Ideas I wanted to remember and share.
“Those who wish to protect natural ecosystems learn, to their stupefaction, that they have to work harder and harder — that is, to intervene even more, at always greater levels of detail, with ever more subtle care — to keep them ‘natural enough.'”
-Bruno Latour, in Love Your Monsters
“The history of the design professions is largely a history of overqualification, of men and women who have insisted on doing more than either clients or public ever asked for.”
-Ralph Caplan, By Design
Horace Dediu makes an important argument that Apple’s stock price has been based simply on the value of its latest products, whereas “the process of product development at Apple is worth nothing.”
In other words, from the market’s perspective:
Innovations are valuable, but there is no such thing as an innovation process. If there was such a thing, then we could measure it and put a number on its value. Until then, innovation is nothing more than a spin of the roulette wheel.
Dediu’s unspoken point, of course, is that the market is missing something huge: Apple has honed and demonstrated its ability to repeatedly design, produce, and sell innovative consumer electronics products. I am absolutely convinced that their success is not due to luck but rather to a finely tuned innovation process. That doesn’t mean they will never release duds, of course, but it means that on the whole they can be counted on to continue to disrupt markets with innovative products. The wider technology community misunderstands this ability so deeply that instead of trying to copy Apple’s innovation process, they insist that it is nothing but good luck and good marketing.
The University of Washington has about 30,000 undergraduates, about 500 of which were enrolled in introductory classes in the statistics department. Assuming that number holds every quarter, 1500/30000 = 1.6% of UW students take an intro statistics class each year.
There are 18 million college students in the United States. If the overall percentage who take statistics is the same as at UW, then about 300,000 college students take intro stats each year in this country.
Bret Victor released a really excellent article about what is missing in the user interfaces of current technology, and what we should consider when crafting visions for the future. Compelling and easy to understand.
I call [iPad] technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade….
We live in a three-dimensional world. Our hands are designed for moving and rotating objects in three dimensions, for picking up objects and placing them over, under, beside, and inside each other….
To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It’s obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.
Read the whole article, which has great pictures as well.
“There is no such thing as a viable democracy made up of experts, zealots, politicians, and spectators.”
-Liz Coleman, president of Bennington College [TED talk]
“Statistics: that’s a subject that you could and should use on a daily basis. It’s risk, it’s reward, it’s randomness, it’s understanding data. I think if… all American citizens knew about probability and statistics, we wouldn’t be in the economic mess we’re in today.”
-Arthur Benjamin [TED talk]
“Children starting school this year will be retiring in [2070]. Nobody has a clue what the world will look like in even 5 years time, and yet we’re meant to be educating them for it. The unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.”
– Ken Robinson [TED talk]
I thought this was worth coming back to. From an article titled “Heart Before Head: The Legacy of Steve Jobs.”
Jobs: “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
You: What do my inner-voice and heart want most for me to do with my life?
Jobs: “Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”
You: If I trusted that eventually the dots will connect when I follow my heart, what would be my vision and what would I do next?
Jobs: “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”
You: What big choices would I make if I only had a short while left to live?
In high school, I made a website on ancient Roman architecture as a class project in world history. That was over ten years ago. A few days ago I got an email:
I recently came across your resource website at http://www.robinstewart.com/personal/learn/romarch/links.htm and I found it to be extremely helpful in some personal academic research I’m doing — I just wanted to say thank you. As a student and an educator, it is a rare treat to come across such thoughtful and concise online resources like this, especially the older ones. In my humble opinion, this is one of the timeless treasures of the Internet.
I forwarded that along to the teacher of the history class, with the subject line “History project website still useful more than ten years later…” His response:
Hi Robin. Wow. That is really kind of awesome. I wouldn’t have bet money that the site was still on-line. Bravo all over again.
I guess this is why I keep things around on my website.