#observations and reflections on a small model of the RGB structure
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observations and reflections on a small model of the RGB structure
These past few weeks, I've been loosely testing a small model of my RGB structure that I outlined in [[erosion of structure]]. To reiterate, that hypothetical structure uses three R, G, and B axes with 255 "values" per axis for a total of 16.5+ million complex coordinates (e.g. 2-132-7). Since I wanted something that I could check at a glance without getting lost, I downscaled to two axes and four values for a total of 16 complex coordinates. You can check out the spreadsheet here. I also opened another sheet to host more derivative ideas from the cross-pollination.
The first thing I noticed when filling in the grid was how hard it was. Some categories were easier to cross-pollinate than others, but I still needed to invest some thinking to synthesize them well. This difficulty also extended into the "Matrixed" sheet, where I budded off certain key points in each cross-pollinated square into a dedicated slot at that same coordinate. For instance, the biggest thing I could think of between "future studies" (3) and "taking breaks" (C) is that the study of the future must account for "slow days" and natural gaps in significant activity (C3). And then the derivative idea: We make history daily, but not all of that is relevant or important.
The second thing I noticed was how interesting the second Matrixed sheet was. It's satisfying to see my ideas precipitate so clearly. I had a felt sense that these were "right", because these were implicit assumptions in my thinking, but I rarely encountered them or followed up with these specific axioms. Now that these ideas were so clear, I could write about them easily, and I did--I wrote two threads about how mental contexts are organic frames, and how radical meaning-making is not enough.
In theory, this structure should also be able to accommodate the reverse process where high-fidelity, specific ideas can be differentiated or decomposed into n axis values and placed at that coordinate. For instance, the idea that "most people don't have a complete insight-through-making cycle" could be split into the values of "essence of problem-solving" and "human factors". Therefore, it will be stored at D1.
However, D1 is already filled by "Radical meaning-making is not enough". This was completely unexpected because I thought that concept multiplication and concept division were inverses/reverses. No matter how many times you combine or split a piece of information, the products will be the same.
This paints an odd picture of my intelligence, and perhaps human intelligence in general: How is it that combining more than 2 or 3 ideas is so hard, but decomposing an idea becomes much easier with the more topics available to classify into?
I don't think my synthesis is "too biased" or "too personal" because that's inherent to the process. I also don't think the division is necessarily "too low-res". The classifying topics are values on the axes and are a deliberate constraint. I'm more willing to accept for the time being that, until we have a "cognitive proof" that concept multiplication and concept division are actually inverses, we may have to treat them like separate though somewhat related processes. To the RGB structure, this means having 1 spreadsheet for synthetic generation and 1 for analytic placement. Or, if we had to really keep everything in one RGB structure, we'd need to either add more values on each axis, add a completely new axis with it's own set of values, or make do with the emerging "superposition" of each coordinate value.
#postrox#homegrown by postie#RGB structure#erosion of structure#observations and reflections on a small model of the RGB structure#information management#personal knowledge management
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The Best Checklists, Tips, and Templates for Content Marketing in 2019
Have you developed your foolproof plan for getting Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or Google Home devices to speak your brand’s praises when customers come calling for advice?
Are you fighting FOMO with a killer virtual reality app that turns your shopping experience into a garden of unearthly delights for consumers to explore?
Have you budgeted for a new blockchain-based loyalty program or a celebrity-hosted influencer network promising fame and fortune to your audience in exchange for their ongoing engagement?
Don’t panic about keeping up with progressive content trends like these. Remember while it’s tempting to pour all your content team’s energies and resources into the next big thing to hit the digital marketplace, sustainable, long-term success with content marketing first requires a mastery of the fundamentals.
This updated toolkit – featuring some of CMI’s best tips, checklists, and templates – can help you build that solid foundation. Use it to check off some of the critical content marketing tasks on your to-do list more efficiently and use the newly freed brainpower to innovate wisely and purposefully.
