Web people: A culture of self-reflexive testing, tweaking, adjusting

After spending two days obsessively tweaking small details on two different projects, I realized this:

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.

Goodbye suburban business enclaves?

“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.

Super sexy industrial typologies

Anyone who is intrigued by old industrial buildings will geek out Bernd and Hilla Becher’s black and white photos of architectural oddities. Montreal’s Centre For Canadian Architecture has posted selections from its Bernd and Hilla Becher collection online. Get ready for cryptically beautiful black and white photographs of anonymous industrial plants. Because the purpose behind each factory is unknown, the structures stand alone, mysterious and otherworldly.