The squares marked A and B are the same shade of gray
(via david)
Source: popularscience.co.uk
When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.
(via david)
Source: foreverahimsa
You know you’re in a good area when you ask for water for the dog and they say ‘still or sparkling?’
Designing websites for Homer Simpson
(from the Upside of Irrationality, Dan Ariley…)
“When designers design physical products—shoes, belts, pants, cups, chairs, and so on—they understand what humans can and cannot do, so they create and manufacture products that can be used by all of us in our daily life. But when people design intangibles such as health insurance, saving plans, retirement plans, and even online dating, they somehow forget about people’s built-in limitations.”
Here Dan Ariley succinctly focusses on the myopia that has been the vision of tech for too long. We’re finally leaving the age of solving solely the technical part of an issue.
User experience and user focussed design may be vogue, but they are as optional an extra as “design” is an optional extra in the conception, manufature, and marketing of shoes. The problem that shoes solve was answered in prehistory when animal skin was wrapped around feet, but the subtle specifics of this solution have been refined ever since to a practically unrecognisable degree.
It feels as if in tech (websites, apps, hardware UIs) plus even medicine, financial services and education, we’re only just overcoming the hurdle of what is to be solved, and thankfully now into the infancy of how best to solve these issues. Considerations of user experience are always secondary to there being a solution (if no solution is possible why build a system to relate it to a user?) but with many solutions now proven in many fields, how we relate said answers to the interface of human perception is the new focus and now ripe for the picking.
Mustard and ketchup.
Found in the rain in Belsize Park.
That’s why we have beliefs, so we can still see the right thing to do, even when blinded with doubt and fear. Our beliefs define us. If we lose them, who are we?
This is an incredible scene, the closing of the Danny Boyle film Sunshine.
The euphoric music (1:30) is incredible in its own right, but married with the concept and the execution of the cinematography, it becomes something sublime.
The music is Capa’s Last Transmission Home by Underworld.
I think what really stands out for me is a feeling that is summed up beautifully in this comment from YouTube: “Imagine dying that way. I mean, that would be so beautiful.”
The cognitive dissonance between death and euphoria is plain, but somehow there is a beauty made more profound by the presence of the dissonance. This is an idea I’ve been toying with for a few years, and I think has parallels through many types of artistic expression, most noticeably for me with music.
One school of thought in music theory argues that harmonic dissonance is something that gives a sense of release and relief when it resolves and returns to a more harmonically consonant state. However, I think there’s a beauty to the unresolved state itself, not in anticipation of the resolution, but because within the moment it is dissonant.
Music from various genres that seems to fit with this approach is being collected on a Facebook page here… http://www.facebook.com/pages/Flow/293770630659495
Put simply, it’s a counter to the usual concept of psychological cognitive dissonance needing resolution (i.e. in the sour grapes tale where the fox lies to himself that the grapes are sour to ease his stress). Perhaps it could be referred to as consonant cognitive dissonance, i.e. a complex feeling of deeper pleasure, truer somehow, than simply a positive emotion alone could deliver.
So to extend the metaphor, the fox would know the grapes are sweet, know he cannot and will not reach them, and yet find a transcendental beauty from the situation, far richer than having simply eaten the sweet grapes and more intensely connected to the truth of his existence than pleasure alone could muster.
Yeah, I think it’s a good film clip. :)
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue… Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung.
Dolphins and a cat. This is pretty beautiful.
Sometimes humans can make the world a little naturally better than it would be without us.
