Analogue, meet Digital. Digital, meet Analogue.

via thisisnthappiness

MoMA: Century of the Child
Great to see what’s possible with HTML & JS these days.
via @ryanquigley

In reaction to my last post, I was just wondering:
How many Samsung employees does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
1,000: One to hold a laptop playing a video of an Apple engineer screwing in a lightbulb, One to screw in the lightbulb and 998 others to redesign the bulb and socket to look like Apple’s.

Ben Brooks ponders:

Why does it take a 1,000 designers to rip-off an Apple design that only took 15-16 people to make?

Again, because they’re copying artifacts, not process.
Remember how many guys it took to reverse-engineer Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit in the first movie?

Tearaway looks like one of the most clever games I’ve seen in a long time.
I haven’t followed the PSP VIta closely at all. I had no idea it had those touch capabilities.
via Twitter and Forbes

There’s a great TED Talk with Kirby Feguson up on Vimeo’s Tumblr. It’s a 10-minute version of his awesome 4-part film series, Everything Is A Remix.

He starts off his presentation explaining how, at the height of his career, Bob Dylan was accused by “a small minority of dissenters” of stealing other peoples’ songs. He then fast-forwards to 2004 to talk about DJ Dangermouse’s The Grey Album, which was a remix of The Beatles The White Album and Jay-Z’s The Black Album.

The three techniques used to create these albums:

Copy. Transform. Combine.

But Ferguson says these techiques are not exclusive to music:

But I think these aren’t just the components of [music] remixing. I think these are the basic elements of all creativity. I think everything is a remix and I think this is a better way to conceive of creativity.

He then goes on to talk about the patent wars between smartphone manufacturers going on today. He calls out the apparent hypocrisy behind Steve Jobs’ intention “to go thermonuclear war” on Android for copying iOS and the iPhone when seen in the context of the original Macintosh being ‘inspired’ by the pinoneering work by Xerox PARC on the graphical user interface (GUI). To his credit, Ferguson talks about the theory of loss aversion–it’s ok when I copy another person’s work, but it’s not ok when someone else copies me (To use Ferguson’s language, Apple didn’t just copy the GUI work done at Xerox PARC, they combined and transformed it into something completely new with the Macintosh, but I’ll leave this for another post). Which leads me to Samsung.

Apple’s beef with Samsung isn’t that it stole Apple’s hardware and software—it’s that they copied Apple’s hardware, software, marketing and retail store design (via The Loop). Samsung has had no intention to remix anything they copied from Apple. Samsung’s intention with all of it’s Android smartphones has been to align as closely as possible with the look and feel of Apple products. Bob Dylan took melodies note-for-note from old folk songs, but you’re never confused. You always know it’s Dylan. This is because Dylan copied, transformed and remixed old media into something new.

Samsung stopped at copying and never bothered to remix anything. This is why many people confuse Samsung phones running Android for iPhones.

Update: Jim Dalrymple talked about this the other day too:

Apple had two blockbuster hit songs and Samsung stole them, note for note. That’s not right.

Microsoft and Palm also came out with smartphones after the iPhone. It’s interesting Jobs and Apple never went ‘thermonuclear’ on them like they did Samsung. I have a feeling this is because both Microsoft and Palm took the time to remix (in various degrees, Microsoft more than Palm) what Apple started with the iPhone. Does webOS look a lot like iOS? Absolutely. It has the DNA of the iPhone in it (Makes sense. The VP of hardware at Apple, Jon Rubinstein, became CEO at Palm/HP during that time). But if you’ve used a Palm Pre, you know it’s a Palm Pre. It has many characteristics unique to it, like cards and the Quick Wave Launcher.

Windows Phone 7 did the same thing, but they went even further. I’m not even sure you could say Microsoft even started with the Copy technique. They turned icons into tiles. They threw away drop shadows and gradients. They transformed the smartphone into something that makes sense to them.

Competition is important. Apple should not be the only company allowed to make multi touch smartphones and tablets, but to copy, almost pixel-for-pixel, what Apple has created is to concede Apple has done everything perfectly with iOS and the iPhone. The thing is, they haven’t. When a company creates a new smartphone they have the opportunity to remix what’s been done and present something fresh and new.

Maybe all Samsung wants is a product approaching ‘iPhone-ness’, but I’d like to think they have a lot of talented designers, developers and engineers who could come up with something good, maybe even great. People with the ability to remix.

Then I always remember we’re talking about a hardware company that doesn’t know how to make software. Who seems to have no interest in learning how to make software. Who licenses their mobile operating system from another company.

