Hi my name is Ulrik Hogrebe. This is a random collection of stuff that occupies my mind at any given moment. Probably something to do with design, art, music and pop culture. For examples of my work, go here.

The Beeb, my own projects (updates on this soon!), the radio show, a festival and several minor and major life changes later, I’ve realized that I haven’t done this for a while. Although I swore I’d never do the “sorry for not updating, all my faithful readers” thing – I now find myself doing just that. In other words, sorry Jonas. I’ll do better.

Interview: Hunter Hunt-Hendrix Of Liturgy
tags: music, black metal, creativity
Responsible for the so-called 3rd wave of Black Metal, this is a must-read if you are into transcendental black metal or generally the more extreme sides of music.
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix talks blast vs. burst beat, the intellectual side of Black Metal and the destruction of form as a creative act. Actually, if you are creative in general, this is worth a skim at the very least. Preferably while listening to this: Liturgy – Renihilation

Essay: The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan
tags: media, mcluhan, future of everything, mindmelt
You will need to make yourself a coffee and make sure you are sitting comfortably for this one. Playboy (when Playboy was cool and smart) interviews Mr. McLuhan in 1969, with the mission to let him express and explain his theories in his own words – with as much space as he needs. What follows is an extensive but terribly articulate romp through McLuhan’s thoughts, from the usual mankind’s relationship with technology, to the re-tribalization of man, sex, drugs and even race. Veering from the brilliant to the slightly… errh… odd, this is a fascinating look into one of the greatest minds of our technological era. HIGHLY recommended, if nothing just for having your mind blown on a sunday morning.

A Life Worth Ending
tags: health, ageing, death, future of medicare
This one is hardcore, but certainly though-provoking. Michael Wolff talks about his mothers final years with a body that was physically fine but a mind that had slipped into advanced dementia. With our increasingly healthy lifestyles we might live longer, but the flip side of this is that it might be harder to die – and that sometimes, with the onset of dementia and depends, life may become a curse and death a blessing. As Mr. Wolff puts it: “The traditional exits, of a sudden heart attack, of dying in one’s sleep, of unreasonably dropping dead in the street, of even a terminal illness, are now exotic ways of going. The longer you live the longer it will take to die. The better you have lived the worse you may die. The healthier you are—through careful diet, diligent exercise, and attentive medical scrutiny—the harder it is to die.”.

Welcome to the Future Nauseous
tags: future of everything, futurism,
Essential reading for anyone who has ever dabbled in predicting what the future will be – and I know most of you probably have jobs where this is a large part of what you do. Venkatesh Rao believes the future is here but invisible to us. Or as he puts it “we live in a continuous state of manufactured normalcy. There are mechanisms that operate — a mix of natural, emergent and designed — that work to prevent us from realizing that the future is actually happening as we speak. To really understand the world and how it is evolving, you need to break through this manufactured normalcy field. Unfortunately, that leads, as we will see, to a kind of existential nausea.”

The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Diamond Heist
tags: heist, crime, awesome
OK, seriously! Best heist story eva! You saw Oceans 11 right? Well this is better – and it’s real. Somehow, it is supremely comforting to know, that people who are capable of breaching a three ton steel vault with a state-of-the-art alarm system still exist in our otherwise super-regulated society. They even have cool nick-names like “The Genius”, “The Monster” and “Speedy”. Awesome!

The Facebook Fallacy
tags: advertising, facebook, business models
Albeit a bit doom and gloom, Mr. Wolff does make a strong argument for why Facebook – and ultimately the web – needs to find a new and better business model than relying on advertising.

Information Design for an Instrumented World
tags: user data, big data, visualization, design
I seem to be forever stuck in the user data space. Don’t get me wrong, it continues to be an exceptionally interesting thing to get ones head around. This deck of slides from Hannah Donovan, which essentially deals with how to make user data meaningful to users, is really simple, useful and generally worthwhile for anyone who has anything to do with “the comet tales of personal history trailing in our wake”. Awww thats a nice mental image isn’t it?

