Dec 28
lindsayrgwattRandom, Travel architecture, australia
Sydney has its own style – of architecture that is. This post is going to be about architecture-I’ll save a bitchy Mr. Blackwell-style rant on some of the bad fashion I’ve seen here for later.
It’s not just monuments like the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, rather there are a few neighbourhoods with a distinct local style. Both Glebe and Paddington consists of houses that look like Victorian London was transported to the tropics. The houses come in two types: two story row houses with iron work…
…and cute little cottages, some of which look like gingerbread houses:
Most of the buildings were built in the 1880’s and they give the neighbourhoods great character (and now sell for millions…). Here are a couple of examples of the detail in that ironwork:
Dec 26
lindsayrgwattRandom fate, INSEAD, writing
A few years ago I was lucky enough to go to school at INSEAD. It’s a university that can claim to be truly global: our class of four hundred represented more than 60 nations, the campus was spread across two continents (Fontainebleau, France and Singapore) and I was able to use the alumni network to get a summer job in San Francisco. I’ve never met more people from more backgrounds, ethnicities and heritages in my life – and probably won’t unless I go work at the U.N.
It’s fascinating to meet such a diverse array of people, as it truly gives you new perspectives on the world. However, there’s a slightly darker side to it as well. Many of the people I met don’t truly feel like they have a home anywhere and instead have joined some global nomadic tribe (someone tried to brand the tribe Globopolitans – fortunately it hasn’t stuck). I must confess that I feel an honourary member: I am Canadian, but I also have British citizenship and live and work in New York City (I’m only an honourary member as the full-fledged members are Pakistanis who live in Sao Paolo, etc.).
I’ve wrestled with how to capture the sentiment of members of this tribe, but lacked the words to articulate it. Fortunately, I just finished reading Granta’s 100th issue (I’m a year behind) and Salman Rushdie has nicely summed it up in his short piece Heraclitus:
It’s an age of migrant writers, voluntary migrants and involuntary exiles and refugees. For such writers instability is a given, instability of abode, of the future, of the family, of the self. For such writers the lack of an automatic subject is a given, too. Some, like the longtime Somali exile Nuruddin Farah, carry Somalia within them just as Joyce carried Dublin within him, and never turn to other places or other themes. Others, like the diaspora Indian writer Bharati Mukherjee, redefine themselves according to their changed circumstance, thinking and writing, in her case, as an American. Others, like myself, fall somewhere in between, sometimes looking east, sometimes west, but always with a sense of the provisionality of all truths, the mutability of character, the uncertainty of all times and places, no matter how settled things may seem.
Dec 26
lindsayrgwattRandom, Travel architecture, australia
Wendy and I are currently in Australia visiting her parents who live on Sydney’s Manly beach. The easiest way to get to Manly from downtown is via the ferry – which happens to give you a phenomenal view of the Sydney Opera House. Sadly, just after we got here we learned that John Utzon, the architect behind the building, had passed away at 90. The obituary in the Economist eloquently captured the beauty of his masterpiece:
What he wanted for Sydney was the effect he had noticed when tacking round the promontory at Elsinore, of the castle’s piled-up turrets against the piled-up clouds and his own billowing white sails; the liberation he had felt on the great platforms of the Mayan temples in Mexico, of being lifted above the dark jungle into another world of light; the height and presence of Gothic cathedrals, whose ogival shape was to show in the cross-sections of the Sydney roof-shells; and the curved, three-dimensional rib-work of boat-building, as he had watched his own father doing it at Aalborg. The load-bearing beams of the Opera House shells he called spidsgattere, in homage to the sharp-sterned boats his father made.
Here are some photos I snapped from the ferry; I leave it up to you to decide whether his building achieved his dream:
Dec 26
lindsayrgwattRandom, Travel australia, Sailing
Today we hiked up to the Sydney’s North Head to catch the start of the 2008 Bluewater Classic – the annual Sydney to Hobart race. It’s quite an experience to watch; over 500,000 people line the harbour to watch the start. Here’s a shot of the starting line:
Sydney’s harbour is such that the boats need to pass through a narrow channel between two cliffs. We sat on the North Head (along with a few thousand other people) and watched the boats come through. As they come through, there are helicopters flying over the boats and pursuit boats following alongside. Here are some shots of the favourites: Wild Oats and Skandia.
