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Dom came over for the weekend, and brought me a present - a lovely book called Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers. From the back cover:

Wabi-sabi is the quintessentail Japanese aesthetic. It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional…

Interestingly, I first came across the term in the source code of some wiki software (explaining that wikis are very wabi-sabi), and it is by no means a stretch of the imagination to apply the ideas to software, agile development and adaptive design.

I’ve been getting into the ideas behind Japanese architecture a bit recently too, so it should be a treat - looking forward to the read ahead. Thanks Dom!

Subject: Here is a chronometer which closely proves the refinement of its owner.

For knowing patrons who dislike forfeiting superbness, our internet store is the solution.

When people look at your wrist, they will know you are a person of taste.

Nearly all of Paul Auster’s books are based in New York, and in each one the city is a central character, with a real identity that reflects the mood of the novel (I think Douglas Coupland does this with Vancouver too).

In Leviathan, the character of Maria Turner is based almost entirely on the artist Sophie Calle. About twenty pages of the book are spent detailing Maria’s work as an artist, and Calle’s projects are borrowed verbatim here, as are Auster’s own experiences in reflexively creating the narrator. “All of my works are stories, and even if they are true stories, they are also invented”, Maria says.

One of Maria’s first projects in the book is to travel to all fifty states in America, spending exactly three weeks in each one (although I’m not sure if Sophie Calle ever actually did this). The point of this is to experience regulated time in relation to place, an exercise in visceral location-focused being.

So.

I saw Sufjan Stevens play in the Village on Friday, and loved it. Perhaps not the best performance ever (and a terrible venue), but seeing him live led me to understand his music in more ways than I had before. He does the same thing with his music as Auster does in his writing - he creates a sense of place through location-based storytelling. Being at the gig felt like reading a book or seeing a play.

Echoing Maria Turner’s project, Sufjan is planning to record an album about each of the 50 states - he’s done Michigan and Illinios so far. The music is extremely narrative, with emotive stories about smalltown happenings, the lives of their founding fathers, and the people who live there now. It’s also deeply respectful, and goes quite a way to investigating the psyche of a place. The landscape is defined by a series of tiny litereary vignettes.

Auster hangs his sense of postmodern solidarity on New York, because the city suits that mood. Sufjan Stevens is coming at it from the other side, allowing his characters to be informed by their location. But they are both essentially addressing the same thing, the relationship between person and place.

If psychogeography looks at how we are affected by our surroundings, what is happening when our environment reflects our behaviour? The concept of adaptive architecture is based around this, I think.

And what’s Sufjan going to do when he gets to New York?

Here’s a little something I cooked up. It’s a simple tool to allow you to filter the built in PHP function list, and quickly find the php.net manual page you’re looking for.

On Saturday I went to TechCamp, a free self-organising technology conference that was run by the attendees. The guiding rule was that everyone who attended should present some work or contribute in some way. There was a room for moderated open discussions, and a room for presentations, so people floated between them as they wished. I got to chat with lots of nice and interesting geeks, and there’s already been talk of organising a follow up session. TechCamp Galway, anyone?

I spoke about how principles of Adaptive Design can be applied to software development - my slides are online, and can be downloaded.

More: TechCamp wiki / TechCamp on Flickr / TechCamp on Technorati

Creative types (artists, designers, programmers) often proudly state that their favourite toy as kids was Lego, as it allowed them to build something without any restrictions and nurtured their imagination. Now there are huge adult hobbyist and hacker communities based around building crazy things with Lego.

The nature of Lego has always been geared towards adaptability - you are literally provided with the building blocks, and allowed to create anything you want. It’s probably the most open-ended toy you can buy. (Some newer lego box sets provide you with the pieces and instructions to create an exact replica of what’s on the box - boo to that!)

I guess the people at Lego appreciate the fact that a lot of their customers are basically hackers; when their 3D digital Lego designer software was modified by fans recently, they encouraged the development, even though the changes to the software allowed users to order only the bricks they needed for their own designs, as opposed to predefined collections.

All it took was being open-minded enough to see that their biggest fans weren’t trying to rip them off; they were trying to improve Lego’s products in a way that, just maybe, the company’s own designers hadn’t thought of.

A couple of years ago when Mindstorms, Lego’s electronic and robotics kits, was being hacked by home users, they opened up the propriatary programming source code, and spawned a whole community, which in turn improved the product.

This is a pretty adaptive design-friendly approach to running a business, and it’s cool to see Lego still empowering their fans to use their toys in the way they want by remaining true to their product’s values.

Anyway, all of this popped into my head when John showed me an animation he’d made for his presentation at TechCamp this weekend. He used LDRAW, a Lego digital modelling program, to create a storyboard explaining the Semantic Web using little Lego men in an office scenario. Step aside, Powerpoint.

What is it about those bright little bricks that brings out the hacker in people?