Robin Good

Over the past year, working on a book on curation, I have interviewed more than 30 curators—art and conference curators, creative directors, Instagram influencers, radio hosts, coders, and genetic engineers—and all agreed that saying no is at the core of the curatorial ethos . Saying no defines what matters.

This is what research builds in you when you commit to it seriously. It develops a subconscious visual language like a set of instincts, references, and connections that are genuinely yours. On set, this shows up in the decisions that happen quickly: the frame you move to instinctively, the object you reach for, the casting quality you recognise... See more

In 1997, Malcolm Gladwell published his piece The Coolhunt, investigating the process of looking for new fashion trends at street level.

According to Gladwell, the coolhunter plays a major social role in spreading trends. Coolhunters were “the first to realize... that social status didn’t lay where Madison Avenue had said it lay in the 1950s and... See more

We're living through transformation so rapid that yesterday's breakthrough becomes today's infrastructure becomes tomorrow's archaeological curiosity becomes next week's "remember when" meme.

Curation becomes a high-value skill when it goes beyond simply linking to things (”Link Roundups”) and moves toward Synthesis Curation: identifying a trend that four separate thought leaders are touching upon, grouping their work, and writing a definitive summary that connects the dots they couldn’t see. The “workout” for this muscle is reading... See more

inviting people into how you see the world

The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of... See more

This bet—that domain-specific human expertise matters more than volume of human annotation—represents one theory of how to maintain quality in an increasingly synthetic information environment.