Ideas and Discoveries

When behind-the-scenes systems replace common sense and customer expectations. A parable at the coffee stand.

My latest scheme to improve productivity and creative flow: Screw around. Waste time. Make stuff. Banter. Play.

If you’ll be in Austin for the SXSW Interactive Festival over the next several days, be sure to say howdy.

A coffee tasting leaves a caffeine buzz and a lesson that applies to design, too: In matters of taste, subtlety is everything.

A park bench becomes a subversive design element. Every project needs one.

A neighborhood landmark gets a garish transformation, and thoughts wander to designer responsibility and online communities.

The Louvre lifts a photo ban, and visitors go insane. A small change in the rules can spark dramatic behavior shifts, not always for the better.

A new bike-sharing program in Paris suggests that a modest fee buys good behavior.

My “couch to 5k” training plan for new runners is made even better by Robert Ullrey’s podcast version.

Amid flying tomatoes, lightning strikes and Tardis sightings, much code was hacked at London Hack Day.

I’m Austin-bound in 2008, thanks to a surprise windfall: free registration at the SXSW conference.

With Hack Day fast approaching and my gadget-building reveries fading, I’m toying with the idea of making a web gizmo to generate machine tags.

User communities own and define technologies as much or more than the inventors. A piano from 1817 is the perfect example.

An Acropolis visit is an object lesson in the value of quiet design decisions amid colossal projects.

Nuit des Musées shakes up stodgy preconceptions about museums and reveals them as lively, relevant places.

I’ll be at Hack Day in London next month. Want to team up to build something outrageous?

Developer returns from vacation, discovers sky has not fallen.

The Paris Marathon prompts your correspondent to ponder what makes creative people tick in adversity.