Here’s a little change of pace. I ran across this little gem of a book at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in New York City last week. Despite how it might look on video, this is a completely low-tech mechanical system, comprised of an acetate layer moving over a photo created from cut-up frames of motion.

The concept is so utterly simple, yet the resulting animation is surprisingly fluid.

Buy on Amazon

Music by Adam and the Amethysts (used completely without permission—please don’t sue me Adam).

One of my great hopes is to one day own a copy of an early Swedish edition of The Hobbit, with illustrations by Tove Jansson.

Tove is the Finnish writer/artist best known for her work on the Moomin books. These “children’s novels” are tender, melancholy and full of imagination; they’re some of my favourite-ever works. (And alas, they are also much superior to the Moomin comics D&Q brought to peoples’ attention.)

Other than Peter Jackson’s films, Tolkien’s work has mostly had its visual world defined by enthusiastic painters like Alan Lee and John Howe. They are both talented, but often it feels like they think more = more.

I’m much fonder of Tolkien’s own drawings, which appear in some editions, or some of the work of Pauline Baynes. I like the way their approach is based in drawings - in using lines that imply more than what’s there. Rather than trying to make a vast, realistic painting. The minimalist approach, for me, suggests a world more believable, somehow.

In any case, Jansson’s drawings are simple, strange, and in some places really different from what we are used to in our Tolkien iconography. But she has a great love for wanderers, woods, and still, hobbit-beloved moments - and it shows.

When in California recently, I dropped by a fantastic architecture and design bookstore called William Stout. I ended-up picking up Matthew Frederick’s 101 Things I learned in Architecture School, among other things. It’s basically a bathroom book for the architecture and design crowd, with short little bits of information that take about 30 seconds to read.

Here’s #18:

Any design decision should be justified in at least two ways.

A stair’s primary purpose is to permit passage from floor to floor, but if well designed it can also serve as a congregation space, a sculptural element, and an orienting device in the building interior. A window can frame a view, bathe a wall in light, orient a building user to the exterior landscape, express the thickness of the wall, describe the structural system of the building, and acknowledge an axial relationship with another architectural element. . .

Opportunities for multiple design justifications can be found in almost every element of the buillding. The more justifications you can find or create for any element, the better.

There are 100 more of those in the book. Much of it, like this example, can be applied to virtually any type of design or creative work.

Alexander is one of my favourite authors, not only because his content is excellent, but also because the books he creates are beautiful artifacts which are a pleasure to look at and read.

While A Pattern Language is great, I’m more fond of A Timeless Way of Building, Alexander’s design manifesto. On the surface it’s an architecture book, but its principles can be applied to a wide variety of design fields. In fact, the book has a positively spiritual tone to it, which turned me off until I began to realize that it was trying to describe something larger and more nebulous than just architecture.

A decent amount of attention has been drawn to his ideas, but I would like to also draw attention to how he designs his books, as it’s a great example of attention to detail. The very way the book is structured is nothing short of brilliant - he has built in a system that makes it easy to skim the contents of the whole book incredibly quickly.

Basically, certain passages are italicized. For the reader who wants to speed through in “less than an hour”, you simply read the bits in italics. For everyone else, read through as normal. The description is deceptively simple, as the real effort went into writing and editing the book to be read in two different modes.

Here is a scan of the first page:

He says of his formatting:

What lies in this book is perhaps more important as a whole than in its details. If you only have an hour to spend on it, it makes much more sense to read the whole book roughly in that hour, than to read only the first two chapters in detail. For this reason I have arranged each chapter in such a way that you can read the whole chapter in a couple of minutes . . .

The great thing about it is that it takes virtually nothing away from the reader who wants to read everything. It is easier to scan, but it’s also great for going back and refreshing yourself on the contents, which at nearly 550 pages would otherwise take some time.

For sake of transparency, I just want to let everyone know that I’ve signed-up as an affiliate with Amazon.com. That means that if you follow a link to Amazon from my site and end up buying anything within a day or so, I’ll get a bit of money. All money is going to go towards a new camera, which in turn is going to mean better photos for the site.

So if you have been thinking of buying the first four seasons of The Wire, books by Christopher Alexander, Jane Jacobs, Ed Tufte, or Paul Hawken, or the complete works of animator Norman McLaren, now would be a great time.

After this post I hope to revert back to making most of my Amazon links a little less shameless, though I did link to great stuff.

I’m reading through Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man. Actually, I’m on page 53 and still not done the introduction - he is apparently rather verbose. He did, however, have this little tid-bit on writing which I, and many other writers and bloggers, should certainly strive to incorporate more often:

. . . do not waffle on about generalities . . . Focus on those small, but fascinating, details that can pique people’s interest and illustrate generalities far better than overt and tendentious discussion.

Simple but powerful advice.

I have always been interested in design, but often cringe at the word because of the connotations of aesthetics it often carries with it. Visuals are important, but design to me is always linked more to function and the stories it tells rather than looks.

I just finished John Thackara’s book In the Bubble, and was pretty astonished how closely his design aesthetic matches mine. He largely avoids the sort of ridiculous “design can solve all our problems” futurism and sticks more to what’s most important to design: people and context. He encourages a “. . . shift in emphasis from what things look like to how they behave - from designing on the world to designing in the world . . .”

In a world where “design” too-often connotes fancy Voss water bottles, visually-pleasing but meaningless tubular steel chairs designed by famous architects, or modernist buildings which purposefully reject both history and the context in which they are built, Thackara’s point of view is refreshing. He writes:

Designers are needlessly constrained by the myth that everything they do has to be a unique and creative act. Rather than design everything from scratch, we should search far and wide for tried-and-tested solutions that others have already created . . . The capacity to think across boundaries, to spot opportunities at the juncture of two or more industries, and to draw relevant analogies from seemingly unrelated industries is as valuable as deep experience of a single sector . . . We need to recombine relationships - among people, ideas, and organizations and knowledge domains - and exploit scientific, natural, and cultural knowledge that is usually ignored, whether it be mimicking biology or learning from storytellers in India. Putting old knowledge into new context creates new knowledge.

William Poundstone loves puzzles. He loves conundrums, he loves paradoxes. He loves enigmas, mysteries and little logical anomalies that perplex and amaze. Chances are that if you love these things too, you will really like his books. This is the third of his books I’ve read, they have all dealt with these subjects, and they’ve all been enjoyable.

How Would You Move Mount Fuji chronicles the movement of companies (mostly high-tech) using puzzles in their job interviews. He talks in depth about how job interviews work at some of these large tech firms like Microsoft. He also describes the puzzles in depth and where many of them originated.The puzzles range from quick bits of logic (why are manhole covers round?), to more involved (How would you find a book in a library which had no cataloguing system or librarian?), to straight up math (a train leaves New York . . .).Poundstone also discusses whether or not puzzles (or I.Q. tests) have any merit in a job interview setting. The argument made by companies like Microsoft is that it tests the applicants reaction to unknown situations. If the applicant is able to react under pressure and come up with a reasonable guess of how to find the library book, he may also be able to deal with crises during the development of a spreadsheet application, or so the argument goes.

<>Poundstone has a very strong grasp of narrative. He creates context and history around what could otherwise become tedious, unconnected information. He is very gifted at ordering the information in a way that makes sense, and building upon what he has already introduced. All of his books have been easy, enjoyable, and informative reads - a combination that not all writers can consistently achieve.In particular, his book The Prisoner’s Dilemma helped me understand the basics of Game Theory, and is a must read for non-fiction lovers who are not overly familiar with game theory. How Would You Move Mount Fuji is not a must read, but is still a good solid book.