But wait, there’s more.  Interesting background on Stromberg Carleson.

There’s so much I did not know about Steve Job’s as a person, and how much of his success was shaped by a very unique life.

His adoption, raised by working class parents.

His unusual education path, a college dropout… yet a non-dropout who essentially made a conscious decision to create his own education.  Observing classes that were interesting to him and drove his passion, and making that happen by sleeping on the floors of friend’s dorm rooms.

The depth’s of his lows when being fired from Apple and nearly begging an apology for screwing up Apple.

Realizing in hindsight the blessing of failure, and the freedom created by lifting the weight of leadership expertise and corporate success by relinquishing to becoming a “beginner” again.

His study of the art and science of typography design that clearly inspired is attention to elegant technology, creating a unique design centered business culture.

His countercultural experimentation and practice of Zen Buddhism.

And his terrible and rare cancer diagnosis that was both a blessing and curse that directed a long battle filled with hope and day-to-drive to live every day like it was his last.

I’m sure many of you already know some of this backstory.  It’s explains much and is also a reminder of how much our life experience shapes who we are.  No matter your view of Apple or the Man, spend the 15 minutes of your life watching this video.  It’s worth every second.

“Don’t be trapped by Dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.  Don’t let the noise of others opinions drown out your inner voice. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.. they somehow already know what you truly want to become.  Everything else is secondary.”

[RIP Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011)]

*more inspiring quotes at Mashable.

[Repost from my entry at the openexchange.org.]

Created by Google Creative Labs,”3 Dream’s In Black” is part art experiment, musical collaboration, part CGI video and breakthrough web coding assignment. Driving a culture of experimentation, all Googler’s are encouraged to pursue experiments both relatable and non-relatable to Google’s business. All to drive a passion of innovation.

How Google makes innovation part of the cultural fabric, not a project or a siloed process.

• Democratizing Ideas. Engage “the people.” Have people magnify the mania and become your evangelists. The user is your marketer.
• Gaining Credibility through the right partners: With finesse of smart salesmanship to make ideas happen.
• Challenging conventions. Question how things should be done (e.g., YouTube and the Guggenheim??)
• Don’t do marketing. Solve problems.
• Know the user. Know the magic. Connect the two. What’s the emotion behind the idea? * taken from Jeffrey Davis’s blog, post his visit to Google Creative Labs.

Rome: 3 Dream’s in Black is an impressive feat with famous musicians including DJ Dangermouse of Gnarls Barkley fame, Jack White and Nora Jones. For most of us it might appear interesting, but not far from what we expect from video games and animated movies. The true stunner, is that this was essentially built with web code, “Web GL-JavaScript” and HTML 5. And.. through a Google Chrome Browser, you can steer and immerse yourself within it.

Amazing. Say hello to the future, the 3D virtual web experience.

Great stuff under the direction Chris Milk, Google Creative Director, Aaron Koblin and @radical media. More about the project at Mashable.

Math makes my head hurt.  In fact I’m horrible at it.  I can barely remember phone numbers much less memorize functions and derivatives.  Just ask any of my past calculus professors, I repeatedly had several of them.

Enter Mandlebrot, something of a rogue in math circles.  One that sought out the patterns in things around him and was intensely curious.  Only in the past few years had I been exposed to his work and I found it amazing. He was a technologist (working for IBM) and and academic (later a Yale professor) and something of an outsider who didn’t care much about making the establishment uncomfortable. Here’ a wonderful quote from his NYtimes Obit.

“He knew everybody, with interests going off in every possible direction,” Professor Mumford said. “Every time he gave a talk, it was about something different.”

He saw science in nature and nature in science and was a master at makes sense of the complex and presenting it back in genius simplicity.  Again from the NYTimes:

“Using fractal geometry, he argued, the complex outlines of clouds and coastlines, once considered unmeasurable, could now “be approached in rigorous and vigorous quantitative fashion.” Instead of rigorously proving his insights in each field, he said he preferred to “stimulate the field by making bold and crazy conjectures ”

I’d always been much more of a fan of geometry, it’s seeming logic bound to an aesthetic-visual mathematics.  I think if I came back as a quant geek, it would be quite nice to be the second coming of the ‘Brot. 

“I decided to go into fields where mathematicians would never go because the problems were badly stated,” Dr. Mandelbrot said. “I have played a strange role that none of my students dare to take.”

