PICKED: Thirty Conversations on Design, 2010 Edition

Last year, we brought you Thirty Conversations on Design — an ambitious scavenger hunt for the essence of design through the minds of 30 of the world’s greatest living design thinkers and tinkerers. Now, the Little & Company team is back with Thirty Conversations on Design 2010, this time asking a new crop of 30 two pivotal questions:

“What single example of design inspires you most?” and “What problem should design solve next?”

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In my mind, [MacGyver] was the original design thinker. He had the most minimal resources, severe constraints, but he had results that he had to get to and his solutions were often so simple [and] elegant and always worked.” ~ Emily Pilloton

We’re thrilled to see this year’s edition coming closer to our own conception of design as a holistic, cross-disciplinary process. This year, the roster of talent has significantly broadened to encompass all kinds creative heroes — from writer and TEDster Daniel Pink (Undo, Redo) to humanitarian designer and Brain Pickings darling Emily Pilloton (Do More With Less) to action sports legend Tony Hawk (For The People) to typography wunderkind Jessica Hische (Group Bonding).

If I had to pick one thing, I’d have to pick hummingbirds. Because they just show you that evolution has an excellent, excellent sense of… I don’t even know what the word would be… humor? Ambition? Needless ambition! I like the needless ambition of hummingbirds.” ~ Stefan Bucher

We’re a little disappointed with the awkward and antisocial — unembeddable, unshareable — video player, but the merit of the substance far outweighs the shortcomings of the package.

The single design that has inspired me the most are Apple products. They took what was considered to be a business-only design — the computer — and made it fun and exciting and useful in your everyday life, and also something you are proud to own and you’re proud to display.” ~ Tony Hawk

We encourage you to explore all of them, but a special shout-out is due to our friend Tina Roth Eisenberg (better-known as Swiss Miss) for her wonderfully insightful query into how cultural differences have influenced design.

This is 2010 and we still have a huge part of our world population that doesn’t have safe drinking water. So what I would love to see is that design combined with engineering help solve problems like this.” ~ Tina Roth Eisenberg

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The Paris Review Archival Interviews: 10 Favorite Quotes

The excellent Paris Review has just opened up its archive, a half-century worth of fascinating interviews with some of the greatest literary figures in modern history. From William Faulkner to Stephen King, the archive spans hundreds of interviews taken between the 1950s and today.

We’ve curated 10 quotes from 10 of our favorite interviews.

The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. He should also be about my age.” ~ Anthony Burgess

Of course I thought I was Jo in Little Women. But I didn’t want to write what Jo wrote. Then in Martin Eden I found a writer-protagonist with whose writing I could identify, so then I wanted to be Martin Eden—minus, of course, the dreary fate Jack London gives him. I saw myself as (I guess I was) a heroic autodidact. I looked forward to the struggle of the writing life. I thought of being a writer as a heroic vocation.” ~ Susan Sontag

I’ve always been keenly aware of the passing of time. I’ve always thought that I was old. Even when I was twelve, I thought it was awful to be thirty. I felt that something was lost. At the same time, I was aware of what I could gain, and certain periods of my life have taught me a great deal. But, in spite of everything, I’ve always been haunted by the passing of time and by the fact that death keeps closing in on us. For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay. It’s that, rather than the fact that things disintegrate, that love peters out.” ~ Simone de Beauvoir

Now, if you don’t like that, Berrigan, that’s the history of my family. They don’t take no shit from nobody. In due time I ain’t going to take no shit from nobody. You can record that.” ~ Jack Kerouac

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices.” ~ Ray Bradbury

It’s a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to. Writing is very pleasurable, very seductive, and very therapeutic. Time passes very fast when I’m writing—really fast. I’m puzzling over something, and time just flies by. It’s an exhilarating feeling. How bad can it be? It’s sitting alone with fictional characters. You’re escaping from the world in your own way and that’s fine. Why not?” ~ Woody Allen

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool—and I’m not any of those—to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.” ~ Maya Angelou

