THEORY IS DEAD, MAY IT LIVE LONG AND PROSPER. After attending the New Contexts conference as a co-author, it has taken a few weeks for my brain to process the entire event. In a way participating in the co-authoring sessions was akin to the dream logic of both being yourself and being a fly on [...]

“I am going to taser your wall socket LAN port!” Perhaps the above exclamation doesn’t sound like much of a threat in this era of wireless everything, but apparently it is stupidly simple to fry every device connected to a LAN network by applying a taser’s 50 kilovolts to the appropriate socket. This wonderful tidbit [...]

Spotty. Neglected. Abandoned. Dead-ended. Nevertheless some dead-ends are worth revisiting. If the fall of Soviet Union some 20 odd years ago consigned Communism and Marxist to some sort of imaginary intellectual dustbin, it is interesting to contemplate the counterfactual: what if the cybernetic central planned economy actually could function as a utopian provider of plenty [...]

Separate but intertwined, the history of graphic design has a unique relationship to architectural history. One could describe it as a kind of coevolution, symbiotic perhaps, even if graphic design remains in architecture’s deep shadow. Only rarely are the intricacies of this relationship teased out into the light. In a recent March 2010 talk at [...]

It is a rare occurrence when the vague ideas that might circulate in the back of your mind as a kind of wave of unconscious ticks are suddenly made to coalesce, not by some particularly brilliant insight of your own, but by someone else’s lucid and provocative statement. Purely through a combination of boredom and [...]