It started when I was a tot on Vancouver Island, staring across the straight at freighters laden with colourful, Lego-like shapes. Up close, shipping containers were cryptic: What are those strange logos on the outside? And what marvels are hiding on the inside?

My fixation continued when I lived in Vancouver and traversed vast yards stacked with giant metal boxes from faraway places. Ahhh…

See. It’s a problem.

And I get pure, unadulterated joy every time I see a new architectural conversion of shipping containers into homes, restaurants, hotels.

The latest: a Starbucks. Made of shipping containers. But oh, what a Starbucks. I’m in love.

(via Good, via Inhabitat… photo credit Starbucks)

“What kind of accounts?” I ask. 

“Eh, like spreadsheets, they make Excel.”

I almost choke, and feel compeled to unbutton my collar and ask for clarification, “You say they work on computers making Excel spreadsheets?” Alex’s face is straight. “Yes, they use the computer, they make the spread-sheets.”

– Hamilton Morris, I Walked with a Zombie, Harpers, November 2011

(Look for shadowy people working furiously behind the light paintings.)

Rippled from Oh Yeah Wow on Vimeo.

(Found on Colossal)

(via Colossal)

It’s not surprising that people who work in web, IT and digital marketing are often unusually self-reflexive.

We spend our days making things work seamlessly inside complicated and often imperfect systems. Hour after hour, many of us are adjusting, testing, revising, trying new approaches… Sometimes we are using technology and tools to do this. Other times we are working inside human systems that require continual adaptation.

How can we not apply the same thought process to ourselves and the way we live our lives? It’s inevitable that this thought process trickles down into the ways adapt to the non virtual world, causing us to continually observe, test, tweak and try different ways living with ourselves and one another.

If you’re in the UK this December, stop by the The Holburne Museum in Bath to feel waves of twinkly light joy.

(Via kuriositas; Photo by Chris Harrison)

“Even leaving aside climate change, very soon the price of energy will make the dispersed, unconnected, low-density city-building pattern impossibly costly. Those jurisdictions and businesses that first create livable, workable, post-peak-oil metropolitan regions are the ones that will win the future.”

Louise A. Mozingo, To Rethink Sprawl, Start With Offices, New York Times

Well it seems obvious to me, but then I don’t commute every day to a suburban business campus. Mozingo wonderfully starts out with the history of the corporate suburban campus, the rationale and proliferation. Then he predicts their demise. Lovely.

I love the way the stairs become unclimbable as they turn upside down.
Pure delight and magic.

(Via The Daily What)

(via Coudal, of course)