Plaster casts. Basement, Museum of Classical Archaeology, Peterhouse, Cambridge. 1976. Reprinted 2026. A precocious teenager, student of Classics, I was visiting Cambridge to talk with archaeologist David Clarke. With extraordinary generosity he gave a couple of hours to me to discuss not antiquity, but prehistory, how the field was a corrective and antidote to the…
posts
The Admiral’s House — re-staging power
Seaton Delaval Hall, Northumberland. Built for Admiral George Delaval in 1720. Darkroom reprint of my photo of 2012. A story of land, inheritance, entrepreneurial opportunity, the roots of local power in global interconnections – and quirky radical taste transformed into an archetype of architectural style. [Link] to a previous post. The Delaval family had owned…
On working with AI: reasoned recommendations
Orientation – some recent personal anecdotes and thoughts about AI In May our reunion of H-Star academic collaboration between Stanford and Denmark prompted me to reflect upon AI in research collaboration [Link]. A new white paper from Stanford’s Accelerator for Learning — Responsible Assessment in the AI Era — prompted me to comment that we…
Larry Leifer
Larry Leifer, extraordinary pioneer in design practice and design research, passed away yesterday August 29. Larry was a key figure in what I had hoped Stanford might stand for when I arrived in 1999. He welcomed me into The Learning Lab, Stanford Center for Innovation in Learning, Center for Design Research (CDR), and the Hasso…
Getting on with AI: a factory in Hesse, Germany
With Sabine (Remdisch) I recently spent time at Rittal’s plant in Haiger, Germany — by some measures the most advanced factory in the world manufacturing equipment enclosures for data centers — and I have been thinking about it ever since. What impressed me was not the automation as such. It was the coordination of temporal…
Ovidiana — archaeological theatre
Becoming stone [Link] [Link]