Content marketing strategy tips and tools
Everything you do as a content marketer should flow from a deliberately constructed content marketing strategy. This includes determining how to model your content operations as well as outlining why you are creating content (your purpose), who you want it to reach (your audience), and the expected impact of your content efforts on the business (your goals).
Everything you do as a content marketer should flow from a constructed #contentmarketing strategy. @joderama Click To Tweet
Choose a content business model
Think of your strategy as a road map of the content experience you intend to cultivate and how it will connect your business with your audience – and move both of you closer to achieving your goals.
Of course, anyone who has used Google Maps knows that every destination has multiple routes. And, according to CMI’s chief strategy advisor Robert Rose, the same goes for finding the best content marketing strategy for your organization. In fact, he recently identified four viable approaches that organizations can follow based on their goals, business structure, team resources, and level of content experience:
Player: Content marketing is seen as a contributor to other business communication strategies such as demand generation or product marketing.
Performer: Content functions as a center of excellence, aiming to build an addressable audience through owned media platforms.
Processor: Content is treated as a centralized service offered throughout the organization.
Platform: Content is run as a self-sufficient yet fully integrated media business.
Craft a one-page content strategy guide
You can’t achieve content marketing success unless you understand what success means to your organization. Some of the most common goals marketers pursue through their content programs include:
Brand awareness
Audience engagement
Lead generation
Loyalty and evangelism
Sales and profitability
Of course, content marketing can help your business achieve all these aims and more; but it works best when you focus on one challenge at a time. If your content program could only help your company achieve a single goal, what would you want it to be?
To figure out which goals your organization should prioritize, try the steps in George Stenitzer’s one-page strategy guide.
Build performance-driven audience personas
When you think of your content recipients in broad terms like “audience” or “targets,” it’s easy to lose sight of their needs as unique, complex people with different needs, interests, preferences, and behaviors.
That’s where audience personas come into play. These composite sketches help characterize key segments of your audience in terms of their relevant challenges and concerns and the role they likely play in their company’s purchasing process.
Robert suggests this five-step approach to building more valuable audience personas – ones that put the customer’s needs at the center of your stories:
Define your target: Detail the total addressable audience.
Discover the “so I can”: Uncover the functional and emotional jobs the audience needs to get done.
Decide on your niche: Find your sweet spot of relevance – where your field of knowledge and your skill sets intersect with a passion point of your audience.
Differentiate your content approach: Prioritize the jobs to be done by those that you can and should solve with your unique and distinct point of view.
Design your map of success: Identify as many of the kinds of value you can provide across each step of your chosen jobs to be done.
Take the information you gathered through these steps and assemble your audience persona profile. Here’s Robert’s example:
Write a content marketing mission statement
A unique content marketing mission statement helps you document your company’s reason for creating content and the priorities and perspectives it will uphold in pursuit of that mission.
Your mission statement is a critical component for guiding decision-making throughout the life of your program. As Ann Gynn points out, there’s an art to crafting a useful one – and not everyone gets it right. To avoid providing too much (or too little) detail in your statement, follow these tips:
Be succinct but don’t oversimplify: Describe your editorial mission clearly to prevent your content team and your readers from making assumptions about the purpose of your brand’s content.
Don’t be generic: Distinguish your brand in the statement, whether it’s by geography, industry, niche, etc.
Include your content’s purpose: Explain, in as few words as possible, how it should motivate the readers or viewers, and what you want them to know, think, or do as a result of consuming it.
Pick a niche: Your content can’t be everything to everybody. Pick an area of specialization and ensure that your content efforts all adhere to it.
There’s an art to crafting a useful #contentmarketing mission statement. Not everyone gets it right. @anngynn Click To Tweet
For more comprehensive guidance on strategic considerations, follow the Road Map to Success: Content Marketing Strategy Essentials
Content planning tips and tools
Repeat after me: “Content marketing works best when you plan for its success.” You need an operational plan that outlines all the insights, actions, people, and procedures necessary to take your content marketing program from a lofty strategic ideal to a fully functional and productive content marketing engine.
