Our class (with Meghann Dryer (IDEO) and Bernie Roth) starts up again today in Stanford’s design school … Design that makes a difference . A key challenge this time round – just what is it to change?
Author: Michael Shanks
hybrid Humanities – Ben Cullen
On the anniversary of the untimely and sudden death of Ben Cullen in 1995. [Link] [Link] [Link] Ben Cullen thought beyond conventional distinctions under a fresh evolutionary notion of humanity as deeply hybrid – material and immaterial, personhood and artifact, species and thing. Humanity: an undecidable, in Derrida’s sense. The lens through which he approached…
Boonville, California
I have been photographing these old apple trees for over ten years now. Relics of an outdated rural economy. Location – Mountain View Road, Boonville, Anderson Valley, northern California. The valley is now increasingly dominated by vineyards.
presence and authenticity – routes to civility
A perceptive item in the Guardian yesterday, from Simon Jenkins: Welcome to the post-digital world, an exhilarating return to civility – via Facebook and Lady Gaga. The point – our contemporary world is a mixed reality – witness the growing importance (again) of “live events”, even as we are more connected digitally: A week in California…
ornament – overlooked and revisited
I have just received a copy of Diana Newall and Christina Unwin’s marvelous book The Chronology of Pattern [Link] – just published in the UK by Bloomsbury/A & C Black. We still radically separate ornament from style and meaning, treating it as superfluous and superficial, yet it is the primary experience we have of much…
Ruin memories
I have just received a copy of World Crisis in Ruin; the Archaeology of the Former Soviet Missile Sites in Cuba from Mats Burström, Anders Gustafsson and Håkan Karlsson. Another fascinating archaeology of the contemporary past. The 1962 Missile Crisis is a well-known episode in the Cold War and twentieth-century history. It is documented in…
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