Technology

Nancy Levinson|Essays

Design Indaba 2012

Design Indaba 2012 gathered creative people from graphic and product design, architecture and landscape, film and video, not to mention Danish gastronomy and Bollywood movies.

Rick Poynor|Essays

John McHale and the Expendable Ikon

Artist, graphic designer, information theorist, architectural critic, sociologist, futurist: it’s time to rediscover John McHale.

Alexandra Lange|Essays

Round Thermostats and Crystal Lanterns, Revisited

Old designs, new tricks: updates on lawsuits filed against the new Nest thermometer, and on behalf of midcentury masterpiece Manufacturers Hanover.

Owen Edwards|Essays

Designers Leap, Users Lag

Trying to meet the challenges designers and engineers set for us is pretty much hopeless, though we can have a lot of fun trying.

John Thackara|Essays

Virtual Boring Agent

The Virtual Boarding Agent Orly Airport in Paris. It's spooky, clever and very well executed — and most people seem to ignore it after a first casual glance.

John Thackara|Essays

A Reading List for Mr. Monti

When the new Italian Prime Minister, Mr. Mario Monti, gave his acceptance speech to the Italian Senate before Christmas, he used the word "growth" 28 times and the word "energy" — well, zero times.

Prachi Khandekar|British Telecom

[MB][BT] Scripting The Future Of Telephony

A Look at the Formalized Language of Telephone Operators.

Michael Erard|Essays

What I Didn’t Write About When I Wrote About Quitting Facebook

The author writes about the genre you could call the Social Media Exile essay.

Sarah Handelman|British Telecom

[MB][BT] Shorthand Science and Magic Lessons

The promotional portrayal of telephone technology.

John Thackara|Essays

Turn-Key Food Hives

There's almost no contact between the health apps crowd and the food system crowd.

Rick Poynor|Essays

This Post has Been Declared a Link-free Zone

Links can greatly enrich an online text, but are they also a counterproductive distraction from reading?

Owen Edwards|Essays

A Demanding Man: Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was more like a great architect than a corporate CEO. Yet, there are those who ask, "Isn't the ultimate measure of a human being the way they treat other people?" In the case of Steve Jobs, this requires some reflection.