visits from my grandmother for a while, but we eventually migrated into the living room.
The living room permits differently to the dining room; it is multi-purpose and can contain technology. Most obviously this is a television, but it can also be a stereo, or a laptop, or in our case a sewing machine. Living rooms can double as workspaces in small houses.
So the potential interruptions are numerous, and the sanctity of the communal eat and converse is threatened. That’s why we need the connected house, where the dining table is brought to you by Microsoft Surface and there are desirous distractions from the mundanity of family first life.
I enjoyed this interview with typographer Gert Wiescher. He digitised the Bodoni Family in 1993, and re-interpreted the New Yorker font by hand-drawing it off points.
And as a designer who was well experienced before proliferation of personal computers, he’s got a view of computers as tools that shouldn’t intervene in the creative process:
Today there are unlimited possibilities to change forms or make alternative weights — and they are sooooo easy to implement — it is no longer necessary to think first and design later. A designer can produce an endless number of variations and then choose what looks best. The problem seems to be that this process takes long and consumes a monstrous amount of time. Lost time, I call it. If you work that way, computers steal a lot of your time instead of saving time.
My feeling is that designers who’ve always worked with computers develop processes to focus their creative workflow, rather than letting the numerous tools intervene in that process. I sometimes wish I was one of them.
I also like reading about designers who’ve made a lifetime endeavour of it, it doesn’t always seem to be encouraged in the online industry nowadays.
Creative Characters, The Faces Behind the Fonts: Gert Wiescher
Well, now I do anyways. Loads of art and graphic design pics and links like the above from http://marcbally.ch/.
From the Washington Post:
The ultimate goal for these cheaper 3G smartphones is to drive more consumers to use mobile data, or a INQ Mobile CEO Frank Meehan told Unstrung, “You need to drive data usage higher right across all the handset segments. You want the majority of customers, not the top-end of the community that rules strategy at the moment.”
Three already try to drive more data usage through promotion of Facebook Mobile on their website.
INQ’s client-based Facebook app will always be on in the background, which means owners of the phone will get instant notice when friends update their profile, or as Meehan says, Facebook becomes like SMS.
This is what it looks like (nice wallpaper, dudes):
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