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“We work closely with clients and collaborators on projects that acknowledge the reality of our rapidly changing times, designing with and for uncertainty, instead of resisting it.
We are particularly interested in the ways emerging technologies interface with the environment and everyday life, and with proven experience in design, strategy and foresight, Superflux is in a unique position to explore the implications of these new interactions. Ultimately, we strive to embed these explorations in the here-and-now — using rapid prototyping and media sketches to turn them into stimulating concepts, experiences, products and services.
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Unknown Fields Division – Mission
“The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design research studio that ventures out on expeditions to the ends of the earth to bear witness to alternative worlds, alien landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness. These distant landscapes – the iconic and the ignored, the excavated, irradiated and the pristine, are embedded in global systems that connect them in surprising and complicated ways to our everyday lives. In such a landscape of interwoven narratives, the studio uses film and animation to chronicle this network of hidden stories and re-imagine the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures.
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Interesting idea . . . with some repercussions.
“Courses are bogus. You don’t go to MIT for the courses (and every course that MIT teaches is online anyway). You go to MIT so that you can learn how learn stuff that they haven’t yet started a class for.
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I still keep thinking this is an Onion article and maybe I should.”People don’t take hurricanes as seriously if they have a feminine name and the consequences are deadly, finds a new groundbreaking study.”
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Can Technology Be Humane? by Paul Goodman | The New York Review of Books
From 1969
“And the style of such research and development is not good. It is dominated by producing hardware, figuring logistics, and devising salable novelties. Often there is secrecy, always nationalism. Since the grants go overwhelmingly through a very few corporations and universities, they favor a limited number of scientific attitudes and preconceptions, with incestuous staffing. There is a premium on “positive results”; surprising “failures” cannot be pursued, so that science ceases to be a wandering dialogue with the unknown.”
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Who is responsible for death threats from a Twitter bot?
“Recently, Jeffrey van der Goot of Amsterdam was questioned by police after a Twitter bot he owned autonomously composed and tweeted a death threat. While conversing with another Twitter bot, van der Goot’s Twitter bot tweeted “I seriously want to kill people” at a fashion event in Amsterdam. The bot used the text of tweets van der Goot wrote to compose new tweets of its own. Based on van der Goot’s explanation, the bot was programmed merely to create comprehendible sentences, not sentences with particular meaning or intent.”
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Letter: What We’ve Learned – NYTimes.com
“It’s no accident that many of the most-read New York Times articles of the last few years have been complex takes on serious subjects in a form other than a traditional article: an explainer of the Ebola crisis, a photo essay on aging, a video on ISIS and, from us, the rent-vs.-buy calculator, a graphic on nonemployed men, a map on poverty and an interactive on generational politics.”
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“Demonstrating how fully he had lost touch with reality, delusional man Jamie Farragut reportedly began turning off his laptop computer Tuesday at approximately 9:45 p.m. as if he were actually finished with it for the night.”