Charles Manson interview with Charlie Rose
tags: manson, 60s, counterculture, murder
Mr. Manson at his most and least lucid in this video interview. Manson has been a pet-fascination of mine for a while (no, I don’t plan on moving to a ranch and starting a “family”) and this interview is one of the better ones out there. As the killer of the american dream (What? Nice middle-class girls taking up knives, butchering innocents???) and destroyer of the hippy movement (What? Nice long-haired hippies taking up knives, butchering innocents???), Manson frames himself as the ultimate product of society – to paraphrase Manson himself “I was fathered by all men who came before me”. Agree, disagree, think what you want – Manson marked the beginning and end of eras.

The Nature of Consciousness: How the Internet Could Learn to Feel
tags: artificial intelligence, sci-fi, HAL, complexity
Great article on consciousness that quite frankly boggles the mind. From the incredible complexity of the human mind (look out for the part where Christof Koch explains the complexity of the wiring of the human mind), to why the internet might feel sad, this is the stuff of pure science fiction – except it’s real and happening all around us. Beautiful.

Stop publishing web pages
tags: content, web, design, topics, streams
I had a (highly theoretical and in no way indicative of anything) conversation with a colleague a while ago, which basically ran along the lines of “What if we stopped sending people to new pages all the time and tried to keep them on page. Say we turned the whole thing into a tumblr page? What if the history section of the BBC was just one page? What would that do?” This seems to tie in with the current buzz around topic pages, categorization as the new organizing principle and of course streams, glorious streams. This is an interesting read – to go with a somewhat painful implementation. However, many of the principles are good, yet the strain the Washington Post puts on the User in terms of actual discovery, is too much I think. Maybe if you just flipped the principle – start with the most relevant, allow users to add sources rather than deselect them?

One morning I woke up with this image on my phone. I don’t know whence it came. As usual, it is completely unrelated to anything at all.

The future of advertising: Many, lightweight interactions over time
Tags: advertising, interactions, design
Paul Adams works with Facebook. He has some interesting thoughts on how advertising should think many sustained interactions rather than traditional “big splash” type advertising. Strangely I have been thinking something along the same lines with my own job in UX&D at the BBC. We tend to design for finite interactions manifest as “grand narratives”. Users come to the site, perform a number of tasks – usually in sequence – in order to complete some sort of goal. I think reality is often much more fragmented, as people jump between tabs, screens, experiences, content etc., over both long and short periods of time. We should be designing for this sort of non-linear and undirected interaction – which probably also involves taking a long hard look at our toolsets – user journeys, scamps, etc. Non of this is fully formed in my mind yet – and some may turn out to be supplemental to what we have now, rather than an actual paradigm shift. But it is none the less interesting. Now stop listening to me pontificate and go read Paul Adam´s thing.

Myself Quantified
Tags: the quantifiable self, data, prevention, health
The most compelling case for personal data tracking /the “quantifiable self” type activity I have read, as Dan Hon takes you through his experience with Diabetes and data. It’s personal and real – and hints at the sheer awesomeness of what this could mean for treatment and prevention. Both for individuals and for society as a whole. Also, a passionate plea against data silos, wether intentional or not.

Mail Supremacy – the newspaper that rules Britain
Tags: daily mail, everything that is wrong with the world, news, media
I have a healthy loathing of the Daily Mail (Quick! See that disclaimer about opinions being my own and not my employers, please) and I believe that they pander specifically to everything that is wrong and low in human beings. I also have a healthy respect for them – you have to be pretty tight with your operation to exceed the New York Times in web visits which Mail Online did in January this year. This is a good read from The New Yorker on The Daily Mail, Mail Online, Editor Paul Dacre (who is a bizarre character upon himself) and everything in between. Must read.

Technology, art, and why the future of branding is nonfiction
Tags: future of some more stuff, branding, art, technology
A short but thought provoking read where Douglas Rushkoff amongst other things talks about the reversal of roles between artists and technologists. It’s the good five minute read to set you up for a good long ponder.

