One of my favorite definitions of “hacking” is the creative reuse of tools for new and unexpected purposes. Hacking is using your email account as a hard drive, using your bicycle seat to open a beer, using Minecraft’s red bricks to create a calculator in the game.
The opposite of hacking is marketing. Marketing tells you that this particular non-stick pan is the pan you’ll use to make omelettes, and you’ll do it in the morning dressed in fashionable clothing in a nice kitchen. It includes a photo and inspirational copywriting to drive this home. Marketing dictates a style, context, and purpose for even the most general-purpose products. This narrative needs to be specific so that you can readily imagine it: it’s you, in an Airbnb, laughing with friends.
Technology is seeing a little return to complexity. Dreamweaver gave way to hand-coding websites, which is now leading into Webflow, which is a lot like Dreamweaver. Evernote give way to minimal Markdown notes, which are now becoming Notion, Coda, or Craft. Visual Studio was “disrupted” by Sublime Text and TextMate, which are now getting replaced by Visual Studio Code. JIRA was replaced by GitHub issues, which is getting outmoded by Linear. The pendulum swings back and forth, which isn’t a bad thing
A piece of milled plexiglass acting as a projecting lens; via the Computer Graphics and Geometry Lab at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
New milling techniques applied to glass and plexiglass panels could be used to “create windows that are also cryptic projectors, summoning ghostly images from sunlight.”
[Pauly and Bompas] hope that the technique will be used in architectural design, to create windows that mould sunlight and throw images or patterns onto walls or floors,” which, if timed, milled, and manipulated just right, could produce a slowly animated sequence of images being projected by an otherwise empty window during different times of day.