When Google Speaks, and When we Speak About Google

Occasionally, people at google write something long and interesting and when they do I tend to find what they say well informed and mostly true to form. Some people argue that they are being hypocritical however I find that they are generally being human. 

In any case, recently, Jonathan Rosenberg, wrote a nice long post about openness as a market strategy, how it should all come together and how google plays or at least hopes to play in this game. Have a look at the Meaning of Open to see what I am talking about. 

An interesting piece, posted by a non googler, Devin Coldewey  from Crunchgear, made the comparison between google and the roman empire which ended up also being mostly about openness and creating contextual improvements, not just making better products. Read Google, Rome and Empire. 

I have posted about these kinds of things before, in particular, one of my favorite articles from google, also from Jonathan Rosenberg, as a similar kind of state of play perspective from earlier this year, From the Height of This Place. 

I guess I quite like Jonathan Rosenberg's writing. What do you think of all this?

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Programers and Designers

The romantic image of an über-programmer is someone who fires up Emacs, types like a machine gun, and delivers a flawless final product from scratch. A more accurate image would be someone who stares quietly into space for a few minutes and then says “Hmm. I think I’ve seen something like this before.”

via johndcook.com

This is a snippet from a short and interesting piece on why programmers are not payed biased on productivity. I think he raises some interesting points and I think this snippet is sort of the key to it. Interestingly I think that this kind of situation applies to designers too. Good design is often about building your own kind of efficiency out of awareness of design in general.

What do you think?

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Art Lebedev - designers who admit to working

via artlebedev.com

I really love Art Lebedev studios. Not because they are the best, nor because they are the most interesting or the company with most valuable perspectives. What I love about them is the playful connection with consumer design, something that very few consumer product design companies seem to have. However there is more that makes them a valuable company. They regularly report on process and on conclusions about design in a rather interesting context.

In this image we see a new product called Fleximus they have designed as a kind of flexible camera. On it's website they provide a design brief, which is wonderfully simple "Problem: Design a flexible camera," and they also provide a link to their process which is arguably more interesting than the product its self. Conveniently they go further than simply telling you how they did it and have a rather nice selection of progress images. In this way Art Lebedev is a model design house.

Another effort of significant value is one of their blogs, Mandership. This blog is seldom updated but when it is, they speak of great conclusions or suggestions about doing design. Quite a great think I say.

What do you think of this company?

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노래방 - Learning to Sing Again

In korea 노래방 (norebang) which literally means singing room and translates to Karaoke (which does not mean singing room in japanese interestingly) is rather popular and people often go late in the evenings and sing with their friends in private rooms. Several interesting things emerge from this.

1. People often start singing at a young age and practice frequently. One friend told me she used to practice songs hundreds of times each in order to be able to sing them well. In any case, the result is that some singers are exceptionally good. Several of my friends are so good that hearing them has a physiological affect. This is not just party tallent this is incredible, well practiced expertise with years of practice to back it. In some cases I think the 10000 hour mark would have been met. 
2. Because in Korea there is a strong connection between business succes and night time activities, drinking and the like, it is expected that you will be able to sing well with your colleagues. For this reason there are 노래방 schools designed to teach lader climbing executives to sing more competitively. 
3. There are many levels of quality and expense for singing rooms and there are various nefarious activities which sometimes occur within, however, an interesting fact is that there are even very small singing rooms, for one or perhaps two people. These are often found in arcades or a similarly game oriented kind of location. I have yet to try this but it seems interesting and good for practising. 

In any case, I have lived here, and in China where similar singing rooms exist, for some time now and of course I have been to the 노래방 quite many times. I have however, until recently not been very good at it. One issue is that I spent many years in voice lesons and choral groups of different kinds however I did not do much solo work and I did very little  singing of non classical or a capella music. Additionally, as a child I listened almost exclusively to classical music and thus know almost none of the english language music these venues offer.The singing rooms of course offer words however they do not offer a score or some other indication of timing and pitch so if you do not know a song it is not easy to site read it, which I could probably do in most instances.

Anyway, I am now starting to practice several songs, in the hope I can become a rich executive in Korea, with the help of some Korean friends. As soon as I am as good as the average Korean I will share a video I think. (this will probably take years) 

The images are from a highly stylised singing room I was at with 2 friends several days ago. The thing that looks like a fan, but is not, is actually a heater wich constitues of a metal paraboloid and coil that reflects eat off it into the room. These are common here, though I have not seen them in the west (granted I have only really lived in warm places, Florida, and Australia in the west). They do also often oscillate like the similarly fashioned fans do and they produce a huge amount of heat.

Tell me about your wonderful times in similar situations. 

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