Valve: How I Got Here, What It’s Like, and What I’m Doing
Tags: organization, management, games
A peak into what it’s like working for Valve (creators of gaming greats like Half-Life and Portal amongst others). No hierarchies, do what you think is most valuable for the company, no managers and so on – a completely new form of corporate management. Or rather, lack there of. I have a bit of a fascination about this for several reasons – partly because I instinctively – and ideologically – believe in this form of non-organized organization, partly because I think it might be a emerging business paradigm that people need to take seriously. Related to this – check Paul Thomas, the “BBC Business Doctor” who operates along the same lines. There is a documentary here, which I admittedly haven’t watched. However, having seen him speak I am pretty sure it’s worth a watch.

The liberal betrayal of Bradley Manning
Tags: Bradley Manning, Wikileaks, whistleblower, liberals, hypocrisy
Bradley Manning is the young soldier who leaked classified details of the Irak war to Wikileaks, exposing everything from the killing of Iraqi civilians to complicity in torture. To my mind, he did his civil duty – to blow the whistle when something is going on that needs to be in the eye of the public. Although much of what Manning revealed went on during the Bush years, it is the Obama administration that has imprisoned him, detained him for almost two years without trial under circumstances that are questionable at best and Obama himself has even proclaimed his guilt without proper trial. This article deals with liberal double standards and why Manning isn’t, paradoxically, a national hero in line with Pentagon whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

Hacks of Valor – Why Anonymous Is Not a Threat to National Security
Tags: Anonymous, civil disobedience, internets,
Yay Anonymous! This quote should cover it “That is power — a species of soft power that allows millions of people, often in different countries, each of whom is individually weak, to surge in opposition to a given program or project enough to shape the outcome. In this sense, Anonymous has become a potent symbol of popular dissatisfaction with the concentration of political and corporate power in fewer and fewer hands.” Good read.

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
Tags: NSA, secrets, crypto
The NSA will break all your codes and listen to everything you say. It’s like Cold War surveillance, turned inward… and outward. Actually toward everybody. Also they use words like yottabytes.

Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss? -Full Post
Tags: music industry, copyright, technology, artists
I love banging on about the music industry and Hollywood. This article is, however, a defense of the music industry – and a somewhat compelling one at that. Personally, I dont think it justifies the business models of old, but I do think it makes a strong argument for looking at the business models of now with a bit more criticism – and especially at Amazon, Apple, Google etc., who arent doing a great job of reinvesting in the content makers whose content they build their distribution systems on. Also I think this reveals something which I think is becoming more and more apparent – which is basically, that our new corporate tech overlords are quickly evolving into just as shitty a deal as what we had before. Shame on you!

Bonus
Crossed – wish you were here
Tags: just plain ol’ weird
I like web comics. I read a ton of them. This one opens with a man shagging a dolphin through it’s blowhole – and then goes on to describe a post-apocalyptic Britain where people have run amok in a sex-crazed kill frenzy, while a small bunch of survivors seek refuge on an island of the coast of Scotland (I think). What’s not to like? BTW I am aware that reading web comics makes you an instant geek. Obviously I stand proud by my geekery.

Another completely unrelated picture of a picture of my Granddad riding his motorbike, which I though I’d share. #grandswag

The New French Hacker-Artist Underground
Tags: Urbanity, hacking the city, preservation, activism
Interesting article on a group of French urban hackers-cum-preservationists who prowl Paris’ underground and fix clocks. Go figure.

Did The Sopranos do more harm than good?: HBO and the decline of the episode
Tags: TV, series, storytelling, content
Thoughtful article on the state and evolution of storytelling in an on-demand world. Good read for any series geek (and aren’t we all?)

Africa’s Dirty Wars
Tags: Africa, Kony, war, colonialism, superpowers
This month we saw the rise and demise of Kony 2012. This is a nice background read about how Africa’s wars are changing after the breakdown of ideology and the conquest of capitalism in a post-Cold War world.

A Code of Conduct for Content Aggregators & Stop calling it curation
Tags: curation, sharing, web, webiquette
“Discovery of information is a form of intellectual labor,” she said. “When we don’t honor discovery, we are robbing somebody’s time and labor. The Curator’s Code is an attempt to solve some of that.” This is the daftest thing I have heard in a long time. Other people agree with me, which is nice (See the Stop Calling it Curation reply). But in the end it Matt Langer sums it up quite well when he says “since by calling the activity of people who traffic in links “curation” instead of “sharing” we imbue it with all sorts of hollow importance and circumscribe it as something wholly apart from the selfless and benevolent sharing of knowledge.”