When I began to lose my sight, the last color I saw, or the last color, rather, that stood out, because of course now I know that your coat is not the same color as this table or of the woodwork behind you—the last color to stand out was yellow because it is the most vivid of colors. That’s why you have the Yellow Cab Company in the United States. At first they thought of making the cars scarlet. Then somebody found out that at night or when there was a fog that yellow stood out in a more vivid way than scarlet. So you have yellow cabs because anybody can pick them out. Now when I began to lose my eyesight, when the world began to fade away from me, there was a time among my friends… well they made, they poked fun at me because I was always wearing yellow neckties. Then they thought I really liked yellow, although it really was too glaring. I said, ‘Yes, to you, but not to me, because it is the only color I can see, practically!’ I live in a gray world, rather like the silver-screen world. But yellow stands out.” ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It’s as psychological as malaria. It’s a matter of exposure.” ~ William S. Burroughs

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

The series is also available in book form, as a four-volume box set that we highly recommend — a priceless timecapsule of cultural history.

via Open Culture

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What Everyday Objects Tell Us About the Universe

Why your reflection is a matter of chance, or how to fit everything that ever existed on a USB stick.

We recently raved about an excellent article about the early history of the universe, quantum reality and the origins of information. Turns out its author, California Institute of Technology astronomer and New Scientist cosmology consultant Marcus Chown, didn’t stop there.

His new book, The Matchbox That Ate a Forty-Ton Truck, offers a fascinating anthology of wisdom bites about the universe gleaned from everyday objects.

Today, we sit down with Marcus to probe into some of the book’s peculiar contentions and quench our curiosity about just how one comes to see quantum theory in bananas.

If the Sun were made of bananas it wouldn't make much difference

How did the inspiration for the book come? Was it a single “a-ha!” moment, an encounter with a particular mundane object that gleaned surprising revelation about something much larger, or was it more of a buildup of insights?

Marcus Chown: While doing publicity, I tend to latch onto everyday observations and relate them to deep physics. Recently, I wanted to highlight the paradox that spawned quantum theory. So I drew people’s attention to a light bulb and pointed out the light waves coming out are about 5000 times bigger than the atoms. “Say, I opened this matchbox”, I said, “and out drove a 40-tonne truck. That’s what it’s like for light streaming out of that light bulb.” And one day, a light bulb did go on in my head. I thought, why don’t I write a book about what everyday things tell us about the Universe?

Tea cups break rather than unbreak because the universe is expanding in the aftermath of the big bang

What’s your favorite mundane-object-turned-quantum-oracle?

MC: It still amazes me that something as mundane and everyday as your face reflected in a window tells you about the most shocking discovery in the history of science — that the universe is founded on random chance, the roll of a quantum dice, that ultimately things happen for no reason at all. Einstein was so appalled by this that he famously declared “God does not play dice with the Universe”.

The irony is that not only does God play dice but, if He did not, there would be no universe of the beauty and complexity we find ourselves in.

Reflection in a window shows that universe based on random chance

Marcus Chown, Serpentine, London, January 2007. Image by Jorn Tomter

Historically, humanity’s beliefs about the universe have regularly turned out to be tragicomically misguided. With what degree of certainty do you foresee the ideas outlined in your book surviving the test of time and scientific evolution?

MC: Well, of course, science is provisional. It is the best description we have of the world at this moment in time. Scientists are always looking for observations that will falsify their theories in their quest to lay bare ever deeper layers of reality. But, even though we know Einstein’s theory of gravity, for instance, is not the last word – because it breaks down inside black holes and in the big bang — we know it contains profound truth. And that’s what I think about the ideas in my book. Most are likely to be modified and extended in the fullness of time but they nevertheless contain a large amount of truth.

You could fit the information for a million universes on a 1Gb flash memory

Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is a favorite here at Brain Pickings, and a recent New York Times article outlined a similar theory of differences in creative capacity. Do you think this associative ability to look at the mundane and extrapolate the omnipotent is a unique kind of mental wiring, a mark of scientific genius shared necessary for groundbreaking discovery and shared by history’s most iconic scientists? Or is it something we can learn to do?