#Contentmarketing works best when you plan for its success, says @joderama. Click To Tweet
Simplify your content inventory and audit processes
Unless your business is just launching, you probably have quite a few content pieces floating around the digital landscape. Some might be worth repurposing; others might no longer fit your goals and should be removed, revised, or replaced. Your first step for activating your strategy should be to take stock of existing content and determine whether it is still shining the best light on your brand.
Two core processes will help with this:
Content inventory – a list of all the content items you’ve created, including the title, type and format, and where each asset has been published
Content audit – an analysis of the data from your inventory that helps you evaluate the relative value of each asset
Content strategist Laura Creekmore shares a streamlined inventory and auditing process, including this template to help you focus in on the most useful data and observations.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: What Librarians Can Teach Marketers About Weeding Out ROT
Distinguish your brand content
To ensure that your content reflects your brand, its purpose, and its values, enable your team to create each piece of content under a unified standard of quality – which includes maintaining a unique brand voice and consistent editorial style.
Brand voice: Erika Heald has outlined a five-step process to establish and maintain a voice that will set your content apart from its competitors while remaining true to your brand’s core ideals.
Gather a sample of your best content pieces. Include examples of all the types. Cast a critical eye on each piece, whittling the list to a small group of assets that represent what’s unique about your brand and embody the qualities that you outlined in your editorial mission.
Describe your ideal brand voice in three words. Broadly categorize all the assets on your list into distinct themes. Select the three most dominant themes and describe their core qualities based on the characteristics your audience would most likely associate with them.
Create a brand voice chart. Create a form (like the example below) to illustrate how each brand characteristic should be applied in your content.
Walk your content creators through the chart to ensure that your team members all understand how to put your brand voice in action.
Revisit and revise your chart as your business evolves.
Style guidelines: Style dictates the technical mechanics of your brand’s unique voice to help ensure that readers find your content to be consistent, trustworthy, recognizable, and relatable. Sasha Laferte shares a few tips for creating a brand style guide for your team:
Baseline guide: Start with an existing style guide (like AP Style) as a baseline, then customize to align with your brand’s unique communication style.
Formatting: Include details on how to format things like bullets, lists, hyphens, and quotes, and outline when those standards might be different – such as a content format (e.g., video, infographics) or content platforms (e.g., social media).
Colors: Detail your brand’s palette of colors, including function. Make sure to include the hex, CMYK, and RGB codes for each color, as well as Pantone numbers.
Logos: Include all versions of your logo and examples of proper usage in your most likely scenarios.
Fonts: Include all brand fonts for headings, paragraphs, etc., and instructions on their usage.
Templates: Include links to any company-branded templates (such as PowerPoint slideshows) and boilerplate information.
Staff up with the right content marketing skills
To consistently produce high-quality content on multiple channels and platforms, you need to make sure everyone on your team understands your organization’s expectations and has the required skills and know-how to fulfill them.
Use this team framework developed by Michele Linn to identify the skills, mindset, and cultural considerations to account for when running an efficient and effective content marketing program.
Find specialized content creation talent
No matter how creative and talented your team members and agency partners are, there are times when it may make sense to outsource writing – especially when you have a high volume to be done or specialized technical or subject matter expertise is needed but falls outside your team’s comfort zone.
Finding a writer who is the right fit for your team and your tasks can take some time – and a lot of careful vetting. Chris Gillespie offers a few resources to help ease the struggle:
Writer job boards: Forums like Problogger, Writer’s Den, the Freelancer’s Union, LinkedIn Groups, or even Craigslist can be instrumental for connecting with potential writers.
Freelancing platforms: Sites like Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer.com add automation to the mix, providing a centralized place for evaluating writers’ profiles, client reviews, and past work.
Content marketing platforms: Content platforms like Contently, Skyword, and NewsCred are pricier than other alternatives but potentially worth the cost because they curate their pool of writers and can provide an editor for quality assurance.
