A weekly letter on design, intelligent systems and the places they touch. Each one is a one or two things I made or noticed, set down in the week it happened...
For several years at Srishti I facilitated courses where students wrote generative code. p5.js, small algorithmic systems that turned a few numbers into a pattern on screen. Some students came in expecting the code to be the hard part. It never was. Most of the design happened before anything ran. You'd sit with a student and ask: out of everything this system could control, what are you going to…
The table, most Saturdays. One of these coffees is the same every week and one of them never is. The bagel does not vary. There is a cafe about ten minutes from the house and we have gone there almost every weekend for the last three fortnights. We did not choose it for being the best cafe on the coast. We sit on whichever side has the sun. A has ordered the same coffee every one of those mornings…
Museum of Sydney, corner of Bridge and Phillip, on one of the drier afternoons. The building sits on the site, and the exhibition is what was under it. There's a book from 1884 called Flatland , in which a square explains his world to you. 1 He lives on a plane. His eye is a single line, so he has never seen a square, including himself. Everyone else arrives as a segment that lengthens and…
Today's breakfast: I can barely make a circular aloo paratha. Accompanied by chai from A, and tamatar ki chutney. People say they see things in their head. Close your eyes and picture an apple, the instruction goes, and most of us report an apple, hanging there in some private dark. I have spent a long time not quite believing my own report. When I try to see the apple I get something, a sense of…
The towers from the garden steps in Pacific Fair, Gold Coast. Two small observations have been rattling around in me this week, picked up from two unrelated quarters of my life. I want to resist the reflex to hurry them into a single tidy law. They may be cousins; they may just be two things that happened to the same person in the same seven days. I will show you both and leave the welding alone.…
A, who waited up. The Greeks had one word, pharmakon , for both a medicine and a poison. The cure and the thing that kills you, named the same. Plato uses it in the Phaedrus , in a story Socrates says he heard secondhand, when he gets to the invention of writing. An old Egyptian god named Theuth invented it, along with number, geometry, astronomy, and the games of dice and draughts. He took his…
Some of the borders I developed and printed this week. First, thank you. I sent last week's post out not knowing if anyone was on the other end, and it turned out some of you were. Thank you for reading it, for subscribing to a thing that is so far one post long, and especially to the few of you who wrote back. Some of it clearly landed, and a few of you said you wanted to read more, which I had…
The first thing I ever had to leave was a bicycle. I was a child, third standard, the year we moved from one place to another, and the bicycle did not make the journey with us. Nobody asked me; that is simply how moving works when you are small. I have been leaving things ever since, and after that first one most of them were my own idea. I have stopped almost everything I ever started. Not the…