MC: Of course, this is what scientists do. They try to tease out the general, unifying principles which underlie as wide a range of phenomena as possible. Darwin, for instance, in one of the greatest strokes of genius in history, saw the driving principle — evolution by natural selection – that was generating the bewildering complexity of the natural world. This kind of thing – extrapolating from the specific to the general — is very hard. But I don’t believe it is special to geniuses (I don’t think much is special to geniuses!). Anyone can learn. It’s just that most of us don’t practice much!

The iron in your blood was created in stellar explosions like this one, NASA

To test yourself against some of the surprising factoids and curiosities in The Matchbox That Ate a Forty-Ton Truck, take a stab at this quiz, answers below. For more about the how’s and why’s of the answers, do grab a copy of the book — we guarnatee you won’t be disappointed.

1. If all the empty space were squeezed out of matter, the human race could fit in:

1. Wembley Stadium?
2. The area of the Isle of Wight?
3. The volume of a sugar cube?

2. Einstein famously said:

1. God does not play roulette with the Universe
2. God does not play dice with the Universe
3. God does not play poker with the Universe

3. The faster you travel:

1. The taller you get
2. The slimmer you get
3. The lighter you get

4. The best place to look for evidence of the big bang in which the Universe was born is:

1. On your TV
2. In your washing machine
3. At the Greenwich Meridian

5. Most of the Universe gives is currently invisible to our telescopes – but how much?

1. 1%
2. 50%
3. 98%

6. The scientists who won the Nobel prize for detecting the faint “afterglow” of the big bang thought they had found:

1. the glow of pigeon droppings
2. the glow of street lights
3. the glow of glow worms

7. Einstein’s mathematics professor called him a:

1. lazy possum
2. lazy dingo
3. lazy dog

8. Today’s sunlight was made:

1. 30,000 years ago
2. 300 minutes ago
3. 3 seconds ago

9. Aged 16, Einstein came up with the idea of relativity after wondering what it might be like to travel on a:

1. sound wave
2. light wave
3. steam train

9. The first time anyone eve saw an atom was in:

1. 1980
2. 1880
3. 5 BC

Answers: 1C, 2B, 3B, 4A, 5C, 6A, 7C, 8A, 9B, 10A

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Ayn Rand on Love as a Business Deal: The 1959 Interview

Why state and economics should remain separate and what the true currency of love is.

In the history of modern rational thought, there’s hardly a creed more definitive than Objectivism, the philosophy movement created by Russian-American novelist and thinker Ayn Rand. Among the central tenets of Objectivism is the idea that we can gain objective knowledge through the processes of logic and that the pursuit of our own happiness, framed as rational self-interest, is the sole purpose of existence. While such moral code may seem overly cynical, especially in the age of the Charter for Compassion, it seems to be the silent underwriting of much of today’s modus operandi.

Today, we look at a three–part interview Rand gave in 1959, as part of Mike Wallace’s Gallery of Colorful People series on CBS. More than half a century later, Rand’s code of morality and her bold challenge to altruism theory is equally controversial and no less fascinating to study. Judgement of its moral righteousness aside, Objectivism is still one of the most important cultural conversations to engage, if only for the passionate consideration of all sides of the argument that it ignites.

What makes this particular interview noteworthy is that Wallace plays, with complete composure, the perfect devil’s advocate, eliciting a series of almost emotional retorts from the living epitome of emotionless rationalism. Watch, waver, and draw your own conclusions.

When you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately, that is to love people without any standard, to love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.” ~ Ayn Rand

Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character.” ~ Ayn Rand

For a deeper look at Rand’s philosophy and moral code, we highly recommend her iconic Atlas Shrugged, one of the most important written works of the 20th century. And we should also point out that you certainly don’t have to agree with Rand’s views in order to appreciate their cultural significance.

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