Referrals and word of mouth: As a rule, the best writers rarely have to look for work – they’re inundated with clients starving for their unicorn-rare mixture of writing proficiency and industry expertise. The easiest way to find them is to ask around.
For more comprehensive guidance on processes and teams, follow the Road Map to Success: Turn Your Strategy Into a Stellar Editorial Plan
Content creation tips and tools
Once you’ve set your strategy and outlined your plans for executing it, it’s time to create high-quality, customer-driven stories. Though the creative process is unique to every business, plenty of tools can help with generating story ideas, organizing them into relevant content pieces, and getting them into the hands of your target audience.
Align team expectations with a creative content brief
A great creative brief provides a clear view of the project, the business challenge it is meant to address, and the value it aims to provide to your target audience. If everybody on the team understands their expectations from the get-go, it makes it easier for them to stay focused, channel their creativity, and collaborate effectively.
If everyone on the team understands expectations from the get-go, it makes it easier to collaborate. @joderama Click To Tweet
Use Duncan Milne’s creative brief template to guide your creative brief execution. Then, make sure to distribute it to everybody on your content team so they all work toward the same vision of success.
Click to enlarge
Generate content ideas designed for success
Brainstorming is a great tool for getting the creative juices flowing and generating a high volume of new content ideas. There are a wide range of ways to approach this task, including the loosely organized free-association process Jay Acunzo recommends, and the five-step improv exercise Cisco Systems’ Tim Washer developed through his experience as a comedy writer.
But, if you are looking for a more strategically guided method – one that prioritizes high-growth content projects over those that only provide incremental returns – consider experimenting with the 10x idea generation framework CoSchedule’s Garrett Moon has used to reach his marketing goals 10 times faster.
Vet your content ideas for viability
Unless you live in a world where time and budget are unlimited, you need to prioritize the creative ideas that result from your brainstorms and determine which are most worth your team’s time and energies in producing.
Michelle Park Lazette suggests asking three key questions before investing in any new content idea – a process she calls her chicken test:
Create content that delivers long-term results
Thanks to search engines, any content you publish online will be findable forever – whether it stands the test of time or not. As you build your ideas into assets, you may want to focus on more evergreen types that will continue to benefit your brand long after it’s initially published.
Mike Murray outlines the evergreen content formats he thinks offer the longest lifespans by design, as well as those that can be easily updated with fresh information as necessary.
Looking to explore additional content types? Check out our most recent content marketing playbook: How to Win at Content Marketing
Support sales and drive increased conversions
While all-purpose content is important to have, you can build your content efforts around specific or specialized business needs – like supporting your sales team’s efforts to address pressing customer challenges or bridging prospects’ critical knowledge gaps.
Follow the technique that Pam Didner has outlined for creating sales-driven (and sales-driving) content – which starts with mapping the customer journey to the sales journey.
Build lasting audience relationships
If your writers are focused on communicating key talking points instead of readable and relatable stories, you might grab the audience’s attention, but you won’t hold it for long – or earn their ongoing interest in what your brand has to say.
As readable.io’s Steve Linney explains, readable content speaks to consumers on their level, using short sentences and simple words, and avoiding unnecessary buzz terms or industry jargon that can make stories feel too complex and confusing to engage with. To strike a good tonal balance between formal and conversational speech without sacrificing your brand’s personality, use Steve’s helpful style of writing chart as a reference tool:
For more comprehensive guidance on content creation, follow the Road Map to Success: Creating the Content of Your Audience’s Dreams
Content distribution tips and tools
Simply creating and publishing content online probably won’t be enough to get it discovered by the right consumers, let alone do so at scale. As a content marketer, you need to make thoughtful decisions about how and where to distribute your content, as well as how you boost your efforts’ chances of building authority and trust.
Promote your blog posts for maximum success
As DivvyHQ’s co-creator Brody Dorland reminds us, without an effective and repeatable process for promoting your blog posts and maximizing their visibility, all the hard work creating them can go to waste. Fortunately, he shares an updated version of his future-proof checklist for promoting your blog that will help you cover all your bases.
