#HTE
What We’re Reading: 507 Mechanisms and Devices, Travel Posters to the Cosmos and More
Core77’s editors spend time combing through the news so you don’t have to. Here’s a weekly roundup of our favorite stories from the World Wide Web.
What Makes Something Beautiful?
Designers should obviously always be thinking about the bigger picture—for example, how to design for social impact and better other humans’ lives. On the other hand, considering style is such an integral part of what designers do, it’s funny that ‘beauty’ is such a taboo word in design right now. The Cooper Hewitt Triennial, confronts this strange paradox through expert examples of astounding, thought-provoking and, dare I say, beautiful design. The Times this week gives a good synopsis of the idea behind this show, now on view in New York.
—Allison Fonder, community manager
Square’s Guide to Supporting Female Engineers Goes Open Source
I found? this piece via my dear friend and boss lady, Kiana Pirouz. While a lot of startups and businesses are creating content around what they sell, Square has launched a publication centered around female engineers. They hope it will become a guide to other businesses, and are hosting in a GitHub repository for others to contribute their own thoughts.
—Carly Ayres, columnist, In the Details
Connecting to the Mass Surveillance State Through Art
David Remnick’s conversation with artist, filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras is the perfect primer for her recently opened exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Astro Noise. She reveals how the installation expands upon her work documenting the post 9/11 security state in a new medium: “What I’m trying to do is make people not numb to information. To reach people in a different way, to actually move them more."
—Alexandra Alexa, editorial assistant
We Are Hopelessly Hooked
Jacob Weisberg’s review-essay probably won’t tell you anything you didn’t already know — i.e. that, with digital media, we’re engaging in a giant, real-time experiment in rewiring our brains, mostly to the detriment of our social skills and emotional maturity — but it’s still a compelling summary of a few new books on the subject. Most troubling is his discussion of Nir Eyal’s Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Reading it, Weisberg writes, "you may come to feel that we’re in the middle of a new Opium War, in which marketers have adopted addiction as an explicit commercial strategy."
—Mason Currey, senior editor
A Catalog of the Small Components that Make Up Complex Machinery
This week I’m leafing through Henry T. Brown’s ”507 Mechanical Movements: Mechanisms and Devices.“ It was originally drawn and written in the 1860s, though the copy I have dates to 1903, and the book covers the then-newly-invented mechanisms of the Industrial Revolution. It’s fun and brainteasing to look at the diagrams without reading the descriptions and try to figure out how this assemblage of parts converted linear motion into rotary, rotary motion into oscillating, etc. Read this book before bed and you’ll have dreams about pulleys, levers and gears.
—Rain Noe, senior editor
Now Boarding
The extraterrestrial-loving folks over at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory just released a series of travel posters advertising 14 cosmic locales. The best part about these retro-flavored graphics for the future of travel? Each high-resolution poster can be downloaded for free from the comfort of your earthly abode.
—Rebecca Veit, columnist, Designing Women
Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age
The exhibition now on view at the Science Museum, London has been hailed as "Colossal,” but there’s scant coverage on the web and it’s only up for another month—is it time for a mission to London?
—Eric Ludlum, editorial director
http://www.core77.com/posts/47052/What-Were-Reading-507-Mechanisms-and-Devices-Travel-Posters-to-the-Cosmos-and-More