Blog

  • The Creative Class

    February 5, 2005

    Been reading a bit about “The Rise of the Creative Class”, by CMU business profess Richard Florida. The general idea is that there’s this class of worker (the aforementioned creative class) comprised of people who do creative things for a living: artists, programmers, designers, and so forth. After the original article was published, a book followed. Since the idea was put forth in 2001, urban planners have been debating whether the whole affair holds water or not.

    Although views are split over the economic veracity of Florida’s claims, the upshot is that he’s done a lot of work to define the living factors that are attractive to those of us in the creative class. You can see how your city ranks at the creative class website. The larger question is what role do creatives play in the economic machine; urban planners who jump on this bandwagon without critically understanding the economy of their region are probably going to waste a lot of taxpayer’s money. It’s a hard problem with competing perspectives.

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    DSri Seah
  • Sportsmanship and the Arts

    February 4, 2005

    Sportsmanship: this is a concept that I associate with athletes and team competition, not new media or graphic design. But maybe that’s just what we need.

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    DSri Seah
  • Next Gen Interfaces

    February 4, 2005

    Here’s a link to something called pad++, a “zoomable interface” that was put together sometime in the late 1990s. The gist: With infinite zooming power, one can have documents at different scales and browse amongst them.

    Jef Raskin, the user interface specialist who did early work on the Macintosh UI (though apparently, not involved in the actual final product) is doing some work on his humane interface. There’s a demo of one concept from it, which bears resemblance to the Pad++ concept.

    Hmm. I’m curious to see what this turns into. After a cursory stumble through the documentation and demos on the raskin project homepage, one can see that the concept is simple enough, but execution is what will really make the difference.

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    DSri Seah
  • A Day on the Town

    February 2, 2005

    I needed to get out of the house to focus on some architectural changes to Showing Evidence, an AS2.0 project I’ve been working on. Sometimes working in a different environment is good for that. Destination: Burlington, MA!

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    DSri Seah
  • What OS Are You?

    February 2, 2005

    As I contemplate making “the switch” from Windows to MacOS X, I’ve been more aware of operating system class divisions between them. One of the fun ones is this What Operating System Are You? quiz. My results, upon taking the quiz:

    You are Windows XP.  Under your bright and cheerful exterior is a strong and stable personality.  You have a tendency to do more than what is asked or even desired.

    Take QuizAnd the ever-popular OS-tans have their own quiz too. Ironically, I got Apple OS X:

    You are Apple OS X. You are beautiful, stable, and a catgirl. It’s no wonder people love you. It’s sometimes a little annoying that so many people stick with the obviously inferior Windows, but since you know you’re better, you don’t let it bother you much.

    The What File Extension Are You? quiz is also pretty amusing if you are extremely geeky.

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    DSri Seah