Working with Brian Eno on design principles for streets An Article by Dan Hill & Brian Eno medium.com Think like a gardener, not an architect: design beginnings, not endings Unfinished = fertile Artists are to cities what worms are to soil. A city’s waste should be on public display. Make places that are easy for people to change and adapt (wood and plaster, as opposed to steel and concrete.) Places which accommodate the very young and the very old are loved by everybody else too. Low rent = high life Make places for people to look at each other, to show off to each other. Shared public space is the crucible of community. A really smart city is the one that harnesses the intelligence and creativity of its inhabitants. collectionsurbanismstreetscitieswastegardens
Enjoying the garden together A Quote by Brian Eno blog.ayjay.org And essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden. One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life. What this means, really, is a rethinking of one’s own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included. creativitymusicmakingartgardens
The Microsoft Sound A Quote by Brian Eno www.sfgate.com The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long." I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel. In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time. musicconstraintstimecreativity
Scenius A Definition by Brian Eno kk.org Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius. The Small GroupMutual appreciationTossing an idea around culturegeniuscreativitycollaboration
The small web is beautiful An Essay by Ben Hoyt benhoyt.com I believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for the “small web” as well as the small software and architectures that power it. Why aim small?Features and complexitySolving the problem of software bloatRaw size isn't enough Rediscovering the Small Web wwwmicrosites
Why aim small? Why aim small in this era of fast computers with plenty of RAM? A number of reasons, but the ones that are most important to me are: Fewer moving parts. It’s easier to create more robust systems and to fix things when they do go wrong. Small software is faster. Fewer bits to download and clog your computer’s memory. Reduced power consumption. This is important on a “save the planet” scale, but also on the very local scale of increasing the battery life of your phone and laptop. The light, frugal aesthetic. That’s personal, I know, but as you’ll see, I’m not alone. performancesystemsconservation
Features and complexity Niklaus Wirth of Pascal fame wrote a famous paper in 1995 called A Plea for Lean Software. His take is that “a primary cause for the complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want”, and “when a system’s power is measured by the number of its features, quantity becomes more important than quality”. A Plea for Lean SoftwareSpeed is a featureRequirements proliferation featurescomplexity
Solving the problem of software bloat But instead of just complaining, how do we actually solve this problem? Concretely, I think we need to start doing the following: Care about size: this sounds obvious, but things only change when people think they’re important. Measure: both your executable’s size, and your program’s memory usage. You may want to measure over time, and make it a blocking issue if the measurements grow more than x% in a release. Or you could hold a memory-reduction sprint every so often. Language: choose a language that has a chance. Remove: cut down your feature set. Aim for a small number of high-quality features. My car can’t fly or float, and that’s okay – it drives well. Say no to new features: unless they really fit your philosophy, or add more than they cost over the lifetime of your project. Dependencies: understand the size and complexity of each dependency you pull in. Use only built-in libraries if you can.
Raw size isn't enough A few months ago there was a sequence of posts to Hacker News about various “clubs” you could post your small website on: the 1MB Club, 512KB Club, 250KB Club, and even the 10KB Club. I think those are a fun indicator of renewed interested in minimalism, but I will say that raw size isn’t enough – a 2KB site with no real content isn’t much good, and a page with 512KB of very slow JavaScript is worse than a snappy site with 4MB of well-chosen images. ...[Instead, it's about] an “ethos of small”. It’s caring about the users of your site: that your pages download fast, are easy to read, have interesting content, and don’t load scads of JavaScript for Google or Facebook’s trackers. minimalismcontentsize