Miscellany

Thanks for the CBC Books blog for including The Casual Optimist in their list of 10 ‘Book Blogs We Appreciate’ earlier this week. It is always nice to be appreciated — I only hope I can live up to the billing… :-)

The Story of Eames Furniture – Written and designed by Marilyn Neuhart together with her husband John, who both worked with the Eames Office from the 1950′s until 1978, the year Charles Eames’s died. Published later this month by Gestalten, the book comes in two full-colour volumes with a slipcase.

The Future of the Future — William Gibson interviewed in The Atlantic:

I think that our future has lost that capital F we used to spell it with. The science fiction future of my childhood has had a capital F—it was assumed to be an American Future because America was the future. The Future was assumed to be inherently heroic, and a lot of other things, as well… I’m not going all Sex Pistols, shouting No Future!—I’m suggesting that we’re becoming more like Europeans, who have always retrofitted their ruins, who’ve always known that everyone lives in someone else’s future and someone else’s past.

Respect for the Users — Jay Rosen‘s inaugural lecture to incoming students at Sciences Po école du journalisme in Paris earlier this month:

The Web effortlessly records what people do with it. Therefore it is easy to measure user behavior: what people are interested in, what they are searching for, clicking on, turning to… right now. What should a smart journalists do with this “live” information?… [Y]ou should listen to demand, but also give people what they have no way to demand because they don’t know about it yet. In fact, there is a relationship between these things.  The better you are at listening to demand, the more likely it is that the users will listen to you when you say to them: you may not think this is important or interesting, but trust me… it matters. Or: “this is good.” Ignoring what the users want is dumb in one way; editing by click rate is dumb in a different way. Respect for the users lies in between these two.

And finally…

Graphic designer James Patrick Gibson talks to Babelgum about his photoblog New Type York , an archive of images of typographic artifacts — signs, directions and building inscriptions — around New York City (via DesignRelated):

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