As I write this, Skandia has taken the lead over Wild Oats, despite Wild Oats being the first out of the harbour. We’ll see if Wild Oats can come back to claim her fourth consecutive victory and whether either will beat the current record of about 42 hours.
Dec 20
lindsayrgwattRandom Travel
I’m writing this from a plane that is somewhere between a place called Apia and Port Moseby. Wendy and I are on our at to Sydney, but I am starting to feel like we have been travelling forever and are in a version of purgatory that has been outsourced to Qantas (I can verify Dante’s statement that one can never be truly comfortable in a chair in purgatory).
The reason I’m feeling this isn’t due to the length of the journey (we’re 8 hours into the 13 hour flight that follows the 6 hour flight to LAX), rather, it’s the dark.
I left work in NYC at 3 on December 19th in a snow storm. The storm made it get darker even earlier on one of the year’s shortest days. Since then, we have been flying West, so the duration of our flight is offset by our ‘gain’ in time change. The net result is that we have been in the dark for almost a day – three hours to get to the airport in the storm, a two hour delay, a six hour flight to LA followed by a two hour stopover and now eight hours across the Pacific.
I literally have no idea what time it is. My phone mocks me as it insists that it is 1:04pm, but I think that it changed time zones in LA -and darkness at 1pm means that it’s either wrong or the Jehovah’s Witnesses were right and the Rapture is upon us. I am beginning to understand how people in solitary confinement could go mad.
Fortunately I have an inflight map that is showing us inching towards Australia so I know that the sun shall rise again.
Dec 14
lindsayrgwattNYC
This weekend has unfortunately been a work weekend. The upside is that since I was in the office and there was nobody there, I could stand on the couch and take a photo of the skyline at sunset from our North-facing windows. Here it is:
Dec 12
lindsayrgwattNYC, Technology Design, interaction design
On Wednesday night I attended a meeting by the IxDA’s New York chapter talking about the current state of interaction design. It was an enlightening conversation. If you know nothing about the topic, here’s a laundry list of things they talked about:
- There was an emphasis on “bringing design back”: the need to find a balance of the art and science of design. If you’ve no idea of what this means, Frank Gehry is the poster child for design as art; Jacob Nielsen for design as science. Each evokes fiery passion amongst their supporters. The iPhone is currently considered the best bridge of the two: cutting edge materials science combined with an artistic, empathetic experience.
- As interaction designers seek to find this balance, they’re exploring the “craft” aspect of their profession. One popular tool for this is sketching experiences: think Bill Verplank (pdf) and Bill Buxton.
- Similar to this, interaction designers are struggling to reconcile that their profession is a combination of design and engineering – which brings a set of challenges. Engineers tend to focus on one issue and keep iterating to a solution; each iteration gets closer. Designers are much more nonlinear; they iterate on mulitple rounds of designs but are constantly bringing old designs back into the process.
- An interesting concept that was bandied about talked about “great design being the embodiment of a story”. A few examples are a Nokia nano-tech phone video and the Google Chrome comic. The iPhone come up again here; the idea being that a user’s interaction with it is a narrative and it tells you what to expect.
- This led to a nice discussion about product ecosystems. From a designer’s perspective, the ecosystem enables a new set of experiences when you connect people using the products inside the ecosystem. Examples are the Nike Plus social network for runners and a Ford concept that takes performance and geolocation data from hybrid cars and shares it with other hybrid owners.
- Here are three more random thoughts from the session:
- Designers don’t create ideas, they create things that embody the idea
- Dopplr is fascinating as they created a web service that was designed to require no website; in theory, you never need to go to it – you can just use APIs instead
- Wireframes are not a good enough tool. They do not have enough fidelity as they lack the dimension of time
A small bonus: the session was held at Bloomberg’s amazing headquarters. I snapped this photo before a security guard ran me down and told me “no more photos”.
