Adactio: Links—Tagged with materials

Papercamp 3 Tickets, Sat 21 Sep 2024 at 11:00 | Eventbrite

Fifteen years after the first one, Papercamp is back this September and the line-up looks good.

Long live the papernet!

Against Scale

Claire L. Evans has written a beautiful piece on the difference between growth and scalability:

Life is nonhierarchical, and it shirks top-down control. But scalability relies on hierarchy, on the isolation of elements stripped of history and context. It is predicated on the assumption that nature is little more than a raw material to be processed and commodified until it is spent. This is, of course, unsustainable — at any scale.

Open Lecture at CIID: “Keeping up with the Kardashevians” – Petafloptimism

A terrfic presentation from Matt Jones (with the best talk title ever). Pace layers, seamful design, solarpunk, and more.

Automate Mindfully | Jorge Arango

But a machine for writing isn’t the same as a machine that writes for you. A machine for viewing photos isn’t the same thing as a machine that travels in your stead. A machine for sketching isn’t the same thing as a machine that designs. I love doing these things and doing them more efficiently. But I have no desire to have them done for me. It’s a key distinction: Do not automate the work you are engaged in, only the materials.

Space Elevators: How a sci-fi dream could be built today

Surveying the current practical and theoretical factors for and against space elevators (including partial elevators—skyhooks!).

Painting With the Web · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

By using static wireframes and static layouts, by separating design and development, we are often limiting our ability to have that creative dialogue with the Web and its materials. We are limiting our potential for playful exploration and for creating surprising and novel solutions. And, most importantly, we are limiting our ability to make conscious, well-informed decisions going forward. By adding more and more layers of abstraction, we are breaking the feedback loop of the creative process.

BBC - Future - How to build something that lasts 10,000 years

As part of the BBC’s ongoing series on deep time, Alexander Rose describes the research he’s been doing for the clock of the long now—materials, locations, ideas …all the pieces that have historically combined to allow artifacts to survive.

Impossible Cookware and Other Triumphs of the Penrose Tile - Issue 69: Patterns - Nautilus

The forbidden symmetry of Penrose tiles and quasicrystals.

Essays « Object Lessons

Fax machines, pop-up books, radioactive televisions, writing boxes, microfilm readers, nuclear bomb cores, cupholders, bidets, jet engines, index cards, wiffle balls, oil barrels, lightning rods, playing cards, air conditioning, hair dryers, wheelchair ramps, handbags, diving bells, slippers, laundry chutes, sewing machines, pockets, skee-ball, safety pins, chalkboards, tote bags, holograms, hearing aids, dollhouses, billboards, airports, flash drives, cardigans, beer cans, stethoscopes, text editors, mugs, wallpaper, towel dispensers, bumber stickers, staplers, microscopes, fingerless gloves, wire hangers, toast, and more.

I’ll be in my bunk.

Neodymium – Popula

Magnets: How Do They Work?

Magnetism might be the most romantic of all the topics in science to be metaphorically butchered by poets.

How Do We Keep Up? What Happens if CSS Grid Changes? - YouTube

Another great video from Jen as part of her Layout Land series. This time she addresses the question of the overwhelming technology landscape for developers and where they should invest their time.

She references my most recent talk, where I’ve been drawing a distinction between “materials” (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and “tools” (everything else).

Steve Jobs on Prototypes - Snook.ca

I’ve thought often of how our design and prototyping tools for the web are often not of the web. Tools like Photoshop and Sketch and Invision create approximations but need to walk the line between being a tool to build native apps and to build web apps. They do well in their ability to quickly validate designs but do little to validate technical approach.

Futurists & realists – The Man in Blue

Cameron contrasts Syd Mead with Frank Lloyd Wright.

Mastery of materials is a valuable thing to have. It will help you build what’s needed now and forge ahead into the near future. But vision is also valuable – it helps inspire and drive teams, and lays out a longer term future that can alter the path of humanity. What I take from the futurists and the realists is that there’s a place for every person and every process; what you need to do is find your own place, get comfortable, and own it.

Saving Your Web Workflows with Prototyping · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

A well-written (and beautifully designed) article on the nature of the web, and what that means for those of us who build upon it. Matthias builds on the idea of material honestly and concludes that designing through prototypes—rather than making pictures of websites—results in a truer product.

A prototyping mindset means cultivating transparency and showing your work early to your team, to users – and to clients as well, which can spark excited conversations. A prototyping mindset also means valuing learning over fast results. And it means involving everyone from the beginning and closely working together as a team to dissolve the separation of linear workflows.

Link tags: materials

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