Why I left Google
Tags: google, social, ads, privacy
I love Google. I remember when they came out with the whole Do No Evil thing and I thought “Finally. Here’s someone who gets it”. However, in the past couple of years, the rumblings from the machine room have grown louder. This article might be pointing to some of the things that need a loving hand to get right (again). Also, it deals with the great Ads and Privacy conundrum which, in my line of work, is always interesting.

Spam-erican Apparel
Tags: zazzle, computer generated design
If you only read one thing – this should be it. Hilarious hijinx ensue as people seek to automate product design, as seen in non-sensical t-shirt designs on Zazzle. Especially relevant with all this talk of the New Aesthetic going on (see below).

Bank of America – Too Crooked to Fail
Tags: banks, bailouts, #fail, snafu
Ahh bankers and banking. This choice quote from the article kind of sums the whole thing up: “Worst of all, they completely suck at banking”. But if you, like me, can’t get enough outrage against a system that really should fail, but for some reason doesn’t - this article is a good read.

You will never kill piracy, and piracy will never kill you and the follow up Lies, damn lies and Piracy
Tags: piracy, Hollywood, business models, copyright
Good though hardly revolutionary article about piracy and Hollywood. Much might be old hat to people who follow the debate closely. However, Paul Tassi does have an intersting point when he says in his follow up: “I would argue that releasing crappy movies has a far greater effect on the film industry bottom line than piracy ever could.”, where he describes the massive losses Hollywood has incurred over movies that basically, suck (and we all know it).

Reacting to the New Aesthetic; Trains, Spiderwebs And Ship Minds
Tags: new aesthetic, visual culture
The New Aesthetic is terribly exciting if not just because it is New! and a bourgeoning aesthetic movement. Will people look back and treat the New Aesthetic like they do Modernism? And will I be able to say, Yes! I was alive and in London when it all kicked off!? In any case, this article might not make the most succinct attempt at nailing down what the hell it actually is, but it contains enough links and for anyone interested in having a good poke around in this new-fangled field.

London’s Overthrow
Tags: London, social issues
China Mieville describes a London always on the brink of collapse, yet somehow weirdly functional nonetheless. Good post-riots, post-banking scandal read.

Developing World: Beyond the frontiers of Science Fiction
Tags: sciecne fiction, Africa, technology
I am a science fiction geek, no doubt. I also grew up in Mozambique and Tanzania, which to most in the West are about as un-science fictiony as it it gets. The idea of a science fiction not born out of the fervid techno-monopolies of the West is fascinating and this article is enough to flood my brain with images of shantytown circuitry and low-fi, high-tech bio-tech black markets. Jonathan Dotse sums it up beautifully here; “It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the future will not be a monopoly of the current superpowers, but lies in the hands of tech-savvy youth from around the world, trying desperately to survive at all costs in an increasingly asymmetrical world.”

Bonus
Legos: How One Vulgar, Ambidextrous Toy Opened the Door for Gay “Marriage” in Denmark
Tags: Lolz
Christwire is hillarious. The debate on gay marriage is ridiculous. This marries the two and throws in some LEGO to boot.

I’ve decided to venture into community radio and kicked off my new punk, post-punk, psych and rock show on Shoreditch Radio this thursday.

First show is up – check it out over on Radio Shoreditch or check out Mixcloud for tracklist and such.

Unrelated picture of the cool rigging in one of the BBC studios

This has proved popular (i had a comment!!!), so I will make it a recurring thing. 10 or so articles that I have read and enjoyed in February. Less directly work-related stuff this month, but lots of nice long form journalism. Enjoy over coffee on a Sunday – maybe with some Arthur Russel which has been haunting my iTunes a lot lately.

