Sixian

Becoming 'multi-temporal', rather than multi-cultural: it used to be a very big problem for historians that they supposedly could not divide themselves from the outlooks and interests of their own age. I think we are approaching a situation where the outlooks and interests of our own age make very little sense. They just don't bind us to anything... See more

Indeed, fidelity angst is an engine that drives all manners of digital innovation. Each year, consumers purchase devices with faster processors, higher pixel counts, larger screens, lighter and thinner enclosures, more comfortable keyboards, VR, speech-to-text, and voice activation. Each innovation promises a more ideal form of connection via an... See more

To develop great virality you must be focused on language. Language is the rails on which products are shared, so you must play with language, experiment with it, and build the product around the language.

First, design is imagining a future and working toward it with intelligence and cleverness. We use design to close the gap between the situation we have and the one we desire. Second, design is a practice built upon making things for other people. We are all on the road together. These two things dictate our relationship to the world and our bond... See more

After all that reading and talking, I can say with confidence that nothing great in this town is built without the whole team linking arms to build it together. And, that true collaboration makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts. And, that getting there requires working your butt off to do work you’re proud of and leaning on and... See more

Thinking about the two opposed theories, it struck me that between the carrier bag story and the hero’s journey, there is a third kind of story that is superior to both: the boat story. A boat is at once a motif of containment and journeying. The mode of sustenance it enables — fishing, especially with a net, a bag full of holes — is somewhere... See more

And as Apple’s marketing material demonstrates, this is no accident. iPhone adverts are strange: they make the phone a body. They borrow a visual language less from sci-fi or action movies than from erotica. Devices are shot in extreme close-up, almost always dimly lit. A beam of light traces across a surface so smooth that it occupies a space... See more