Day: November 20, 2012

Please design me a dog house

Please design me a dog house:

In June of 1956, Frank Lloyd Wright — a man posthumously recognised as “the greatest American architect of all time” by the AIA — received an unusual letter from 12-year-old Jim Berger, a boy looking to commission the design of a home for his dog, Eddie, by the same architect who designed his father’s house 6 years previous. Incredibly, Frank Lloyd Wright agreed and, as seen below, supplied a full set of drawings for “Eddie’s House” the next year. Construction was eventually completed by Jim’s father in 1963.

Eddie hated his new home. It was demolished in 1973.

The full exchange can be found below, along with a photo of the completed dog house. It was the smallest structure ever designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and possibly the least used.

[Remarkable.]

Source: Letters of Note

The Average Place on Earth

The Average Place on Earth:

Projections for the year 2050 predict that most of the 8 billion people on the planet will live in megacities, with populations over 30 million. And these megacity clusters will form a network made up of smaller cities over 1 million in population. But these incredibly dense clusters will weave through a countryside that is emptying. It is already common to find entire villages in China, India, and South America abandoned by its inhabitants who fled to the swelling cities, leaving behind a few old folks, or often, no one at all.

This is the pattern on Earth. Extremely dense and vast populations in a network of megacities connected to each other with nerves of roads and wires, woven over an empty landscape of wild land, marginal pastures, and lightly populated farms.

By 2050 and beyond, Earth will be a urban planet, while the average place on the planet will be nearly wild.

[Averages are tricky.]

Source: The Technium

What does tech in the “new office” look like?

Little, Big:

Part of me rebels against this observation, for “people like me” form a terribly skewed sample. We do a lot of things with our hardware that the Median User does not do—like install software. (If the majority of applications on your phone, pad or even computer didn’t come with it, you aren’t a Median User.) For people who want to have an iPad as an adjunct to their laptop, the Mini may be near perfect. For people who want to have an iPad as their one portable device, though—something that they really can do Serious Work on—the Mini may not be the right thing.

Yet I can’t shake the notion that I run into a paradox with that premise. Most “Power Users” wouldn’t want to replace their laptops with iPads, yet I suspect it’s only the Power Users (and a subset of them) who would look at an iPad and wonder if they could replace their laptop with it in the first place. The best way to use an iPad is not as a laptop replacement. It’s as an iPad. It’s quite possible that millions of people would rather have an iPad instead of a laptop. And it’s quite possible that many of those would, given a choice, rather have a smaller, lighter iPad, just like many of us who want an iPad and a laptop would.

So what does this mean for non-iPad tablets? If the iPad Mini is the better size, then all those other tablets were onto something, right? Yes, but the original iPad sells more than all other competitors combined. Either buyers vastly prefer 10″ tablets, or buyers vastly prefer iPads. Given that other 10″ tablets have been about as popular as a vegan activist at a Texas chili cookoff, I know which one of those I’d put money on.

[Working hard to understand exactly thee feelings as they relate to the new office. How many folks really need a laptop? desktop? iPad (or pad of some sort, but for now it’s really only Apple’s stuff, we’ll see what time brings.) Even a Chromebook might work for some. It’s certainly inexpensive enough. WHat do you think the new office will look like from this perspective.]

Source: Coyote Tracks