Click to enlarge
Streamline your social media marketing
Figuring out the best places to share your content on social media can be puzzling as the rules, opportunities, audiences, and value propositions vary greatly from one channel to another – and can shift gears abruptly without a moment’s notice. But one thing that can make your decisions more straightforward is establishing a channel plan – an advanced directive for how your brand can and should distribute its content marketing efforts on rented channels like social media and what you expect to achieve.
For my post on social media marketing plans, I created a sample template (below) that can help you organize and apply the essential details. Feel free to download a copy and customize it to suit your needs – just open the Google document, go to “File > Download As >” and select the file format you prefer to work with. (Please note: While I used CMI as a reference for this example, the data included does not represent our channel plan.)
Master the basics of link-building
Another way to amplify your new content is by linking to it from your other high-performing content as well as popular and relevant third-party sites. Authoritative backlinks might be harder to earn than organic social shares; but as BuzzSumo’s Susan Moeller points out, they stay around longer than a tweet or a Facebook post, are easier to track than “dark-sharing” mechanisms like email and apps, and serve as a powerful Google ranking factor.
Amplify content by linking to it from high-performing #content as well as relevant third-party sites. @joderama Click To Tweet
If you are looking to take advantage of this technique, Susan recommends five content formats that won’t steer you wrong:
Authoritative content that answers popular questions, such as “what is?”
Strong opinion posts and political posts
Content that provides original research and insights
Content that leverages a trending topic but also provides practical insights
Authoritative news content on new products or developments
Get started with influencer marketing
Partnering with high-profile industry experts and public personalities for content distribution can help strengthen your company’s credibility and trustworthiness – a must for success. And with brands estimated to see an average ROI of $6.85 for every dollar invested in influencer marketing (Burst Media study), it may be one of the smartest bets around for successful content distribution.
Partnering w/ high-profile experts & celebs for #content distribution can strengthen credibility. @joderama Click To Tweet
Building a robust influencer marketing program can be a time-consuming and intimidating undertaking, especially for businesses new to the game. Following our eight-step process will prepare you to tackle all the tasks, but you can start with a few lower-touch entry points such as the content roundup.
As Chad Pollitt describes, the content roundup involves collecting the thoughts of several industry influencers on a given topic and compiling them into a blog post (or some other form of content). Chad also shares the checklist below, which outlines everything involved in executing the technique successfully.
For more comprehensive guidance on promotion and distribution, follow the Road Map to Success: Content Distribution Essentials That Win Eyeballs
Content measurement tips and tools
Following the above advice will give your content a strong strategic and creative foundation, but that doesn’t mean your job is done. You need to continually evaluate, strengthen, and grow your content kingdom by identifying what’s working, adjusting what isn’t, and amplifying your content’s power through strategic optimization.
Measure content performance with the right metrics
It’s not enough to create and distribute the content you think your audience will want to read. You must demonstrate that your content is making a measurable impact on the bottom line by driving readers to take action with your brand.
Tracking the right key performance indicators (KPIs) can help provide insight into whether your efforts are moving the needle in the right direction. KPIs can also offer clues as to what steps should be taken to get poor-performing content on track. Use this list shared by Mike Murray to identify the most informative metrics for your specific business goals:
Of course, not all of the above metrics will be meaningful when determining the ultimate measure of success for content marketing initiatives: ROI.
As Global Copywriting’s Sarah Mitchell points out, a single piece of content rarely generates a direct conversion, making data points like unique visits, page views, sentiment scores, or even time on page somewhat irrelevant to the bottom line. However, if you want to demonstrate how your overarching content strategy is contributing to your business goals in other ways, she suggests starting with these content metrics as indicators:
Open rates from email show whether your titles or subject lines resonate with your audience.
Click-through rates (CTR) from your website content and email campaigns can identify consumers’ willingness to answer calls to action and help you understand how customers move through your content.
