David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start & Design for Hackers.
What’s the fastest and easiest way to manipulate the characteristics of your brush in Photoshop?
This will save you tons of time when using the brush tool.
Last week, AIA Omaha presented Amory Lovins, one of the authors of Natural Capitalism, who spoke about the concept of Natural Capitalism (the entire book is available online at the Natural Capitalism website).
Natural Capitalism recognizes that there are four types of capital in a functioning economy.
“Capitalism, as practiced, is a financially profitable, nonsustainable aberration in human development. What might be called “industrial capitalism” does not fully conform to its own accounting principles. It liquidates its capital and calls it income. It neglects to assign any value to the largest stocks of capital it employs—the natural resources and living systems, as well as the social and cultural systems that are the basis of human capital.”
Amory also explains that in the first Industrial Revolution, there was a surplus of resources and a shortage of people, and that in the next Industrial Revolution, there is a surplus of people and a shortage of resources.
I have not read the book yet, but I imagine it presents even more working models of Natural Capitalism than even Amory’s lecture did. One good example was Interface Flooring (yes the same Interface Flooring that I created my first carpet tile sample rug from). When you think about it, you don’t want to own carpet. You just want to use it for awhile. Apparently Interface is now providing flooring services. They’ve developed carpets that can be re-manufactured with no waste. They install the carpet, come back every few months and replace the worn tiles (carpet doesn’t wear evenly, of course), and re-manufacture those tiles. The result is much less impact on the environment, and its even more economically efficient.
Amory Lovins also has a house in Old Snowmass, Colorado that has no mechanical (heating) system. Oh, and he farms bananas in that house, and his energy costs are negative…with technology that is 15 years old.
He is a brilliant speaker, and is clearly brilliant in general and I look forward to learning more about his ideas. I will keep you posted.
One of my readers has pointed out to me a Chess game that shows you what it’s thinking. Check it out.
With one eye glued to your TV tonight, glue your other eye to this well-designed interactive map illustrating party distribution for the 2004 election. There are also graphics illustrating past elections, and the progression of approval ratings throughout the campaign. The graphic when you click on “electoral votes” above the map communicates very well.
You may have noticed that I haven’t posted for awhile. Don’t worry, I’m not a blog abandoner, I have been investing my blogging time in transferring my blog from blogger to Movable Type, and it has been a much more involved process than I had anticipated. If you’ve been considering making the move, I suggest that if you are in fact going to do it, do it as soon as possible.
One of my readers has brought my attention to a cartoon that is reminiscent of my previous Don’t You Read My Blog? post.
The copyright is from 2002, so I’m certainly not the first one to notice this trend. It’s funny how much someone can know about what is going on in your life without even talking to you, but rather, reading your blog.
For years, my home computer setup has been in need of an ergonomic overhaul. Not able to find any computer workstations that adequately accommodated my non-traditional setup, I have been using an art table for my computer. To say that it has made computer use undesirable would be an understatement.
I have noticed in looking around at desks of various people in my office, that some people, like myself, take a “Google” approach to organizing: everything is just in one big pile, and when you need something, you just sort through it and find what you need. Other people take the “Yahoo!” approach to organizing: everything is in nice, neat piles, or even filed away by project or what have you.
I dedicated today’s would-be blogging time to researching and writing a comment about Typographygate, the scandal surrounding forged documents about President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard.
As an “expert” I can say these documents were definitely not created with technology that would be available in an office in 1972. As you will see if you read my comment, these documents are forged very badly, so badly I wonder if they meant to make a few mistakes.
I came across The Visual Thesaurus, which is a fascinating tool for examining the relationship between words. This is a great example of Human-Computer Interaction knowledge at work. Sophisticated visualization applications such as this will continue to bring art and technology together, and demand graphic designers that have a much better understanding of technology, psychology, and the relationship between form and space in establishing hierarchy than today’s graphic design curricula tend to offer.