[ recap ] Last week we looked at Saul Bass’ pitch to Bell Systems (1983) and the "Quickborner Team" revolutionising office spaces in post-war Germany: "Bürolandschaft." [ thoughts ] I keep coming back to post-war Italian design and advertisements. I think there’s something beautiful about the aesthetics. I feel like it’s something we’ve lost. Post-war Italy moved through what became known as the "economic miracle", especially between the late 1950s and early 1960s, with rapid industrial...
20 days ago • 2 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media and John Berger's four-part BBC series, Ways of Seeing, and how we can use these ideas prompting AI. [ thoughts ] I am pulled, lately, by what I believe is an incredibly innovative and creative period that ran from the 1950s into the late 1980s. Today we’re going to look at Saul Bass pitching Bell System in 1969 and the Quickborner Team redesigning the office in 1958. Saul Bass was a graphic designer, born in the Bronx in...
27 days ago • 4 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at Orwell's 1946 warning that bad language produces bad thinking, and a Cornell study from March showing workers who rated corporate nonsense as "business savvy" scored worse on analytical tasks. [ thoughts ] Marshall McLuhan wrote one line in 1964: the medium is the message. McLuhan was a Canadian professor of English literature who spent the 1950s analysing advertising, mass culture and early television age. Understanding Media came out in 1964 and his single...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked analog resurgence and Walter Benjamin's "aura": what gets lost when art is mechanically reproduced? 2026 answer: people choose what can't be copied. [ thoughts ] Read this sentence and tell me what it means: "As a global leader grounded in a mission to growth-hack and circle back to the human spirit, I have always aspired to grasp exponential connections." Take a moment. What is this person actually saying? The answer: nothing. That sentence was generated by a...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
[ recap ] Last we looked at one of my current favourite websites is Antikythera, "What is Intelligence?" by Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception." [ thoughts ] "Look to the past: some of the best ways to spark creativity and innovation come from revisiting old ideas." Walter Benjamin wrote "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in 1935. His argument: mechanical reproduction strips away the "aura" of original art - the unique presence, the physical...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at David Bowie's advice: never play to the gallery, and if you feel safe in what you're making, you're not working in the right area. George Hotz's essay argued that AI will produce all the derivative, safe work for free. What's left is work that only someone with conviction could make. [ thoughts ] One of my current favourite websites is Antikythera - a site that documents ancient computing mechanisms, consciousness research, and intelligence theory. The site...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at Claude Shannon's creative thinking restatement technique: write the problem ten different ways. Brian Eno's axis thinking: the creative moment happens when you recognize new axes exist. [ thoughts ] In 1997, David Bowie released Earthling -- drum and bass, industrial noise, processed vocals. Not what anyone expected from the man who wrote Heroes. He was fifty. In an interview promoting the record, he gave one of the most direct pieces of creative advice on...
2 months ago • 2 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at who gets remembered and who decides. Marysia Lewandowska's Women's Audio Archive preserving feminist conversations and female group manifestos: VNS MATRIX, Riot Grrrl, Guerrilla Girls, Pussy Riot, Xenofeminism. The pattern: when systems won't document you, you document yourself. [ thoughts ] Inspiration is unreliable. Sometimes it shows up. Often it doesn't. I've been reading two essays this week that both make the same point: you don't wait for inspiration....
2 months ago • 3 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at the Whole Earth Catalog as Stewart Brand's curatorial (artistic) act, hand-selecting tools, tested claims, vouched for results. Marcel Duchamp's "The Creative Act" argument that the artist is a mediumistic being - the viewer completes the work. The question both raised: who decides what gets built, and for what purpose? [ thoughts ] Today is International Women's Day. Rather than the usual platitudes, I want to talk about who gets remembered and who decides....
3 months ago • 3 min read