Time spent. If time-spent figures are changing, it’s worth examining why.
Invitations to contribute at in-person events, in writing, or by making appearances on videos or podcasts are an indication of thought leadership.
Results from research and surveys about your company provide a body of information to track over time.
For more comprehensive guidance on measurement, follow the Road Map to Success: Monitoring and Measuring Your Content’s Performance
Go forth and conquer
While these tips, tools, and templates will help you tackle many of the challenges involved in successful content marketing, they’re no substitute for a thorough understanding of the principles and techniques they represent. If you have questions or would like additional insights on any of these topics, let us know by adding a comment.
Want to immerse yourself in content marketing and gather with thousands of your fellow content marketers? Register by the end of 2018 for the lowest rates for Content Marketing World 2019!
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post The Best Checklists, Tips, and Templates for Content Marketing in 2019 appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
from https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2018/12/checklists-tips-templates-2019/
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This summer’s most inspiring design books
Summer is a time for creative renewal, and for many of us, that means new books. 2018’s most exciting new design books have something for everyone, whether you just want to peruse coffee table eye candy or you finally have time to pore over the essays you didn’t have a chance to read during the winter. We’ve compiled some of the most compelling new and forthcoming releases, from significant design research to pure, unadulterated fun. Find the first 10 titles below, and stay tuned for part two.
Architects’ Houses
By Michael Webb
[Cover Image: Princeton Architectural Press]
What happens when an architect becomes his or her own client? That’s the premise of the projects in Architects’ Houses, which looks at the stories behind homes designed by architects for themselves. Take the husband and wife team, Antón Gargía-Abril and Débora Mesa, whose studio spent more than a year on structural calculations for their remarkable balancing act of a home. When the architect is in the driver’s seat, the typical process–and timeline–for finishing a house can easily go out the window. Often, that’s what makes these buildings so worthy of our attention.
$41.82 on Amazon
California Captured
By Marvin Rand, Emily Bills, Sam Lubell, and Pierluigi Serraino
[Cover Image: Phaidon]
Marvin Rand is the most famous architectural photographer you’ve never heard of. Like his better-known peer Julius Shulman, Rand chronicled the aspirational architecture of mid-20th century California, but his work remained largely unknown until 2012, when journalist Sam Lubell discovered an archive of more than 50,000 of the photographer’s negatives and transparencies. California Captured (Phaidon) showcases nearly 250 of these images. Sleek, single-family homes by architects such as Richard Neutra, Craig Ellwood, and John Lautner figure prominently, in addition to Googie landmarks like the Theme Building at LAX and Tiny Naylor’s drive-through–all rendered in Rand’s crisp, unfussy style.
$40.19 on Amazon
California Crazy: American Pop Architecture
By Jim Heimann
[Cover Image: Taschen]
Almost 40 years ago, Jim Heimann published a book called California Crazy. It brought the state’s folly-filled pop architecture to the mainstream, documenting its theme parks, fast-food stands, and roadside buildings. In June, the book is being republished anew. It still features page after page of rich, archival photos of countless SoCal typologies–from buildings shaped like pumpkins, cameras, and ice cream cones, to studio sets and faux castles. But Heimann also reflects on what makes California such fertile ground for architectural experimentation and the “dicey business” of preservation, including how the first edition inspired new research into many of these formerly obscure structures (some of which no longer exist). Here’s hoping that the 40-year-update will become a regular thing.
$60 preorder on Amazon.
Coffee Lids: Peel, Pinch, Pucker, Puncture
By Louise Harpman and Scott Specht
[Cover Image: Princeton Architectural Press]
Did you know the Smithsonian has more than 50 coffee cup lids in its permanent collection? Thanks to the work of architects Louise Harpman and Scott Specht, who have been collecting lids for years, this form of “invisible” design will be preserved forever. The duo’s new book about the typology, titled simply Coffee Lids, is a glimpse into the depthless variation and ingenuity of an object that few people have ever even considered. “Looking something as simple as a humble coffee lid is an entry into that conversation,” Harpman told Co.Design‘s Katharine Schwab, “to slow down, take notice, wonder, ask questions–what is that, how is it made, who designed it?”
