economics
Baumol’s cost disease
Small economies
The economic value of old buildings
The mirror-image economy
You cannot consume what is not produced
The Fetish of human life
Avant-Garde and Kitsch
The trend is your friend 'til the bend at the end
The amorality of Web 2.0
An Essay by Nicholas CarrThe Internet is changing the economics of creative work – or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture – and it’s doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it’s created by amateurs rather than professionals, it’s free. And free trumps quality all the time.
Tokenize This
An Artwork by Benjamin GrosserDifferent from the typical website whose URLs act as persistent indexes to a page and its contents, Tokenize This destroys each work right after its creation. While the unique digital object remains viewable by the original visitor for as long as they leave their browser tab open, any subsequent attempt to copy, share, or view that URL in another tab, browser, or system, leads to a “404 Not Found” error. In other words, Tokenize This generates countless digital artifacts that can only be viewed or accessed once.
Hints towards a non-extractive economy
An Article by Matt WebbThere’s a movement called the circular economy which is about designing services that don’t include throwing things away. There is no “away.”
A non-extractive economy is going to look very different to today’s economy. These points feel opposed somehow but they are part of the same movement:
- With CupClub, it’s all about infrastructure.
- With the battery-free Game Boy, it’s untethered from infrastructure: once manufactured, no nationwide electricity grid is required to play.
We’ll need better tools to track and measure. There will be new patterns for new types of services. New technologies to build new products. New language. So it’s fascinating seeing the pieces gradually come together.
The psychology of a discount
An Article by John MaedaFound on a wall.
The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.
Back to the Drawing Board
The lost art of drawing for engineers and architects.
- You can almost tell which software they were designed in
- Conversational drawing
- The effort heuristic
- Tablets have caught up
You can almost tell which software they were designed in
Tatiana von Preussen, cofounder of London practice vPPR Architects, says that certain software comes with constraints that encourage a particular style:
“Something I’ve noticed with new buildings is that you can almost tell which software they were designed in. For instance, if you take Revit, it’s very hard to freely create non-orthogonal, non-linear geometries, and it’s very easy to create repetitive elements, so it lends itself to a particular way of building.”
Conversational drawing
A skilled draughtsman guides design conversations by selecting and emphasizing details in a way that computer programmes cannot. Ron Slade, author of Sketching for Engineers and Architects and a structural director at WSP in London, calls it “conversational drawing”. He notes how botany field guides are always based on detailed drawings rather than photographs — as much for what they leave out as for what they show. “Extraneous material that might exist in a photograph is eliminated. It may be important to pick out and illustrate particular areas and leave other parts in sketchy or broad outline.”
The effort heuristic
Psychologists have noted that people tend to place greater artistic value on images when they can see the work that has gone into them — a tendency known as the “effort heuristic”. They are also more likely to connect emotionally with the work if they can detect the human hand, says Goldsmiths’ Chamberlain. “There’s an argument that if we see a brush stroke, we almost recreate it, and that’s part of the connection we feel with the artist — you can feel the intention.”
Perhaps to capitalize on this, some architects now show presentation drawings that look hand-drawn but are actually generated entirely by computer. “It’s totally fake,” says Brillhart. “They just take a computer image into Photoshop and put filters over it to make it look like it’s drawn by hand. It’s kind of amusing — instead of just sitting down and drawing for an hour, they spend eight hours making it look like a hand drawing.”
Tablets have caught up
But in the past couple of years, Brennan believes that tablets have caught up, with apps such as Apple’s ProCreate and Morpholio’s Trace becoming far more responsive to the user’s marks. “Tablets didn’t used to have that immediate response, from brain to eye to hand to pen to paper. A half-second delay has a huge impact on how you think — it causes you to stumble. But now that lag’s gone, it’s almost the same as drawing with pen on paper. You don’t need to engage with the airbrushes or other features — just use it in its purest form.” The stylus, too, far more convincingly apes a manual pen: “You’re able to tune it to almost replicate your favourite pen — and it doesn’t run out of ink.
Chetwood is an iPad devotee, using it to produce fantastical urban artworks as well as architecture. Far from hindering the drawing process, he believes tablets will give rise to a new era of creative drawing. “A lot of people say technology and computers are taking away the true art of drawing. That’s rubbish, it releases sketching. You can move so much quicker and change things much more quickly, and it keeps a record of what you’re doing. The control is just brilliant.” The polished glass surface is the only flaw, but textured acetates applied to the screen can make it feel more like paper.