The getaway to end all getaways Any attempt to track down the perfect getaway is made all the more complex because almost everything we know about burglary—including how they did (or did not) get away—comes from the burglars we’ve caught. As sociologist R. I. Mawby pithily phrases this dilemma, “Known burglars are unrepresentative of burglars in general.” Great methodological despair is hidden in such a comment. Studying burglary is thus a strangely Heisenbergian undertaking, riddled with uncertainty and distorted by moving data points. The getaway to end all getaways—the one that leaves us all scratching our heads—to no small extent remains impossible to study. Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar's Guide to the City failure
The Evolution of Useful Things A Book by Henry Petroski Here, then, is the central idea: the form of made things is always subject to change in response to their real or perceived shortcomings, their failures to function properly. This principle governs all invention, innovation, ingenuity. Spike and sponShaped and reshapedForm follows failureTheir wrongness is somehow more immediateA small corner of the world of things+23 More The evolution of devices formfunctioninventionprogressfailure
My Anti-Resumé An Article by Monica Byrne monicacatherine.com A couple years ago I was having dinner with a playwright, Bekah Brunstetter, and her director David Shmidt Chapman. We talked about how rejection is just part of the landscape for all beginning artists, no matter how talented or hardworking they might be or how successful they might appear. David said he’d love to publish his “anti-résumé” someday—a list of all the things he didn’t get. Spreadsheet Portfolios for UX Designers workfailure
Things that don't scale An Article by Benedict Evans www.ben-evans.com Maybe the internet is due for a wave of things that don’t scale at all. In that light, I’ve been fascinated by ‘Morioka Shoten’ in Tokyo - a bookshop that sells only one book at a time. This is retail as anti-logistics - as a reaction against the firehose, and the infinite replication of Amazon. Before the internet that would only work in a very dense city, but, again, the internet is the densest city on earth, so how far do we scale the unscalable? Morioka ShotenStepping out of the firehose scalewwwbusinesscraftmicrosites