charts, data, & wayfinding designs via lukasz lysakowski
First edition cover of our present.
Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
Norbert Wiener. Paris, 1948.First edition of the first book to discuss electronic computing (preceded only by a few technical reports). Wiener was a professor of Mathematics at MIT. “The revolutionary aspect of this work can hardly be underestimated.” (Origins of Cyberspace).
Smart thoughts on how marketing is not just messaging but also value creation.
The Media Map
Visual.ly teams up with Bilty to map which news sources are read per state. The Bitly data only represents 01/2012 but it reveals a few interesting online reading habits.
Surprisingly news is still primarily consumed regionally. New York Times (blue) is primarily read in the North East. Washington Post (purple) is primarily read in the Mid Atlantic plus Kentucky.
USA Today (red) is a total surprise as it has the broadest range as it’s the leading online news in thirteen states. Huffington Post leads in six states, proving aggregation of news beats creating original news, which is a total bummer.
Finally, Fox News (orange) just leads in three states which is a total surprise, seems like their audience are not avid readers but instead are avid tv viewers.
The Machine Stops is a short story published in 1909 by E.M. Forster” that predicts our internet mediated life & resulting loss of humanity due to complete dependance on technology. The story was written 60 years before the Internet was invented but it predicts virtual communities and video conferencing. It is a warning about losing our direct relationships for virtual ones, and creating a sole screen based existence. http://t.co/BipPMPNG
A short and smart article on how McLuhan, Agel, and Fiore invented the language that defines the newest visually driven user interfaces.
In a series of paperbacks with “The Medium is the Massage” as the most famous work, Agel the director, Fiore the designer, and McLuhan the writer, created a bold and highly graphic “distillation of big ideas for young people.”* These distillations became bite sized data bits which were quickly scanned and easily consumed. The lower costs of publishing paperbacks allowed the three to create a new visual form of storytelling merging film, music, and magazines aesthetics into a contast moving body of imagery and typography.
The graphic nature of their worked quickly became the pop culture vernacular. Children who grew up in the visually stimulated culture quickly adapted the vernacular and are now transforming into the language of the internet. They are newest entrepreneurs inventing the latest communication tools. These tools are naturally on the internet, image driven, and distilled for ultra fast consummation.
Flipboard (2010), Tumblr(2007)**, and Pinterest(2008) currently are the most successful examples of image driven UIs. The design pattern is one in which information hierarchy is comletely flattened and content is simplified to graphics. Graphics are structured into tiles and tiles allow for quick scanning with the boldest bits winning our attention.
Finally it’s not only new startups getting into the game but also Puma, Reebok and Microsoft with their new UI paradigm called “Metro.”
* http://acquiesce.tumblr.com/post/17382353709/how-mcluhan-agel-and-fiore-created-a-new-visual
**Of course Tumblr such as this site allows you to scroll information based on a linear time fashion but many bloggers have adopted the multi-image tile layout.
Via: Acquiesce
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace tells the story of modern financial systems, the evolution of computer to manipulation of global markets, and the false belief that these instruments would protect their creators, resulting in a destabilized Western market now known as the New Normal.
Documentarian Adam Curtis is among our era’s most influential cultural storytellers, with a penchant for debunking the established order of beliefs and ideologies.
The first part, titled Love and Power, deals with how Ayn Rand and her philosophy of objectivism shaped the ethos of Silicon Valley in the 1990s and, eventually, the global economy as Alan Greenspan and Bill Clinton set out to create the New Economy, based on the premise of a dramatic rise in productivity thanks to emerging information technology. Curtis, however, goes on to argue that instead of creating market stability, these Randian ideals constricted people into a rigid system with little hope of escape.
Via: acquiesce:
