Street Use

by | Wednesday, February 06, 2008

In blogging Kevin Kelly’s piece on “Better than free” (read that post here), I came across another site that he maintains, titled “Street Use,” self-described as follows:

This site features the ways in which people modify and re-create technology. Herein a collection of personal modifications, folk innovations, street customization, ad hoc alterations, wear-patterns, home-made versions and indigenous ingenuity. In short — stuff as it is actually used, and not how its creators planned on it being used. As William Gibson said, “The street finds its own uses for things.”

The similarities between the idea of street use and my Looking for It project are uncanny (see my blog posting about that here). I can see this site as being useful not just for my project but also for my CEP917, Knowledge, Media, Design class.

Topics related to this post: Creativity | Design | Evolution | Fun | India | Photography | Technology

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Koehler & Mishra (in press)

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Vikram OR Vetaal, A Halloween Story (co-authored with AI)

Vikram OR Vetaal, A Halloween Story (co-authored with AI)

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The first 100 days, on Facebook

This is just absolutely brilliant!! In particular check out the URL that Dick Cheney sends to Obama, approximately half-way down the page. (You will have to copy and past the url).

Seeing in the dark

All of us have walked through a sun-dappled forest. However, few of us have noticed that underneath are feet are thousands of little perfect circles. This is often difficult to see because these little perfect circles often overlap into irregular globs of sunlight....

Indipix Gallery, cool photographs

The International Conference on Indian Education: The Positive Turmoil. is being held at the India Habitat Center in New Delhi. This Habitat center is a rather cool building and, apart from academic conferences (I saw two different conferences going on at the same...

Computer Fiction: Two new ambigrams

For one reason or another I have not been bitten by the ambigram bug for a while - till suddenly a week or two ago, two new ambigrams popped into my head. A bit of work with Freehand later... here they are. Enjoy Computer Fiction

Hello Taiwan

Arrived at Taipei airport and got through immigration and customs quite quickly. I was received at the airport by Waiway Lin, a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Curriculum and Instruction at the National Taipei University of Education. It appears that she...

The many (type)faces of politicis

Leigh Graves Wolf forwarded to me a link to an NPR story about fonts and the presidential campaign. As the USA network slogan goes, "Characters welcome." You can follow the story here: Character matters. Following a few more links led me to some more sites: (1)...

Us in Flux: A conversation with Sarah Pinsker

Us in Flux: A conversation with Sarah Pinsker

The Center for Science and the Imagination at ASU has a new series called Us in Flux. Every two weeks they publish a (super-short) short story that explores "themes of community, collaboration, and collective imagination in response to transformative events." They...

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