The balance of power is going to shift from companies running people, to people running companies.

via designtaxi.com

It’s a hack of old technologies, aimed at creating a calmer vision of social networking. It’s a limited device that’s meant to fit into our day rather than demand attention.

via fastcodesign.com

My brother Mark has submitted a presentation topic for SXSW 2013 on Ambient Futurism:

The future is NOW?! That expression is as annoying as it is untrue. The future is not now… but let’s get prepped for later. An organization’s ability to anticipate the trends and abilities of the future will be crucial for remaining nimble in a world that is forcing us to adapt quickly. Fortune 500 companies are now contracting professional “Futurists” to navigate these waters for them, but what about the rest of us? “Ambient Futurism” is a new approach to the Futurist discipline, designed to extend the far-sighted vision of a company for near-term, tangible benefit. This presentation will define this concept and explain its benefits, specifically for marketers. The content draws on a range of unexpected sources while providing practical tools and frameworks to bring an Ambient Futurism program to your own office or company. The goal will be to demonstrate how actual profit and competitive edge can be gained through a more imaginative application of Futurist thought.

If you dig it, go vote for it at the SXSW PanelPicker site.

Scroll down a bit and a reader will see that Michael linked up one of my Missile Test articles here at Daily Exhaust. I love getting shout outs like that. Yesterday he sent me an IM asking me to check out the stats on my site, as he was curious what sort of juice a DE link up is worth these days. So last night after work I logged on to Dreamhost’s basic stats page, and saw this:

Last week, well before Michael posted his link, hell, before I even wrote the article, Missile Test saw an over 30,000% jump in traffic. Trust me, this had nothing to do with me. I scrolled down further into my stats looking for anything else out of order, and there it was, page requests for a folder I know I did not put on my site. I looked on my server, and there was a whole other website squatting on my domain, selling vpn access to god knows who out of who knows where. I’d been hacked.
Know that feeling you get when you see a roach scuttle across your kitchen counter when you thought things had been clean? That’s what it feels like when you get hacked. Unclean. I was even worried about how the search engines would feel about me now that the vast majority of my traffic was criminal. Was I now an unsafe site? Hopefully I caught the disease in time. As you can see from the bottom of the screenshot above, things went back to normal quickly after I deleted the offending files from my server. But still…my skin is crawling a little bit.

TLDR Summary:
After 13 years of designing websites and mobile applications, I’ve decided to return to my roots and create (and sell) things by hand at my new site, Stay Vigilant. It’s going to feature posters, t-shirts and other design artifacts. I’m starting slow, but in the coming year I’ll be adding new creations, day-by-day, month-by-month.
One of the first projects I’m featuring on my storefront is the poster series I was able to successfully fund through Kickstarter earlier this year, Bicycles For Our Minds.
If you don’t see something you like, sign up for the SV newsletter (it’s in the righthand column) and I’ll let you know when I post new pieces.
Extended Chunk:
Long ago, in an analogue galaxy far, far away I was a fine art major with a concentration in graphic design. Figure Drawing. Photography. Painting. Print Making. Book Binding. The trunk of my car and the floor of my bedroom included: sketchbooks, x-acto knives, linoleum blocks, gouache, cardboard, stretcher bars, conté crayons, Canvas, card stock, tracing paper, charcoal, oil paint, acrylic paint. Almost every piece of clothing I owned had an ink or paint stain on it.
Back in these days, I stretched (and gessoed) my own canvases to paint on. I developed my own film from the Pentax K-1000 I shot photos with. I cut my own mat board and mounted my design work onto it with spray mount. I wasn’t always happy with my work, but there was a great satisfaction in creating things by hand.
When I brought my wife (then girlfriend) to my parents house for the first time 12 years ago, she saw painting and drawing hung on the walls. She asked me who made them. I told her I did. She was surprised, because even back then, she knew me as a guy who designed websites. Who did things on an RGB screen.
I don’t think she’s surprised by my new venture. She’s caught me sniffing the bindings of hardcover books at bookstores on numerous occasions. The first time, she didn’t know what to think. She probably thought I was doing some weird drug. I had to explain to her I loved the smell of paper and ink. Maybe it transports me back to happy time in college. A time when I decided what I wanted to make and for whom.
Well, there’s no reason I can’t start doing it again.

The Velvet Underground: psychedelic poster for an October 14, 1971 show at the London College of Printing (via thisisnthappiness):

My first thought when seeing this was that it looked like the result of giving Milton Glaser way too many tabs of acid and having him redesign his iconic 1967 Bob Dylan poster: