OH HAI!
In service of art as a habit and not just a hobby, here’s what I made this week.
Last week’s art ended up in a mess. Wrong paper thickness, put on a coat of paint before erasing pencil marks. Oh well, that’s the whole point. This week I’m experimenting with gouache on a high-grammage (don’t you love that word?) paper journal. I’m deutan color blind so my daughter was my trusted assistant helping me with the right colors.
Onwards to this week’s finds:
- MUJI HOUSES I’ve written about how the loneliness epidemic in the East and West find themselves in the same spot but took different roads to get there. Ryohin Keikaku Co., the homeware brand Muji’s parent company, is working to breathe new life into danchi, Japan’s vast housing complexes that have been neglected into disrepair. The minimalist brand has been renovating individual units for over a decade, revamping outdated features like kitchens and traditional tatami flooring in its attempt to attract younger residents. But now they want to bring in the community element with existing elderly residents and by baking in social events into the setup.
- FARMERS How much of the content fed to you is truly popular? How much of it is just good ‘ol click farming? A photographer went behind-the-scenes to these content farms. It’s a meditation on what does it really mean to be popular online now. “There’s this need to appear more popular than you are as a form of validation and there’s certainly people in my industry I know who have purchased followers. I think we’re allowing the metrics of social media to infiltrate our self worth in a way that I think is quite fascinating.”
- TINY CHIPS Nothing like a dose of good interactive information design to make a profound point we often gloss over - how ridiculously good we have gotten at making chips tiny - really really really reeeeaaaallly tiny. Financial Times went all Eames Power of Ten to show, not tell. TSMC is now experimenting with methods where photons, the building blocks of light, are used in place of electrons to carry data at higher speeds. This is some sci-fi magic right here! 🤯
- SEARCH & RESCUE Hikers get lost all the time. But there’s a field of study that looks into exactly this - lost person behavior. If you can guess what they’ll do, how they’ll think - you have a better shot at finding them. All backed by years of data. This is incredibly fascinating. Encouraging to see what big leaps this field is about to take by adding new data and agent-based models.
- WRITE MORE In an age of AI-assisted writing, is it important for university students to learn how to write? A language scholar’s response is ‘absolutely yes’. There is a lot written about the clarity that writing brings to our selves. The human act of writing is a ‘system of finite resources but infinite combinations’ - a way to think, synthesize, judge the credibility of sources and information and interact with an audience — none of which can be done by AI. I concur.
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