$18.08 on Amazon.
How To Make Repeat Patterns: A Guide for Designers, Architects and Artists
By Paul Jackson
[Cover Image: Laurence King Publishing]
Channel your inner M.C. Escher with How To Make Repeat Patterns (Laurence King). The guide, by paper artist Paul Jackson, reveals the rules of symmetry that undergird complex patterns and offers tips for producing your own designs, whether for wallpaper, architectural facades, or digital products.
$24.33 on Amazon
Inside North Korea
By Oliver Wainwright
[Cover Image: Taschen]
The humans in Oliver Wainwright’s photos of North Korean buildings look like scale models: Tiny figures, invariably dressed in drab tones, that serve only to underline the yawning size and shimmering jewel-tones of Pyongyang’s architecture. “It looks as if someone has emptied a packet of candy across the city, sugary pastilles jumbled up with jelly spaceships,” writes Wainwright, the Guardian architecture critic who visited the country on a tour in 2015, when he shot the photos in this Taschen tome that will be released in August. Unlike most accounts of the city, Inside North Korea (Taschen) offers a thoughtful analysis of Pyongyang’s urban history, situating its widely photographed architecture in context with the Kim dynasty and the way it seeks to articulate its goals through building. It’s sobering, and mesmerizing, at the same time.
$60 preorder on Amazon.
Lorna Simpson Collages
By Lorna Simpson
[Cover Image: Chronicle Books]
The collages in this monograph are a revelation. Artist Lorna Simpson takes models from vintage Ebony and Jet ads and gives them elaborate new hairstyles, using ink washes, geological formations, and other mysterious imagery. The book features 160 artworks that, together, form a meditation on the language of hair and black identity. As poet Elizabeth Alexander writes in the introduction: “The repetitions in these images suggest that we are thought of by some as a dime a dozen: undervalued, yes, but also, abundant. Black women are everywhere glorious and unsung.”
$29.95 preorder on Amazon.
Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life
By Julia Reinhard Lupton
[Cover Image: University of Chicago Press]
This inventive book by an English and comparative literature professor at UC Irvine examines the spaces that bring Shakespeare’s tales to life. Author Julia Reinhard Lupton analyzes dwellings in five classic works–Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale–and draws on theory from the likes of Martin Heidegger and Don Norman to offer insight into everything from “the ethics of habitation and hospitality” to “the literary dimensions of design.”
$27.50 on Amazon.
Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours: Adapted to Zoology, Botany, Chemistry, Mineralogy, Anatomy, and the Arts
By Patrick Syme and Abraham Gottlob Werner
[Cover Image: Smithsonian Books]
Skimmed-milk white. Arterial blood red. Celandine green. In the 19th century, naturalists were struggling to standardize the colors they observed in nature–without the utility of post-Industrial Revolution digital precision of CMYK or RGB. Werner’s Nomenclature Of Colours, published in 1814, gave scientists, artists, and naturalists a common language to talk about color–even Darwin famously used the color dictionary on his travels. This spring, the Smithsonian re-released the book in a small, pocket-sized version, perfect for travelers or anyone who spends time outdoors. It’s an evocative creative document–and a lovely antidote to life lived online.
$13.46 on Amazon.
Women Design
By Libby Sellers
[Cover Image: Frances Lincoln]
Women Design (Frances Lincoln) assumes the Herculean task of highlighting women’s contributions to design–including architecture, industrial design, digital design, and graphics–from the 20th century to the present day. It has no business being just 176 pages, but author Libby Sellers, a prominent British gallerist and curator, manages to pack a wealth of information in profiles of 21 women designers. Historic pioneers such as Denise Scott Brown, Ray Eames, and Lella Vignelli get their due, as well as contemporary stars like Neri Oxman, Patricia Urquiola, and Kazuyo Sejima. “Women have always been, and remain, a significant part of the design profession,” Sellers writes. “…Yet, if asked to name the design world’s greats, most people would produce a list of predominantly male names.” This book attempts to correct the narrative, and it tells some rollicking stories along the way. Be sure to check out the section on the “Damsels of Design,” a group of women industrial designers GM hired to address what a 1957 press release described as “woman driver’s problems” like “anything in cars that might snag their nylons.”
