OK last post was musing. This is the synthesis.

People. The world is becoming flat again.

example: Interfaces are becoming flat. Touch screens. Flat screens. Tablets. We are writing and reading on tablets again.

Let’s hope we don’t fall off the wrong edge.

Special thanks to Einat Biran for helping me crystalise!
Image source: 1922 illustration from the Swedish and Norwegian magazine Allers Familj-Journal

The smell of melons once more drifted across the stage.
- Thursday Next The Eyre Affair by the fabulous Jasper Fforde

I was just on Facebook commenting as you do, and I realised they had removed my OK button. Huh? In it’s place in tiny text was a little note saying “press Enter to post your comment”.

Now admittedly this is a small change but it got my thinking about buttons and keys. And texture and feeling. All this new technology at our finger tips, but no differentiation between things.

So I click enter for a comment, enter for a sentence divider…
I click the single round button on my iphone, the rest of the buttons are on touch so they all FEEL the same. There’s no difference between calling my mother, sending an email or playing a game.
There is no sensory difference between my experience.

It’s just well…boring and well…slightly off. I could say I’m hanging on to the old and that’s probably true. And I could also add I’m viewing this through the eyes of someone looking at UI (user interface) but really…don’t you kind of miss buttons and knobs. Even my kitchen cabinets are push and click.

And keys!? My friends car has what looks like a memory stick that you insert and then push a “Go” button…no turn no weird sounds

…it all just…

Smells like melons.

(ie it all seems good and great but “smells slightly wrong”).

today’s observation…40 is the new 20.

“Time-Space-Body and Action” at Gallery L’Attico in Rome, 1972
-
Klaus Rinke

Beauty in action.

thank you alice

I saw this today. It makes me feel calm.
Caribbean Sea, Jamaica, 1980 (c) Hiroshi Sugimoto

ps apologies for the very minimal blog upkeep..

Things are changing. Fast.

Sometimes it can be hard to articulate quite how much I feel that things are changing and those changes are speeding up. Even our (and my own) shift to visuals over words^.

My friend posted the link to the images below on Facebook*.
It portrays visually what I feel.

Things are changing. Fast.

These images are of Mongolian villagers documented by A Yin – the first image is only 2years difference. The second, 5 years. That is a very short space of time.
See more here

Some other examples I’m observing in myself:
- ^Movement to a visual & oral/aural (sound) world – for instance, when was the last time you ‘told a joke’ rather than were sent a joke – comic, cartoon, youtube link
this was foreseen by thinkers like Marshall McLuhan
- Reliance on difference sources for media *another change, how I receive/gather information eg Facebook
- (Over)reliance on smart phone
- “Chatting” online / sms vs calling someone ie voice!
- Shopping online
- Less and less waiting to find things out: “oh I don’t know” “let’s look it up” get out smart phone, read wikipedia entry
- Wikipedia – it’s less than 10 years old!!
- Speed at which I expect things to happen
- Storing documents on google docs / email vs on desktop/computer or shock horror, printing them!
- Typing over writing
- Less and less need to commit things to memory
- Patience and appetite for ‘long’ reading
- Shorter and shorter times between changes – shorter time lines, product life cycles, release of new media, new products, new sites
- “Long term” thinking means 1 year, maybe 2…not 5years, not 20, or 100….
…
The list continues.
I am watching. And observing.

Do you feel it too? Please share your thoughts.

Here is an explanation of WHY from my good friend Paul Schumann

I love fractal-algorithm-geometric patterned things.
Today’s images are a part of Elijah Porter’s inspiring series.
Elijah -I want these on my wall!!

Caught today on But Does It Float.

You have to live spherically–in many directions.
- Fellini

I caught this line while watching a movie yesterday.
It makes me think. Opens me up. Thank you Fellini…

I’ve started to write again. Well I’m sprouting really. It’s chick lit. A bit of a surprise for me too. But it seems working so why not.

And I’ve decided to have a full first draft by end of this year. My Aunty added that it would be published within the new year. Amen.

image via lotta > modern motive

In 2004 my friend Thomer called me a fractal.

As a communicator I am always looking to define myself with clarity.
And hearing of this term was quite a relief. Firstly, fractals are very pretty.
They also are 1. very hard to condense into a precise definition
2. they work on many levels 3. fractal geometry is a branch of mathematics that bridges many areas from art to science and technology.

And that was how I first came into contact with Benoît Mandelbrot, the man responsible for coining the term fractal.

Suffice to say that I do not know Mandelbrot personally, but I am deeply thankful for his discovery of this pretty damn amazing branch of mathematics.

And also, now having read his biography, also much charmed by the innovative maverick he seemed to be!

“If you take the beginning and the end, I have had a conventional career,” he said, referring to his prestigious appointments in Paris and at Yale. “But it was not a straight line between the beginning and the end. It was a very crooked line.”

RIP Benoît Mandelbrot

Obits in:
NYtimes
&
Boing Boing