the culture of the Academy – lessons from design thinking

Across on archaeology.org Chris (Witmore) has taken issue with a comment  Tim Ingold has made about the notion of a symmetrical archaeology.[Link] Symmetrical Archaeology? Like many others, Archaeologists regularly  do all they can to separate what they do from what they study, their work in the present from the past, past artifacts from the stories…

Olympics opening – (in)tangible heritage

London – the opening of the 30th Olympiad A bucolic pastoral green and pleasant land succumbing to dark satanic mills, in William Blake’s vision, homage also to Tolkein’s pitting of Hobbiton against Isengard’s tower; Shakespeare’s Tempest declaimed by Brunel on the slopes of a druidic oak-toppped Glastonbury Tor; dreams of Peter Pan and Mary Poppins;…

Paul Ingrassia – 15 cars for America

Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Ingrassia was with our Revs Program yesterday at the VAIL Facility of CARS (the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford). He was sharing with us his superb new book: Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in 15 Cars.   Written in his crisp and elegant prose, the book…

crowds of makers

Maker Faire, San Mateo – [Link] – and see the 2011 Economist article – [Link] 50,00 people and more  attending the latest gathering of geeks, amateur designers, hobbyists, hackers, aspiring inventors, tinkerers, incipient entrepreneurs, electronics experimenters, steampunk enthusiasts, new-age techno-dreamers. Giraffe robots, poetry on a Remington, Arduino contollers, ship models, Makerbot contraptions, customized jeans, zombie…