On the design of meringues (nom)
January 28, 2010
naturally, everyone who has seen Helvetica and Objectified is knowledgeable about design.
I love realizing that almost anything around you has been thought up and manufactured by someone. Just imagine, somewhere on this earth there is at least one person who does nothing all day but operate the fascinating machine that produces the little nets they put oranges in and an engineer who thought up and made that machine.
Although it’s not always apparent, all things around you have also been designed, not in the sense of how something works but how it looks. Sometimes this has been done consciously, sometimes without the designer at hand realising it. This last group is very interesting to look at, because the design process is then steered not by creative thinking but by what things looks like at that moment and what is unconsciously percieved to be beautiful.
Mom has, as long as I can remember, made meringues, a simple dessert made by beating eggwhites and sugar, putting that on a plate in little heaps and drying them in the oven for a few hours. The recipe has never changed: they’ve always been deliciously sweet, crunchy on the outside and mellow on the inside. What has changed, is the shape of the meringues, the way they are put on the plate. They have, along with the perception of what is beautiful, evolved. The first meringues I can remember (probably from around 1996) had this shape:
They are quite complicated and baroque compared to what is perceived as beautiful nowadays.
Later (2000-2004) the design simplified, less rococo, a smooth surface but still somewhat symetric and artificial:
And this is the way the meringues nowadays look:
They are now as unartificial as possible, thrown from afar on to the parchment paper and put in the oven without too much tampering. They look completely different from the ones I remember giving me my first toothaches.
It’s fun to see trends in things were no one would bother to look for them, but it also means everything manufactured by man will once look dated and old. Reminds you of the impermanence of things…
Then again, if you eat them, no one will ever know.
…that all packets are created equal
November 10, 2009
I will refrain myself from arguing for and listing the benefits of net neutrality, as that has been done better and more elaborate by others than i ever could. I am of the opinion that anyone who has used and understands if only parts of the full meaning of the world wide web has no other option then to oppose the notion that the space through which I am now speaking to you can not be anything other than free, unregulated and unmeddled with.
The ACTA treaty, for which the latest negotiations were held just a few days ago in Korea and the horrific rules it plans to impose to supposedly stop piracy and the ‘Internet Freedom Act’, a bill proposed by American Senator John McCain to stop the government from forcing ISP’s to treat all information going through their cables equal are only two examples of how this freedom is threatened
I strongly believe that the guarantee of net neutrality could be one of the most influential historical moments in our lifetime, one that will set in stone the inventions made by the the information revolution.
Why then are these laws being imposed or planned without larger public outcry? Corporate greed, their sole reason, can only go as far as the populous lets it. As long as there is no education on this matter so that a large enough percentage of the public can cry out in horror, our rights will never be safe. We will have to to start a campaign to inform people who are unaware that their rights are being violated using commercials and ads in newspapers. Once everyone knows what net neutrality means and understands its value, ISP’s and governments will back off.
I beg you, educate me…
October 28, 2009
Our higher educational system is flawed in many ways. Two of these flaws particularly grab my attention. The first is that in a digital and constantly online world our universities still require their students to memorize facts that are just a Google-search away. The second is that, at least for the educational system in Europe, these universities produce people with a very restricted worldview, or more specifically: these institutions do not play a large enough role in countering this narrow-mindedness.
Iʼve been reading Jeff Jarvisʼ “What Would Google Do”, in which he looks at how various businesses and institutions can make their step into the “digital age”. One of the institutions he talks about is universities, a specific section of the book which he also put on his blog in February:
“Who needs a university when we have Google? All the world’s digital knowledge is available at a search. We can connect those who want to know with those who know. We can link students to the best teachers for them (who may be fellow students). We can find experts on any topic. Textbooks need no longer be petrified on pages but can link to information and discussion; they can be the products of collaboration, updated and corrected, answering questions and giving quizzes, even singing and dancing. There’s no reason my children should be limited to the courses at one school; even now, they can get coursework online from no less than MIT and Stanford. And there’s no reason that I, long out of college, shouldn’t take those courses, too.” Read the rest of this entry »
When we are old farts
October 20, 2009
Recently, I had a long conversation with my mother and grandmother about how hard it is to use new technologies to change and/or better the way non-tech people work. When someone has worked as a clerk for thirty years, he or she won’t accept a new, digital, system being put in to place which alters the way work has been done. I wonder how this problem will evolve as our generation and the ones that come after that will have jobs and find ourselves confused by new technologies.
A pessimist will ask: How much more will the nature of what we do with computers and networks change? In the 1960s computers were used for, well, computing, nowadays they are used primarily as a means of communcication. Will the difference between now and the 2050s be as massive as that shift? If the revolution of the last decade evens out, we won’t have to worry about learning new technologies, because there won’t be anything radically new. Yes, the core technology itself might possibly not bring anything radically new, but the effect of the inventions of the last decades will only be felt when we figure out what cool stuff we can do with those. Read the rest of this entry »