$30 preorder on Amazon.
This summer’s most inspiring design books published first on https://petrotekb.tumblr.com/
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@quadratic-shipping
B. Thanks for the tip! I rarely use spreadsheets so I have a lot to learn.
A. Yeah, I'm definitely looking to math for inspiration (even though I'm not particularly good at it, lol). I do think the multiplying-division metaphor isn't quite right. Solving for roots sounds a lot closer, especially since imaginary numbers and the imaginary axis provide solutions to all polynomial equations. And, knowing that solving for roots requires 0, identifying the "roots" of a given idea probably requires a similar construct to test against.
observations and reflections on a small model of the RGB structure
These past few weeks, I've been loosely testing a small model of my RGB structure that I outlined in [[erosion of structure]]. To reiterate, that hypothetical structure uses three R, G, and B axes with 255 "values" per axis for a total of 16.5+ million complex coordinates (e.g. 2-132-7). Since I wanted something that I could check at a glance without getting lost, I downscaled to two axes and four values for a total of 16 complex coordinates. You can check out the spreadsheet here. I also opened another sheet to host more derivative ideas from the cross-pollination.
The first thing I noticed when filling in the grid was how hard it was. Some categories were easier to cross-pollinate than others, but I still needed to invest some thinking to synthesize them well. This difficulty also extended into the "Matrixed" sheet, where I budded off certain key points in each cross-pollinated square into a dedicated slot at that same coordinate. For instance, the biggest thing I could think of between "future studies" (3) and "taking breaks" (C) is that the study of the future must account for "slow days" and natural gaps in significant activity (C3). And then the derivative idea: We make history daily, but not all of that is relevant or important.
The second thing I noticed was how interesting the second Matrixed sheet was. It's satisfying to see my ideas precipitate so clearly. I had a felt sense that these were "right", because these were implicit assumptions in my thinking, but I rarely encountered them or followed up with these specific axioms. Now that these ideas were so clear, I could write about them easily, and I did--I wrote two threads about how mental contexts are organic frames, and how radical meaning-making is not enough.
In theory, this structure should also be able to accommodate the reverse process where high-fidelity, specific ideas can be differentiated or decomposed into n axis values and placed at that coordinate. For instance, the idea that "most people don't have a complete insight-through-making cycle" could be split into the values of "essence of problem-solving" and "human factors". Therefore, it will be stored at D1.
However, D1 is already filled by "Radical meaning-making is not enough". This was completely unexpected because I thought that concept multiplication and concept division were inverses/reverses. No matter how many times you combine or split a piece of information, the products will be the same.
This paints an odd picture of my intelligence, and perhaps human intelligence in general: How is it that combining more than 2 or 3 ideas is so hard, but decomposing an idea becomes much easier with the more topics available to classify into?
I don't think my synthesis is "too biased" or "too personal" because that's inherent to the process. I also don't think the division is necessarily "too low-res". The classifying topics are values on the axes and are a deliberate constraint. I'm more willing to accept for the time being that, until we have a "cognitive proof" that concept multiplication and concept division are actually inverses, we may have to treat them like separate though somewhat related processes. To the RGB structure, this means having 1 spreadsheet for synthetic generation and 1 for analytic placement. Or, if we had to really keep everything in one RGB structure, we'd need to either add more values on each axis, add a completely new axis with it's own set of values, or make do with the emerging "superposition" of each coordinate value.
#tri#postie replies#homegrown by postie#RGB structure#observations and reflections on a small model of the RGB structure
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