Transmission #18: Yak Shaving, Deep Time, the overemployed and something about Feng Shui.
Design, ideas and other flotsam.
Hello. Welcome.
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.
If you’re new here, then sign up now to get more of these in your inbox, and don’t forget to tell your friends!
Design
Design Heroes: Kazumasa Nagai
Readymag
The website platform Readymag have been putting together a series of short vignettes of their favorite designers. Imagine someone spent the time and effort making design-Wikipedia visually appealing and you’re halfway there. Includes household names like Ettore Sotsass and Irma Boom, but mostly focuses on lesser known figures (to me, at least) like Nagai, April Greiman, and Dan Friedman.
5 Commonly Used Idioms in the Tech Industry
Karina Chow, Git Connected
From the tech world, but will resonate with anyone who tries to build things for a living. Bikeshedding, rubber ducking, dog fooding, bus factors, yak shaving. The description of bikeshedding, for example:
The term comes from a story in which a group of engineers, architects, and scientists are hired to build a nuclear power plant, but get stuck deciding where and how to build the staff bike shed. Where will the bikes go? How many bikes should it be able to hold? What color should the bike shed be painted? All of this attention on the employee bike shed results in a loss of funding and neither the bike shed nor the power plant being built.
250 Things An Architect Should Know
Michael Sorkin, What Goes Up
A classic from the archives, from the esteemed architecture critic who sadly passed away last year from COVID. Poetry as a listicle. Each sentence sublime in its brevity. A deep reservoir of wisdom and grace. A section, chosen at random:
27. The proportioning system for the Villa Rotonda.
28. The rate at which that carpet you specified off-gasses.
29. The relevant sections of the Code of Hammurabi.
30. The migratory patterns of warblers and other seasonal travellers.
31. The basics of mud construction.
32. The direction of prevailing winds.
33. Hydrology is destiny.
34. Jane Jacobs in and out.
35. Something about feng shui.
Ideas
The Art of Pondering Earth’s Distant Future
Vincent Ialenti, Scientific American
An anthropologist working for a Finnish nuclear waste management company takes a look into the deep future, imagining lives thousands of years in the future. It’s a profoundly humbling experience, stepping outside our rushed lives to imagine how ephemeral our moment is in the long expanse of Deep Time.
Years ago, an architect friend of mine was working on supplementary designs for La Sagrada Familia. He told me had to design some gutters that not only needed to exist in the style and materials envisaged a hundred years earlier by Antoni Gaudi, but also needed to function reliably for at least a thousand years into the future. The mind can barely stretch to envisage what our distant descendants will make of his handiwork.
The article also reminded me of other explorations into Deep Time, notably the Long Now Foundation’s 10,0000 year clock, funded by Jeff Bezos and currently under construction inside a mountain in Texas. Kevin Kelly writes a great overview of the clock, its philosophical underpinnings, and some wondrous details of its design:
The Clock is designed to run for 10,000 years even if no one ever visits (although it would not display the correct time till someone visited). If there is no attention for long periods of time the Clock uses the energy captured by changes in the temperature between day and night on the mountain top above to power its time-keeping apparatus.
Quotes
"Human noses can detect some compounds at as low a concentration as thirty-four thousand molecules in one cubic centimeter, the equivalent of a single drop of water in twenty thousand Olympic swimming pools.."
– Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake
Chart of the Week
(by Mark Belan)
Other
🍜 The roof over the entrance of the Nissin factory is, of course, a pot noodle lid. Link
💻 💻 Some people are taking the opportunity of remote working to secretly do two full-time jobs at once. Article Link and an incredible how-to resource.
🇨🇺 Havana Syndrome, the strange neurological illness that has befallen dozens of US embassy staff around the world, is seemingly the work of a weapon that’s physically impossible to build. Link
(Shameless plug alert)
✈️ My son started a YouTube channel for his paper plane obsession, video production by his sister. Link
Till next time!