Finding The Story

When Emily Spivack points to product descriptions on eBay, and reveals them to be funny, poignant, or otherwise surprisingly meaningful stories and narratives, she’s up to something effective, and affecting. What looked to the rest of us like mere detritus, the marketplace vernacular of a virtual nation trying to hustle a buck from used goods, gets transformed. Now these are tales of love, of memory, emotion, misadventure, family, fame.

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The Medium Is The Mail

Something surprising arrived in the mail not long ago: actual mail. Jill Stoll's "random acts of mail art" combines artistic ritual, creative reuse, and the postal service as unexpected connector. It's a distinctly analog project — with a digital twist. And it made my day.

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Cover Story

Some architecture students treated the most recent edition of Columbia GSAPP's annual, Abstract, like garbage. But were they really reacting to the "book" (which was really an iPad app) or its "cover" (a plastic box that looked like a book)? The possibilities for representing digital material with a physical marker are pretty interesting — but perhaps book-shaped plastic isn't the best answer.

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Bill for a Bowl

You can fill a bowl with cereal, dog food, spray-painted pinecones, little soaps you’ve taken from hotel rooms over a period of years, or offal. In all these cases, there’s an upper limit to how much the bowl can contain. You can also fill a bowl with, for lack of a better word, dollar value. This is harder to measure; it is negotiable.

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The Panic Option

Thanks to a rental car, I found myself confronted several times a day with an unnerving Panic button that seemed more invitingly pushable than the more ho-hum options around it. Presumably it's supposed to make me feel safe. But really: How many times a day do you want to contemplate the panic option?

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Overshareability

Sometimes, as we go through our digital days, it feels like everything we encounter on the Web or through mobile apps is optimized for sharing. Is it possible that tech design has become overly focused on our extroverted behaviors? Optimizing for shareability appeals to marketers and VCs, but what about, you know, users?

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Let's Make A Mark

The problem: Digital writing has watered down the meaning of the traditional exclamation mark. The solution: Ellen Susan proposes a new punctuation mark to connote polite enthusiasm, without resorting to the suggestion of childish excitability. It's a symbol somewhere between the period and the exclamation mark. She calls it the ElRey.

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Branding By Numbers

Looking for another opinion about the American Airlines logo? Well, probably not. But how about one that's based on "the data"? While conclusions about design based on mining some database probably sounds off-putting, it has its appeal:. And data is precisely as useful as what a knowledgeable interpreter can make of it.

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What Are You Looking At?

The benefits of new map technology are clear: We’ve all been in unfamiliar cities, judging restaurants by their awnings, when access to data could have guided us to a better meal. But having made that concession, let's recall the benefits of actually looking around.

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13 Striking Landscape Fictions

Photography of natural locations imaged, conjectured, meddled with, altered by technology of some sort, or otherwise partly invented: With apologies to Bruce Sterling, can I call these images "landscape fictions"? These are less like landscapes that suggest fictions, and more like fictions imposed on landscapes. Here are 13 examples that have caught my eye in recent months.

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Rob Walker is a technology/culture columnist for Yahoo News. He is the former Consumed columnist for The New York Times Magazine, and has contributed to many publications. He is co-editor (with Joshua Glenn) of the book Significant Objects: 100 Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things, and author of Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are.

Recent Book

Significant Objects: 100 Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things
Edited by Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn
Fantagraphics, 2012
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Other Essays: 2010-2012

Etsy Goes Pro
Wired, October 2012

Tumblr Follows Its ♥
The New York Times Magazine, July 12, 2012

What It Takes To Be A 'Tuber
The New York Times Magazine, June 28, 2012

A Product of Creative Friction
The New York Times Magazine, June 3, 2012

This Brand Is Your Brand
OnEarth Magazine, May 31, 2012

MakerBot's Meta-Tools
Fast Company, January 2012

Politics As Entertainment
The New York Times Magazine, January 4, 2012

The Dog Ate My Paycheck
Marketplace, December 16, 2011

Recognizably Anonymous
December 8, 2011: Slate

A Visual Object for the Digital Era
December 2011: The Atlantic

What Percent Are You, Really?
November 29, 2011: Marketplace

The Machine That Makes You Musical
October 23, 2011: The New York Times

The Cult of Bang & Olufsen
October 2011: Wired

4CP Friday: Effacement
September 2011: HiLobrow

Replacement Therapy
September 2011: The Atlantic

Not All Consumers Are Equal
August 18, 2011: Marketplace

The Trivialities and Transcendence of Kickstarter
August 5, 2011: The New York Times Magazine

The Swan Song of the Top 40
July 15, 2011: The New York Times Magazine

Foursquare's Branding With Badges
July 5, 2011: Slate

Failure Chic
June 16, 2011: Marketplace

Hiring "the crowd" for a design job
May 31, 2011: Slate

Advertising that's "relevant" — but to whom?
May 23, 2011: Marketplace

Disliking "Dislike"
March 31, 2011: Marketplace

The Propaganda of Concern
March 22, 2011: Slate

The Sound of Radiolab
The New York Times Magazine, April 7, 2011

Disliking "Dislike"
Marketplace, March 31, 2011

Fun Stuff (Digital Collections)
The New York Times Magazine, February 11, 2011

Go Figure (Scalies)
The New York Times Magazine, February 4, 2011

Ghosts In The Machine
The New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2011

Collecting: Bicentennial Quarters
DesignObserver.com December 9, 2010

Go Figure (Scalies)
The New York Times Magazine, February 4, 2011

The Hidden: Filtering "Friends" On Facebook
TheAtlatntic.com, October 4, 2010

Hearing Things (Music Objects)
The New York Times Magazine, September 10, 2010

Taking Lulz (Sort of) Seriously
The New York Times Magazine, July 16, 2010

Brilliant Mistakes (Digital Antiquing)
The New York Times Magazine, July 25, 2010

Valuing $0 (Gifts)
The New York Times Magazine, May 13, 2010

Rewind (The Cassette)
The New York Times Magazine, April 23, 2010

Slightly Used (Best Made Ax)
The New York Times Magazine, April 3, 2010

Clutter, Objects, Joy
Murketing.com, March 4, 2010

Shopping Our Way To Safety (Review)
The Journal of Industrial Ecology, February 2010

The Unlikely Success of Boing Boing
Fast Company, December 2010/January 2010

Site and Sound: One Home, Sixteen Objects and the Things We Listen to Now
Essay for Rewind, Remix, Replay exhibition at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, January 20, 2010

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