For everyone (like me) who keeps re-reading the 1992 edition of Robin Kinross' Modern Typography: an essay in critical history... his revised edition (published in 2004) ends in an interestingly different way*:
"The phrase ‘democratization of typography’ has become common, referring to the wide availability of the tools of production …
Philosopher of science, Bruno
Latour, opened the recent Networks of
Design conference with a keynote
address: A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of
Design. In his lecture, Latour linked the growing importance of design
with his idea that "matters of fact" have become "matters of
concern".
Provocatively …
Dave
Walden from the TeX User Group introduces his excellent TUG Interview
Corner as follows:
"technology is created by and evolves with use by people, and the points of view and backgrounds of the people influence the technology"
The ever growing list of interviewees include Barbara Beeton, Donald Knuth, Herman …
These past few days I've been navigating a sea of acronyms, neologisms and tiny iconic metaphors here at LGM. The thing that I can't get out of my head is the tool that pippin of GIMP used for his talk. At first it looked like a PowerPoint clone, but then …
David Reinfurt's essay Making do and getting by departs from the work of Muriel Cooper and Anthony Froshaug, and relates their critically engaged practice to contemporary projects such as Juerg Lehni's Scriptographer. In this way, he convincingly shows how designers can and should reclaim a more intimate relationship with the …
While
looking for designers writing about their relation to tools, I
discovered the excellent William Morris
Archives, part
of the Marxist writers' Internet
Archive. To Morris, to own
his means of production, was the only way a designer/workman could find
back pleasure in work, and this in turn he …
"It may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source’s success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work." (Eric S. Raymond, postscript (2000) to The Cathedral and the Bazaar)
The Cathedral and the Bazaar is …
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"Neurath's pictograms owe much to the Modernist belief that reality may be modified by being codified – standardised, easy-to-grasp templates as a revolution in human affairs. But the templates themselves, or the code, may end up in their turn aestheticised, reified, in need of a further round of de-cryption, a paradigm …
The Institute of Network
Cultures published an
insightful study on the culture of new media work by Sociologist
Rosalind
Gill.
Technobohemians or the new Cybertariat? New media work in Amsterdam a
decade after the web, is based on 40 'semi-structured' interviews
with practitioners (designers, developers, artists, information
architects, ...). Her study …
