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.
All Aboard!
If you’ve ever had the pleasure of traveling by rail in Japan you know they take train design very seriously—from the super smooth Shinkansen to the jam-packed commuter lines, each mode of travel is a reflection of Japan’s hyper-efficiency. This week, in honor of its 100th anniversary, the Seibu Group has unveiled a new train designed by architect Kazuyo Sejima. The express train is designed to blend into the surrounding landscape with semi-transparent and mirrored surfaces, and an interior designed to function as a relaxed living-room space. It’s expected to start rolling out on Seibu Railway’s commuter network around Tokyo in 2018.
—Rebecca Veit, columnist, Designing Women
How My Art Degree Made Me a Better Tech CEO
I am personally not someone who followed a linear career path (product designer-turned-editor here), so this article about art majors making great leaders resonated with me as I’m sure it does to many creatives in this generation. Design thinking may not be something I literally practice each day, but it has given me the ability to problem solve on a multidimensional scale, and that right there is an indispensable skill gained from a seemingly tangential field of study. We can’t necessarily expect to end up going into the field we studied in school, but we also shouldn’t forget that the overarching lessons we learn there can be highly indicative of the way we end up dealing with everyday hurdles.
—Allison Fonder, community manager
In Defense of Homogeneous Design
For all the differences between physical and digital product design, the two fields share quite a few similarities and I constantly find myself pulling from one to the other. In this Medium post, Yaron Schoen writes a compelling argument for homogeneous design, championing accessibility over slick home pages. “Jackets all look the same too, but hey, I’m pretty sure I know where my pockets are.”
—Carly Ayres, columnist, In the Details
If the World Began Again, Would Life as We Know it Exist?
This exploration of what might have happened if we were to rewind “the tape of life” is filled with more questions than answers, but it’s an endlessly fascinating rabbit hole to go down, as we follow the evolutionary experts who are trying to figure out “whether every living thing is the result of a several-billion-year-long chain of lucky chances, or whether we all—salamanders and humans alike—are as inevitable as death and taxes.”
—Alexandra Alexa, editorial assistant
The Minutiae Man: Paul Lukas and the Universe
Core77 old-schoolers will remember the days when Paul Lukas filled these very pages with his obsessive inquiries into consumer culture and will no doubt be pleased to catch up with him in this piece over on Vice. Speaking about the Brannock Device—the thing you use to measure your shoe size—he notes: “It’s a universal touchstone in our culture; like there’s literally nobody in America you can think of whose foot has not been in a Brannock Device at some point. But almost nobody knows what it’s called. So it’s simultaneously ubiquitous and anonymous, which to me is a very powerful combination.” Lukas’s work seeks mainly to elucidate that anonymity, to give it names and histories and cultural context. His devotion is such that he sports a Brannock Device tattoo.
—Eric Ludlum, editorial director
http://www.core77.com/posts/49568/Designing-an-Invisible-Train-for-Japanese-Commuters-and-Paul-Lukass-Obsessive-Studies-of-the-Aesthetics-in-Athletics