Watch this. The comparison between environments we build on screens and the environments we’ve built in the physical wold is brilliant. The whole thing is great.
He also does a nice profile of Robert Irwin in there, who is a favorite of mine.
(via dowithless)
The Atlantic published an excerpt from my essay for Distance today. It’s a little over 1500 words, and covers some of the main points in the essay.
It also includes a fantastic photoshopped stock photo of a lab rat playing FarmVille in a Skinner box.
Here’s a small snip:
In the 1890s, while studying natural sciences at the University of Saint Petersburg, a Russian mathematician named Ivan Pavlov was analyzing dogs’ saliva output over time. Pavlov noticed that dogs tended to salivate more before eating and that merely the sight of a white lab coat would induce salivation — even if no food was on the way. So he tried ringing a bell before presenting them with food, and found that over time, the dogs would salivate even if a bell was rung with no food presented. Pavlov’s research defined classical conditioning, in which a primary reinforcer (one which naturally elicits a response, e.g. food or pain) is associated with a conditioned or secondary reinforcer, such as the lab coat or bell.
Forty years later, Burrhus Frederic Skinner built upon Pavlov’s observations as a young psychologist in graduate school. He constructed a soundproof, lightproof chamber that housed a small animal; a lever was placed within the animal’s reach, which triggered a primary reinforcer. Called the Skinner box, the device opened up many possibilities for experimentation, leading to breakthroughs in later research: from the relative addictiveness of cocaine in isolation versus in a larger community, to the question of whether rats have empathy.
I’m really, really excited about the impending release after Feb. 17, especially given the awesome essays that Vitorio Miliano and Jon Whipple are working on alongside me.
Anyone curious about social game design, behavioral psychology, or even just why FarmVille is so damn addictive should take a look at the full excerpt.
Really inspiring work.
I hope the buzz of ‘gamification’ wears off and we return to saying ‘Skinnerian’. It’s so much less rosy that way.
This abyss (dopamine mine?) is well charted by slot machine manufacturers who have found what lies at the bottom: “customer extinction.” As explained in this lecture by Natasha Schull, “the stated goal of [slot machines] is “customer extinction” - the moment at which the customer is out of money:”
Sounds like a cool scene.
Marcin Ignac:
Recently I was working on a project about underwater life. In this case we used 3d models so the immediately when I heard about Written Images I thought “Let’s make something more generative and organic”. I did some research and was amazed how big jellyfish can grow so I decided to make one. At the beginning I was aiming for super realistic look but after stumbling upon works by Ernst Haeckel and his amazing book “Kunstformen der Natur” I knew that this is the way to go. The most difficult part of the project was to find a way of controlling the layout on the page because when you generate something randomly it’s hard to predict it’s shape, size and position. I dealt with that with some smart transformations and iterative algorithms.
Nerds: You know more about technology than anybody else, and anybody who knows less than you is a total ****. I love you for that. But normal people deserve wonderful technology too. And half the **** you call computing—running custom ROMs, reinstalling OSes, ****ing with network settings—is like a chef sharpening his knives over and over and calling that cooking. Real computing is the actual stuff you do—cutting videos, editing photos, writing. Or at least it should be. Not the **** people do to make all of that work.
By Matt Stiles
Inspired by Neil Mckay, we tried story mapping to help us enhance our reporting features today. We came up with some great ideas.
Neil Mckay’s Tumblr is good too.
Whereas the options are limited for differentiating graphical elements, you can differentiate texts any way you wish. Nuances are used to express causality in language. Graphics, however, provide no room for leeway. Due to the complexity of the financial crisis, diagrams that primarily avoid text quickly become grotesque because they simplify the world to a point where we can no longer recognize it. If we simplify things too much, they might not make sense any more.
Art is fundamentally a survival device of the species. Otherwise it wouldn’t be so persistent. It wouldn’t be in every culture. We wouldn’t know about it…
Milton Glaser: first graphic designer to win the National Medal of Arts. Glaser continues:
How does art help you survive? It helps us survive by making us attentive. In a simplistic way, when you go past a forest and you look at it and you say, “that looks just like Cézanne.” And you realize Cézanne has made you see the reality of the forest in a way that you never could have seen before. He’s made you attentive.
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(via thestatusjoe)
