A still from the animated series <n>Avatar: The Last Airbender</n>.

Screenshot clipping While the Capstone clipper allows users to capture entire web pages, images, and fragments of text, often users wanted an “excerpt” of a website or PDF with all formatting intact. The user behavior here was to take a screenshot using the “capture region” screenshot capability of their desktop OS.

if technology is a place where we live, a place that we carry around with us, shouldn’t we choose to be in lively and nourishing digital environments? This reasoning should be enough to encourage you to leave the optional digital places that you don’t enjoy.

By engaging in a conversation (with a person, a piece of paper, or a computer), thinking becomes a feedback loop. We don’t experience the world only by observing it. We poke and we prod at it. Thinking is a process of affecting and being affected; acting and understanding.

The spirit and promise of the early web was captured well by Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of WIRED Magazine, when he wrote: “Out of complete nothingness we were harnessing a virtual commonwealth.”

In the Upwelling project we have built an experimental editor that aims to satisfy the needs of professional writers and editors. It allows co-authors to collaborate in real time when they wish to, but it also supports work on private drafts that can be shared and merged only when their authors are ready. By combining elements of real-time collaboration with ideas from version control systems, Upwelling supports writers in maintaining their creative privacy and editors in ensuring accurate results.

We’re exhausted and over-extended, because everything is vying for nearly boundless amounts of our time and attention.

Screenshots In the age of mobile apps with content the user cannot directly save or copy, screenshots have become the gold standard for sharing digital content.  It’s a trustworthy format and looks like exactly what the user saw. But so much of the original content is lost: they cannot select, copy-paste, or search the text; they cannot reflow or reformat it for a different screen; in general it loses much of its “webpageness” in the screenshotting process.

so it’s best to recalibrate the digital experience by increasing the footprint and mindshare of the kinds of cultural and communal value they can’t provide. The web isn’t like Manhattan real estate—if we want something, we can make space for it.  Different measuring sticks are also in order. If commercial networks on the web measure success by reach and profit, cultural endeavors need to see their successes in terms of resonance and significance. This is the new game, one that elevates both the people who make the work and those who see, use, and enjoy it.

Design cybernetics describes design practice as inextricable from conversation – a way of enquiring, developing shared understanding and reaching the new that harnesses reliable control as well as error and serendipity.

Capstone: A tablet for thinking

Creative people tend to nest. A professor in their classroom, a writer in their home office, a woodworker in their shop, an artist in their studio—these spaces are full of work surfaces like desks and drafting tables, drawers and pegboards full of tools, pinboards and chalkboards and whiteboards, scraps of paper, photos, books, printouts, works-in-progress, post-its, and more. They are messy, informal, mixed together, freeform, and personal.

Freeze-dry: web page conservation Freeze-dry captures a web page as it is currently shown in the browser. It takes the DOM, grabs its subresources such as images and stylesheets, and compiles them all into a single string of HTML.  The resulting HTML document is a static, self-contained snapshot of the page, that could for example be used for archival, offline viewing, or static republishing; it could be saved on a usb stick or attached to an email, and be opened on any device.

Filmmaker <n>Casey Neistat</n> in his New York studio.

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” —Teilhard de Chagrin

[C]reative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see. … Having too many ideas can be dangerous. Part of what comes with seeing connections no one else sees is that not all of these connections actually exist.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Our team took inspiration from the 1991 tablet operating system PenPoint OS. Among it many gestures, PenPoint allowed the user to draw glyphs over the top of onscreen objects to issue commands. For example, a circle to edit the item, and an X to delete it.

Paper by FiftyThree for iPad

<n>Untitled</n>, a video by artist <n>visanstefan</n> for the <n>NOWNESS Experiments</n> series.

“Ideas rise in crowds, as Poincaré said. They rise in liquid networks, where connection is valued more than protection.”

Where good ideas come from

Pleasure Activism is a gathering of ideas, stories, interviews, held together in the shape of a book. As a container, it is more than just the sum of its parts; the book is the site around which its public forms, and a place in which to gather that public.

The <n>Microsoft Surface Dial</n> input device on a <n>Microsoft Surface Studio</n>.

Microsoft's Surface Dial hands on

When I call myself a gatherer, I mean that, even without my hands in dirt, I aggregate, together with collaborators, disparate pieces from an ecosystem, and develop the appropriate container for each collection.

If you bundle those conversations together, the diagnosis is clear: there is so much convenience, but so little comfort. Everyone is tired. Our attention is over-extended, over-stimulated, and over-commodified, making us twitchy, unfocused, and, in a very crude sense, afraid.

App Ratings - Center for Humane Technology

Every app either points inward through personal practice, organization, and art, or points outward to help us navigate the world.