Transmission #13: Fuzzy Robots, Music for Airports, Bowling Ball Cores, Gen-Z and Human Turtles.
Design, ideas and other flotsam
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This is Transmissions by me, Martin Brown. Father. Husband. Design Lead at Craig Walker and lecturer at RMIT. Marty to most.
This is an ongoing fortnightly newsletter that collates some of the more interesting stories, links, quotes and other curios that float my way.
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Design
Cozy Tech
Kelly Pendergrast, Real Life Mag
It’s around 20 years ago that Steve Jobs, and his brightly colored, bubbly iMacs changed the game for how computers were perceived. They went from being a schlubby but functional beige workhorse, to something like a signalling device for designers and creatives. Said the iMacs, “My work is more fun than your work!”
Fast forward to now, and we’re entering another era of closeness with technology. This article explores how, as computers become integrated into our lives, in new and even more ubiquitous ways, they are increasingly adopting textiles as core components of their industrial design.
Textiles, in their contemporary use by tech companies, cloak and conceal the function of products where it’s prudent to do so, soothing fears about surveillance and covering ugly mechanisms in muted shades of soft gray cloth.
The piece is critical of the subterfuge involved – the dislocation of form from function, but I’m not so unnerved. I think my views are somewhere closer to costume designer Casey Storm, who’s quoted in the article: “In the future, one has access to everything. Why wouldn’t we create a world that is warm and cozy and soothing? Why wouldn’t we gravitate towards colors and fabrics and textures that made us feel comfortable and loved?”
Bring on the fuzzy robots, I say.
Deconstructing Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports”
Reverb Machine
This piece explores Brian Eno’s first ambient release, Music for Airports, from 1978. There’s a wonderful blend of openness and spontaneity to Eno’s method of splicing tape loops together of varying lengths, generating patterns and variations as the sounds overlap. What’s extraordinary to me, though, is Eno’s notation. Famously an autodidact, Eno couldn’t read or write musical notation, and so created his own visual systems to conceive and describe his music (see above). It shows that what seems like spontaneity was actually very carefully considered, and that perhaps it’s this balance between precision and experimentation that makes the music so compelling.
In other music-related posts, this 🤯 story of Charles Kellogg, a man who had an uncanny ear and a remarkable gift for vocal mimicry, who was also able to create sounds out of tuning forks that could actually extinguish fires. He also carved his own car out of a single fallen tree.
One Man’s Amazing Journey to the Center of the Bowling Ball
Brendan Koerner, Wired
In which this newsletter-curator discovers that inside the centre of a bowling ball is not a sphere, but an odd-shaped, asymmetric core. And that of course, there are also arcane and wonderfully eccentric men who think of nothing but designing new and ever more inventive bowling ball core shapes.
I had always imagined that a bowling ball was constructed a bit like one of those cross-sectional diagrams of the earth, with a spherical core at them middle. Turns out I’m wrong on both counts.
(Also learnt there is a thing called flare, which is a great name for how much a bowling ball grips and turns as it spins down the lane.)
Ideas
A Guide to Gen Z Through TikTok Trends, Emojis, & Language
Rex Woodbury, Substack
This article explaining ‘Gen-Z culture’ made me grimace for a couple of reasons. One, it’s the kind of homogenising of culture into neat, definable categories that marketers love and is also so obviously unrepresentative of 90% of what it is trying to describe. The second reason is that it was almost entirely new to me. It made me feel horrifically old, like one of Duane Hanson’s tourists, staring agog at a world that I’ll never truly grok, and from forever on I’ll be doomed to reading explainer articles like this one. Vale, my connection to the zeitgeist. I’m 39.
Quotes
"Probably the most common way that talk radio men deal with other men talking over them, is to play Verbal Chicken. This is a game in which each man simply continues to talk until one of them stops. This can go on for an excruciatingly long time, and usually involves the two getting louder and louder until they are both shouting their points at the same time. But eventually, someone does stop. And the other person wins."
– What I Learned About Interruption from Talk Radio, Rose Eveleth, The Last Word On Nothing
"If that's the world's smartest man, God help us."
— Richard Feynman's mother, Lucille Feynman, after Omni magazine named him the world's smartest man.
Diagram of the Week
From a Japanese book explaining, in a way I’ll never forget, how a turtle’s shell is actually an adaption of it’s ribs. See more like this here.
Having fun?
Other
🍞 Baked goods as masks. Japan, of course. Link
🍎 One of the all-time Steve Jobs stories. The guy was from another universe. Link
🚗 Ever wondered how a combustion engine works? Wonder no longer. Link
👀 Following on from last week’s post about crossing the uncanny valley with computer generated graphics, check out this incredible rendering of Australia’s outback, viewable inside 3D game software Unity:
Correction: In Transmissions #12 we published a photo supposedly taken from inside the rings of Saturn. It was actually a NASA-created artists impression. Apologies 🙏Thanks to Joe who pointed me to this article.