The Great Tech War Of 2012
Tags: innovation, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple
Fast Company has a thorough breakdown of the battle of the Titans. You can almost hear the “In this corner…” announcements and the roar of the crowds. Will this be the year we announce a winner? Or a at least an early frontrunner? Scarily enough, who wins the tech wars feels almost as urgent as the US Presidential primaries.

Newspapers, paywalls and core users
Tags: print,media, pay walls, revenue models
Having worked for e-Types and having done a fair share of thinking about newspapers and the future of print media in general, this article by  Clay Shirky was an interesting and illuminating read, full of concise and visionary thinking, Mr. Shirky rounds things like the death of bundled media, pay wall versus free, why papers need to think twice about taking the Murdochian approach and finally how papers need to wrap their head around rewarding, rather than penalizing their Users for wanting their content.

One Town’s War on Gay Teens
Tags: Queer, teens, Michelle Bachmann, conservative christians, suicide
The tragic results of bigotry and hate and the causalities of the Christian right’s campaign against LGTBs . Heartrending, infuriating and sad. Highly recommended, just for being a great piece of long form journalism. Even more for shedding light on such an urgent and important story.

Netflix’s Head of Content Sarandos queues up an original programming strategy
Tags: recommendation engines, biz models, user data, content
Recommendation engines and user data has become a bit of a pet hobby with me because of my current work. This is a great article for content producers, commissioners, designers, biz devs and anybody else who works in the video/TV field on why they should think about user data.

Cute Inc.
Tags: Japan, cute, kawaii
Funny article on Japan and the proliferation (and monetization) of cute. It’s old (1994 I think) but still worth the read. Contains references to Pikachu 747s and Hello Kitty weddings and men’s couture lines.

Drones and Democracy & The Crash and Burn Future of Robot Warfare
Tags: drone wars, skynet, democracy, #fail
It’s a double-header on the Drone Wars and the military, political and civilian consequences of our new killing machines. Also, the thing about them going rogue gives me the willies #AllHailOurRobotOverlords

How Companies Learn Your Secrets
Tags: user data, tracking, Target
Definitely this months must-read – a glorious romp through corporate data targeting land and the story of how Target figured out you are pregnant. Explains exactly how powerful and pervasive personal data is these days. And extremely well written too.

I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave
Tags: warehouses, sweatshops, e-commerce, darkside
Wow, this is hardcore. I had heard these places were bad, but I had no idea. Something to think on next time you grumble about the cost of shipping. This is what it’s like packaging up all the stuff you buy on teh interwebz. Like an evil Santa’s workshop.

The Boy Who Played with Fusion
Tags: fusion, reactor, teenager
The feel-good story of the bunch. A 15-year old Super-Brain builds his own fusion reactor, creating a plasma core 40 times hotter than the core of the sun. Wish I had thought of that when I was 15… And if that’s not your taste, here is an article about white supremacists and prison violence.

The Straight Satans were a LA biker gang from way back when that used to hang around the Spahn Ranch with Charlie and his Family. This is the kind of thing I imagine they would dig.

(BTW – there is a download link here, ’cause it got pulled by Hulkshare)
The Breeders – No Aloha
Nice piece of 90s flavoured dark-tinged surf from ex-Pixies bassist Kim Deal and her band The Breeders. This is off the bands second album Last Splash – you will probably remember the album from the single Cannonball which was pretty much stuck on repeat for a while in MTV land back when kids were angsty and wore Dr Martens and plaid (Oh wait - isn’t that happening now?).

Original Surfaris – Exotic
Really don’t know much about these guys except they were active in the 60s and seem to have had some sort of name dispute with The Surfaris, (of hit song “Wipe Out” fame). Anyway, this has that nice jangly fuzz sound that evokes more imagery of leather jackets and switchblades than board shorts and bikini babes.

The Jesus and Mary Chain – Kill Surf City
The B side to the Glasgow rockers wildly successful single April Skies pushes this tape into even darker waters with their treatment of Brian Wilson’s (Beach Boys), Surf City.

Alan Vega – Fireball
Alan Vega is ancient! Like 72 or something. He is also probably one of the coolest cats alive. Fireball is like Elvis if Glen Danzig lived inside him and he (it?) rode around in a souped up muscle car and lived in a cabin out in the bayou. And even then, Alan Vega is still cooler than all of that squared.

