Readings

#38 Collected Reading – A year in review 2011

A selection of my favorite collected readings from this year. I hope you have enjoyed reading them. Happy new year!

1.Design Thinking 

Design should not be seen as a discipline in the same way as geography or physics. It is a method: a method to join together separate ideas, information, emotions and organize them to develop a thought. None of the books listed below have any real examples of what is traditionally thought of as design. There are no glossy photos, models or “concepts”. Instead they are books which develop a way of thinking, a method which realizes that what is made is only as good as the way an idea is framed. There is no style, no “big idea”, just different ways to help you see the world you live in and how to rearrange the complexity of that world in a way that makes sense of things.

-KP

Read more

 

2. The food edition 

This week I have collected together a series of recipe videos I made. Most of them were made on a recent visit to London in my mum’s kitchen.

-KP

Read more

 

3. Thinking about the present

A collection of thoughts around thinking, work and how to be in the present. 

“Today is a gift.
That is why they call it the present.”

-Eleanor Roosevelt

Read more

 

4. Introduction : Sherlock Holmes and the design process

After reading a collection of  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes short stories and novels,  I was struck by how much the process of detection has in common with the process of design. I have picked out some of the best quotes which illustrate these ideas.

-KP

Read more

 

5. Free markets and democracy 

“And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research. The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy.”

– Neil Postman

Read more

 

The Comparing Trap – Thomas J. DeLong

Comparing becomes a trap, however, when people become so consumed by measuring themselves against others that they fail to step back and see how it’s impacting their actions, and fail to acknowledge and celebrate their own unique successes.

Read more

Source : HBR

‘Virginity tests’ on Egypt protesters are illegal, says judge

Egyptian academic and columnist Amira Nowaira gave a cautious welcome to the ruling. Speaking from Alexandria she said: “Nobody had heard of the virginity tests before so it is good a court has said they cannot be used. People should be prosecuted but it’s going to be hard, even assigning blame will be difficult. Who is ultimately responsible?”

Read more

Source : The Guardian

Memory Shorts

Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind
To arrive there is what you are destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for many years,
So you’re old by the time you reach the isle,
Wealthy with all you have gained on the way
And not expecting Ithaca to make you rich

– C.P Cavafy

Making these short movies had a couple of motivations. First, I wanted to see if I could actually do this while traveling (they were all made on my iPod). Second, by making them it actually made me feel like I was paying more attention to where I was. I was experiencing and thinking about places with the idea of making a movie about them, and this made me look closely and ask questions : What are all the pieces that make up a place? How can I observe them? What is the best way to capture those pieces, those feelings, on video? Making these films and thinking this way made places I had been to before come alive with new perspectives, and it made places I had never been before seem less foreign. I think that making these movies made for a vivid accumulation of memory, or rather, a vivid making of new stories, and made the feeling of traveling less hurried.

Image of unknown woman beaten by Egypt’s military echoes around world

Until 25 January. The Revolution happened and with it came the Age of Chivalry. One of the most noted aspects of behaviour in the streets and squares of the 18 days of the Egyptian Revolution was the total absence of harassment. Women were suddenly free; free to walk alone, to talk to strangers, to cover or uncover, to smoke to laugh to cry to sleep. And the job of every single male present was to facilitate, to protect, to help. The Ethics of the Square, we called it.

Read more

Source : Guardian