[Mandlebrots NYTimes obituary here]

[Seminal work. The Fractal Geometry of Nature on Amazon]

[Google Gallery of Fractal Imagery]

[Video tip off, courtesy of David Walker of 302 Designs]

Posted via web from experiencefreak

via baltimoreprintstudios.com

[via @neilperkin and @swissmiss]

Posted via web from reeboot’s posterous

via aiga.org

Continuing my latest dive into design fiction, check out this collaboration between Penguin Book and Six To Start an experiential design firm in London. Perhaps a bit ahead of it’s time (launched in 2008) these stories used Google maps and other immersive online media, rolling out over the course of six weeks. Very cool concept for marketers and advertisers to think about as a case study when creating experiential narratives.

See more via the AIGA blog: We Design Stories: The Digital Fiction of Six to Start by Holly Willis.

Posted via web from reeboot’s posterous

Design Fiction has been on my mind as of late. Particularly after hearing Bruce Sterling’s thinking about it’s role in experience design, product innovation and technology as well as other’s speaking from a designers point of view at SXSW 2010.

What follows is a design fiction exercise, wrapping a narrative around thoughts about the weird, wired world we live in and the tremendous social implications it has for possible futures.  William Gibson I’m not, but digest this and tell me what you think it means to us now and possibly what it could mean for the evolution of the web.   Indulge me while I surf through themes of the social web, digital immortality, privacy, an open data world, artificial intelligence and more, not in a blog post commentary but instead in a blurb of storytelling.

I’m Jack Meta and I’m a repo man of the digital conscience.

Let me give you the 30 second update. Life got pretty weird for the bio-brains soon after the AI-Data Flux. Once the open-conscious hippies broke the Googleplex server-farm wall and data burst through the behavioral floodgates, meatspace humanity found itself standing around more naked than a politician post-sex scandal. Funny that nobody saw their personal Peyton Place hidden in all those facebook posts, tweets and ISP logs long ago. Just plain stupid that nobody figured their conscious would get reassembled from all that data, through code lumps that algorithm-geeks created in their hobbyist spare time. You can be damn sure no one would want think about little Bobby and Sue talking to your long “dead”, pixellated great grandood-self in a kitsch retro-quaint Ed Hardy shirt, your abrupt and embarrassing re-entry into the world 70 years into the future. They didn’t think of any of this, not until open-data and uber-AI hit them in the skull like a mallet anyway.

But I’m a bitstream myself, so far be it for me to judge what the bio-cell’s thought about the weird world of digital immortality back in the day. I’m just here to clean up their act once they hit the biological brick wall and surrender their brains and personal lifestream to the meta-sphere.

What’s my game? I’m an identity moving van pulling up to my client’s scattered persona-attics to steal back their life in little bits and bytes. Then I spit polish, metatag and redflag pieces of digital conscience so it ain’t so boring, confusing or just plain dirty once it hits the AI’s. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not much of a combinatorial artist so I leave your final coming out party good-looks to my persona stylist biz partners. It seems the cyberpunk jokers that plugged me into the meta-sphere to do this job secretly watched antique’s roadshow a hundred years back. Surfing through the digital-conscience flea market is in my genes.

Anyhoo, good meeting you mate and welcome to the ‘sphere. I can tell you’ll get the hang of things pretty quick once you shake that linear, cerebral cortex processing hangover. I’ve gotta get back to work to pull this boring experiencefreak.com assignment. Mundane crap I tell ya and a pisser given it hit my approval cue right before the Charlie Sheen assignment of a lifetime hit the market. Just my luck. Now that would’ve been hella more hilarious than this grey haired, tech-fetish archival and family photo-pixel antique show.

See you ‘round. And remember, watch where you leave your digital droppings now that you’re back in action.

More on design fiction:

Near Futures Lab

Interactions Magazine

An Essay on Design Fiction

]]> http://experiencefreak.com/blog/2010/04/18/info-agent-man/feed/ 1 http://experiencefreak.com/blog/2010/04/06/breaking-the-chain-of-busy/ http://experiencefreak.com/blog/2010/04/06/breaking-the-chain-of-busy/#comments Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:13:21 +0000 andyhunter http://experiencefreak.com/blog/?p=1242 I’ve never been a huge Gary Vee follower, but right on for this video.  I think it represents emotions many feel after being so immersed in social media, the info rich web and culture of personal branding world.  The addictive nature, the distractions and the overwhelming opportunity to interact with others can stretch people to extremes.

I see this as a tipping point in culture, not just for Vee but for many early entries into social technology.  Jaron Lanier, Nicholas Carr and others have seen, felt and are worried about how technology is effecting our ability to think, connect and be creative.

Get zen Gary, read, think.  Get at it.

[h/t to @alexknowshtml - dangerouslyawesome.com ]