Growlers – Something Someone Jr.
Long beach band the Growlers call their sound “Beach Goth” which is funny in itself. I really dig the slacker-psych sound though, and the surf-tinge just works for this. This is off their 2009 debut album “Are you in or are you out”.

Crocodiles – Stoned to Death
From the second album “Sleep Forever” from San-Diego contenders to The Jesus and Mary Chain throne.

The Raveonettes – Dead Sound
It still boggles my mind that The Raveonettes are Danish, having a very not danish sound… and look… and attitude. Also I know the guy who designed the cover for this album (Lust Lust Lust) which makes me not very famous at all. Even by proxy.

Beat Happening – Black Candy
These guys took being bad at music to epic levels. Only problem is that they still manage to be extremely awesome.

Undertones – Teenage Kicks
Leather teen love from North Ireland punk rockers Undertones. Definitely a classic as is evidenced by the enormous amount of covers by everyone from the Raconteurs to Green Day (sigh…).

The Jesus and Mary Chain – Teenage Lust
You can probably see where I am going with this by now.

The Gun Club – Fire of Love
The Gun Club are amazing. Reading their wiki is like a whos who of bands that Ulrik like with band members from everything from The Cramps to Romeo Void passing through the band. Also this is from the album Miami which I have just learned features backing vocals by none other than Debbie Harry. That’s punk rock pedigree right there.

Link Wray – Fever
Father of the fuzz guitar and inventor of the power chord. How can you even start to add to that? This is Fever, originally penned by Otis Blackwell and performed by Little Willie John. The original is worth a listen too.

The Cramps – Lonesome Town
One of my biggest regrets in life will always not seeing The Cramps live. Lux Interior is to this day, one of my greatest idols. There is some amazing footage of the legendary gig at Napa State Mental Hospital over on youtube. You should go watch it.

This is a completely unrelated picture, but it looks kinda kewl…

Since I read a lot of these – and since other people seem to find my tweets about them interesting – I will try to summarize 10 of the best/ most noteworthy each month. Which will also hopefully give people (another?) reason to return to my ramblings every now and then.

It’s Not Your Face, It’s Ours
Tags – face recognition, technology, New World Order
Jan Chipchase, The Indiana Jones of ethnography offers a rather dystopian view of face recognition. Personally, I think face recognition is kind of cool, but hard not to agree with Chipchase on what has the potential to become a fundamentally Orwellian technology. Am already looking forward to the various legal battles, scandals and general chaos that will ensue when this stuff becomes ubiquitous.

QR Codes Are the Roller-Skating Horses of Advertising
Tags – QR Codes, advertising, annoyance
Whenever I hear the word QR code, I reach for my revolver.

The Friction in Frictionless Sharing
Tags – facebook, sharing, User Owned Data
A very succinctly put analysis of why Facebook’s frictionless sharing is really quite annoying.

When did the Remix become a requirement
Tags – remix, music
Nice article on the remix phenomenon and it’s evolvement through different genres and technologies. Good “sunday morning over coffee and 90s east coast hip hop” read. I would recommend Tribe or Dilla.

Rick Falkvinge: the Swedish radical leading the fight over web freedoms
Tags – copyright, pirate party, obsolete business models
“Musicians earn 114% more since the advent of Napster. The average income per artist has risen 66%, with 28% more artists being able to make a living off their hobby. What is true is that there’s an obsolete middle market of managers. And in a functioning market, they would just disappear.”

Chief ACTA Eurocrat quits in disgust at lack of democratic fundamentals in global copyright treaty
Tags – copyright, ACTA, EU, law
Another week, another daft piece of copyright legislation to combat it seems. This article is interesting because it A) it is about a person on the inside, saying enough is enough and B) kicks up a whole of questions around how laws are made at a European level. Ahhh the days you could just sit back and point at other countries and their corporate… erh, I mean corrupt judicial systems. Transparency is cool, although depressing.

