Week #389

Regular week… and I say that as a compliment. Given the last months(years?) a week where I can just work, make progress in multiple areas and find time to make croquetas and a shepherd’s pie is a good week.

Alberto is enjoying the last days of the summer and having a lovely time with his family as you can see in the header of this post. I’ve been working in the usual suspects (stage, bazaar, verkami, sse), coding and designing new features for them. Utilitarian, not super-exciting but necessary features that demand from you stamina and professionalism. I’m happy to oblige.

This week instead of giving you the usual references I’ve already seen/read, I’m going to try something different: trust my gut. I want to share with two of the links I’ve written in my notes for enjoying this weekend. The first one is a documentary about design and education:

This film is about patient and dedicated teaching, about learning to look and visualize in order to design, about the importance of drawing. It is one designer’s personal experience of issues that face all designers, expressed with sympathy and encouragement, and illustrated with examples of Inge Druckrey’s own work and that of grateful generations of her students. There are simple phrases that give insights into complex matters, for example that letterforms are ‘memories of motion.’ Above all, it is characteristic of Inge that in this examination of basic principles the word “beautiful” is used several times.

The second one is a long (+7.000 words) essay about the raise of open hardware, one of the topics I’m really interested about these days. From the article:

Open source software as an industrial process grew out of the culture of free software development, but departed from the latter’s political focus on the value of sharing and the maintenance of a knowledge commons, and instead focused on the efficiency of open source processes for software production. Within the software production industry, open source is broadly perceived as creating more democratic, ‘free’ and ‘open’ innovation structures. Following this, attempts are now being made to replicate the process in other fields of technology production, notably the production of designs for electronic hardware and other physical objects.

I hope they are good enough but if not, please don’t shoot the pianist.

Have a great weekend.