- We social animals, ain’t we ?!
With the onset of the Internet and its ubiquitous presence; every tech evangelist selling us the vision of connecting (digitally) as an inherent human right. How much and to what extent ?! Dunbar's number gives an approximation, 150 people, a number with whom we can have a stable interpersonal relationship limited by our cognitive ability. That’s why every corporation has a hierarchy and the army has ranks.
Our web today operates as a single organism, a single brain, every gadget on its network, every node connected! A mishmash of waves and packets invisible to our naked eyes. Social Media has undoubtedly given us a boost to involve ourselves (on)line with people living anywhere on the planet, giving us a commonplace of our niche with any form of medium converted into bits going back and forth between nodes, situated at a centre(data) available on-demand. But also changing our ways of participating in our immediate social surroundings and way beyond that we are still stripping off from our digital identities. Our current social media is conditioning us on a mass scale, narrating our actions from what to eat or wear, to where to travel and how?! It has also become a platform to connect with our childhood friends—an archive of relationships & acquaintances, a platform for opportunities—perhaps, a way to consume news and comment on it (because our current democracies give us the freedom of expression and right to speak in one form or the other except with few exceptions elsewhere), a gateway to escape reality and have a few giggles from cat/dog videos.
With all these current systems and infrastructures in place, how to find a discourse—we set on imagining the social web for tomorrow with La Plateforme’s Innovation Lab, finding a local community to work with and building with them around Web3, the Distributed Web, and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO).
During the cohort, we were provided with various resources to help us build our own social network, I will try to sum it up in an infographic for Part Two, stay tuned !!
- What’s next for design ?!
Space 10 closing its doors after almost 10 years as IKEA's design research lab - End of an era !!
France Design Week begins this week, Check out what to expect, the theme this year is “vivant, vivant” (alive,alive) - from 07th SEP to 23rd SEP
The climate dictionary by UNDP is something to refer to while working on climate solutions or not, and in general to boast the right terminology in social gathering/work meetings.
- Watch
Le Dernier Combat (The Last Battle, 1983), is a sci-fi based on a post-apocalyptic world where people have lost their ability to speak, starring one of my favourite French actors Jean Reno. With limited resources across the dead horizon and surrounded by a war-ridden landscape, the fight for those resources creates an immersive visual satire. Shot in B&W with no dialogue, our eyes keep following the edge of the screen for visual cues. The Long Spear in the Hand of the Man has a downright scavenged aesthetic and so does the costume of the brute and the protagonist of the movie. One of the first movies directed and written by Luc Besson, do give it a watch !
Nuit cassée. Insomnie
Je raas de en dormant
Les morceaux de la nuit
Broken night. Insomnia
I’m from sleeping
The pieces of the night.
(Saw this beautiful poem on a Paris metro ride)
- On sell
Another analogue tool for this week is a vintage light measuring meter from the 1930s (pre-World War II), built in Bakelite with a leather case. A true collector’s item, made in Germany by the brand Gossen. (They are still in business !!)
- Postcards
Photos from a weekend stroll in the suburbs of Paris, somewhere between Bois-de-Roi and Fontainebleau-Avon along the river—La Seine Sauvage !! Request prints of any photos you see below, cheers !!