Musicians praise Bit Torrent and Creative Commons
tags – copyright, bit torrent, business models
More proof that there really is an emerging business model for CC music and the music industry in general. Now would be the time to start experimenting with alternate business models, if you are say… a large multimillion dollar recording and distribution music company.

Inside Supreme – Anatomy of a streetwear cult
Tags – fashion, branding, streetwear, pop culture
Nice read on the notoriously shy streetwear brand Supreme and how they built their brand. Also reminds me of this BBC interview with Shawn Stussy from the 90s (Im guessing).

5 Big Ideas For A New Economy
Tags – economy, new models
Well we need some new ones, right? We can all sort of agree on that, right?

The Yin and the Yang of Corporate Innovation
Tags – Innovation, Steve Jobs, Google, Apple
In the wake of Steve Jobs’ death there seems to be a slew of people rushing to hail the “Genius Leader” as the only innovation model that matters, usually using the dreaded “design by consensus” as the polar extreme. I personally think it is slightly more nuanced than (benevolent) design fascism and dysfunctional democracy: great leaders can balance both – honestly it is to easy to just don the iron gauntlet. Apart from the horrible “innovation as jazz” metaphor, this article does present a slightly more nuanced argument.

It’s still January, so I can still sneak in a quick overview of the years reading. Being an avid bibliophile, this amounts to a sizable amount of dead cellulose since I believe that traditional flipping of dried pulp, earmarking and general coffee staining is the way to go when it comes to the #LongRead. Thats how I roll – or flip if you will

The Art of Immersion, Frank Rose
Having read Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture back in the day, this seemed like a natural progression. A good read on all things transmedia and UGC (user generated content) which spurred a brief flurry of interest in harnessing Otaku fan culture for content makers and steeled my belief in content production from below.

Nudge – improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness, Thaler & Sunstein
Probably should have read this when it was getting a lot of hype, but simply didn’t get around to it. One of the books that started the “persuasive design” wave and an interesting, though slightly dated read. Worth it so you can chin stroke with confidence whenever someone starts ranting about the value of default settings and such.

Game Frame – Using Games as a Strategy For Success, Aaron Dignan
I picked this up because I saw Aaron Dignan’s PSFK talk and thought “what a delightful, humorous and non-gushy young man”, who seems to have a balanced and nuanced opinion on the G-word. Somehow he comes across a lot less nuanced in the book. It has a framework though. I like frameworks.

Content, Cory Doctorow
More of Cory’s crusade against copyright. Nothing new but always a good read and a peak into the mechanics of DRM and the general intellectual property debate. Link takes you to a free download of the book over on Cory’s site.

The Brand Gap, Martin Neumeier
Hailed as the “designers guide to branding” because (and I kid you not, this is a direct quote from the person who recommended it to me) “it is a really short read” (because as we all know designers can’t read, right?). I decided to read it to see what the ruckus was all about. Honestly, in my opinion Mr. Neumeier sacrificed nuance and functionality for simplicity, which makes it more or less useless as anything but the briefest of introductions and doesn’t capture the intricacies of working with brands in as complex an environment as we have today.

Noise Music – A History, Paul Hegarty
I like noise music, so this was kind of a no-brainer when it came up on Amazon’s recommendations. Weirdly conflicted on this one. On one hand, there are some interesting points about breaking with classical form and mastery as a prerequisite to performing music, some good musings on what noise is and how it is a prerequisite of order and such… but in between the dense theoretical musings, I could have done with a raunchy anecdote from behind the scenes.

Exposing the Magic of Design, John Kolko
Terrible title aside, this is a straight up “from observations to insights to ideation to implementation” handbook from a man who obviously sipped the multicolored process-juice. I tend to agree with him on most counts.

This is Service Design Thinking, Stickdorn & Shneider
The epic service design tome, bound in black with nifty design details and all. It is supposed to be an attempt at a textbook for aspiring service designers, which it seems to do quite well. Did feel they went through the methods/tools bit slightly quick and I am still looking for an insightful and interesting book with service design cases, where touch points are explored in detail, brand and strategy discussed, process unveiled and deliverables analyzed etc.

