links for 2008-08-21

Founds this hid­den in a cryp­tic blog post by Matt Webb. Inter­est­ing view on how design has changed over the course of human his­to­ry and what design ‘today’ (writ­ten 2005) is or should be like: “Design­ing is in itself the cre­ation of abstract machines, which draw com­plex dia­grams, that cut across het­ero­ge­neous seg­ments. […] The design prod­uct is often not embed­ded in a sin­gle phys­i­cal object. But rather is an inter­con­nec­tion between many objects and peo­ple and their environment.”

This has been mak­ing the rounds late­ly. A Japan­ese design­er has mocked up a con­text-aware device from the near future. I like the sug­ges­tive qual­i­ty of these images. He suc­ceeds in com­mu­ni­cat­ing a com­pli­cat­ed con­cept in a very con­cise way. Many dif­fer­ent kinds of appli­ca­tions not explic­it­ly men­tioned can be effort­less­ly imag­ined based on this.