Dec 10
lindsayrgwattBusiness bailouts, Complexity
As I write this, a bailout for the U.S. automakers is winding its way through Congress. The House has approved it; the Senate looks like it might vote against it. An auto bailout elicits fierce passions: some people have no sympathy to Detroit due to decades of mismanagement; others claim a car company failure will unleash a domino effect – plus, hey, it’s a helluva lot less money than those bankers got.
I have to admit, that I fall a little closer to the first camp. I’m stunned that these giants have been able to mismanage themselves for so long. Let’s be clear: this ‘crisis’ has been a long time coming. Here’s an interesting opinion on how bizarre incentives caused them to lose focus on building the right set of cars. In fact, there’s no longer “one cause” for their decline: they’ve allowed the cancer to spread all through their business (failure to innovate; focus on financial return, not the consumer; weak boards, etc.).
Chrysler and GM are facing two imminent realities: bankruptcy or bailout. Bankruptcy is not such a bad option. If they enter into a prepackaged bankruptcy they can restructure their operations and avoid a liquidation. A breakup is almost certain (goodbye Pontiac), but there’s a decent underlying core business; the companies just need to get their cost structure and balance sheet back in line with their expected revenue/cash flow.
However, lots of people are saying that a bankruptcy would be a disaster. It would lead to millions of jobs lost and a domino effect as suppliers shut down and in turn economically devastated the towns they were located in.
Unfortunately, either way, there are going to be a lot of job cuts, so neither scenario is going to avoid those. More importantly, let’s test the domino hypothesis. Imagine Chrysler is liquidated. No more Dodge, so no more need for the suppliers. So they go bankrupt and liquidate.
Except they don’t. Some actually sell to other companies, so they don’t go bankrupt. Some definitely do, but automotive manufacturing isn’t that big a piece of the economy, so they don’t really take anyone else down with them.
The big group that suffers in this scenario are the people who live in one factory towns where the local factory shuts down: those towns aren’t coming back. However, it’s not clear that anything is going to sustain small towns, so we’re really just delaying the inevitable. There’s a bit of a cold calculus here, but this is why we have social programs like job retraining and Social Security; to handle transitions like this.
Contrast this with the banking sector. What happens when a bank fails? Here’s a quote from the New Yorker, interviewing a Fed official:
“If Bear had failed,” the senior official went on, “all these money market funds, instead of getting their money back on Monday morning, would have found themselves with all kinds of illiquid collateral, including C.D.O.’s”-collateralized debt obligations-”and god knows what else. It would have caused a run on the entire market. That, in turn, would have made it impossible for other investment banks to fund themselves.”
Here’s the quote in English. Trillions of dollars are held by money market funds. They extend overnight loans to investment banks and businesses so that they can function (this is what most people don’t realize: most major corporations run on credit). If a bank goes bankrupt, the money market fund is left with whatever collateral they bank posted – substantially less valuable, and a heckuva lot less liquid – than the cash they had before.
So what do they do? They stop lending money overnight and instead buy Treasury Bills. Check out The Giant Pool of Money to hear it direct from ServiceMaster’s CFO.
This means that one bank went bankrupt and nobody in the entire economy can borrow money. Suddenly otherwise healthy companies start to go bankrupt or stop investing simply because no one will lend them money anymore at reasonable rates.
That’s a wildly different scenario from a GM or Chrysler bankruptcy. It’s an example of a tightly coupled complex system: a failure can quickly spread through the system. And that, in a nutshell, is why the banks are getting trillions of dollars whereas the automakers will be lucky to get a billion. (And the bankers are also going to get a lot of regulation as people have realized that they were allowed to build a much too fragile, complex system).
Dec 10
lindsayrgwattNYC, Random coffee culture, mac
New York has great coffee and great cafe culture. You name it: Cafe Grumpy, Ninth Street Espresso, Abraco – the places hum with activity. However, sometimes they can be a bit much.
On the weekend, Wen and I went out to Grumpy’s original Greenpoint location to take in the neighbourhood and an arts and crafts fair (I picked up some carrot habanero sauce and pumpkin butter; very unexpected). I couldn’t help but notice this group working away in the corner:
What you’ve got there are four people, all with identical MacBooks. Each is plugging away and completely oblivious to each other. A bit of a parody of a twentysomething working in a coffee shop…
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