Business Model Generation, Osterwalder & Pigneur
Wow, this is useful and is quickly becoming a bit of a must-read in the service design community. Used the framework with quite some success for a BBC project and find it is really useful for breaking things into chunks and allowing people to deliberate on the small bits that make up the whole. Recommended!

Drawing the Head and Hands + Figure Drawing for all it’s Worth, Andrew Loomis
I started drawing again. It’s hard. These are supposed to be the definitive books on drawing. They are hard. I haven’t technically read them cover to cover – rather I have flicked through picked up a tip here and there, and failed miserably when trying to apply them. They are also quite fun and it’s nice to be drawing again – even though I just like doodling silly cartoons on post-its while on the phone.

Animation 1, Preston Blair
How to draw silly cartoons! Yay!

From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campell
I am getting heavily into graphic novels again, after a roughly 20 year hiatus. This one is cramped, dense, claustrophobic and just plain amazing. Deals with Jack the Ripper, who used to haunt my current ‘hood. The part where the Doctor rides around London explaining the significance of the Masonic/druidic origins and meanings of the architecture had me riveted and now I can’t walk past anything Hawksmoore built without looking for hidden symbols and feeling slightly creeped out.

The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Will Self
As a newcomer to the country, I feel it is my obligation to study my host nation. People splutter into their beer when I proclaim that I am reading Will Self as a result.

Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delaney
Simultaneously one of the most confusing and most heart-achingly beautiful books I have ever read – my copy is now earmarked with a thousand different quotes that had me slack-jawed with awe. The style, the denseness, the schizoid incomprehensibility and the stark yet wonderful dives into self reflection are simply stunning. I have had dreams about the book ever since.

Cyclonopedia – Complicity with Anonymous Materials, Reza Negarestani
A so called “theoretical novel”, this book is as obscure as it is oddly cinematic. Detailing the role of the Middle East and “petro-politics” as a narrative baseline for world history, the author mixes in arabic occultism, syrian demonology, diverse conspiracy theories and mathematics - plus a slew of other concepts which I am still struggling to digest, into what is one of the hardest reads I have ever undertaken, paling even to Nicholas Luhman’s thoughts on discursive theory (which my proffessor confided to me “Nobody actually gets it – academics just say they do. It might all be nonsense for all we know”) that I plowed through in Uni. However, it invokes images of vast arid desertscapes and cavernous putrid secrets – and for that alone, it’s still worth a read.

Teatro Grottesco, Thomas Ligotti
Apparently popular with the whole Boyd Rice crowd, I think this just reads like a poor mans Lovecraft. Meh…

Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
Recommended to me by the guy who started the NO2ID movement in the UK and a mix between a James Clavell novel and a beginners guide to cryptography – this was one of the most enjoyable books I have read this year in terms of pure pleasure (with a bit of learning thrown in for kicks.)

A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R Martin
Yep I saw the Game of Thrones series and then proceeded to hoover up every book available so far. All roughly 4500 pages. In what amounted to two months. I am not afraid to admit it – this was two months of plain getting my geek on. If you haven’t read it, rip out a couple of months of your social life and start reading. Who needs friends when you can have epic things like murder, conspiracy, dragons, bloodshed and even a bit of sordid incest.

Honorable mention: The Paris Reviews interview with William Gibson, by David Wallace-Wells.
Not a book so it technically doesn’t count, but this is just a great long form interview. Keep returning to it, so it should go on here too.

Honorable mention 2: Who killed Video Games, Tim Rogers
Brilliantly written and highly entertaining piece on the evils of social gaming (yes, that means you Zynga).

Just found this vid trawling through my YouTube favourites of Jesper and myself messing around back in the CIID days. I believe we were asked to create/rapid prototype something that “Protected you in a post-apocalyptic world” with some biomimicry thrown in for good measure. Uhm… yeah well, voila!

The very talented and often sometimes slightly surreal Di Mainstone cooked up the Hydrocordion for the Surface Tension exhibition at the Science Gallery in Dublin. I had the pleasure of hanging around her studio while she built it along with the equally talented Richard Shed, gluing the odd bit together here and there. Great fun to see the thing evolve from a morass of plungers and half-baked ideas and solutions to it’s finished hooty glory.