The Design That Conquered Google→

Matt Buchanan, The New Yorker:​

In April, 2011, the Google co-founder Larry Page took over as C.E.O. Besides moving to streamline Google’s increasingly sprawling scope as a company, he immediately launched Project Kennedy, an initiative to give all of Google’s products a more consistent look, so everything would be easier to use.
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​Nearly a year later, the crisp design cues of Google Now and the Kennedy Project have swept across Google, and cards are set to become one of the dominant ways in which Google presents certain types of information to users. In other words, a card will be the atomic unit of information display across all of Google. In addition to Now and Google’s Glass wearable computer—where all information is displayed as a card—they have started appearing across a multitude of Google's services and applications, like the Play Store, Gmail on iOS, and mobile search and Plus, to name a few. And today, cards are invading two of Google’s most important products outside of search, with a dramatic design overhaul of both Maps and its Plus social network. That change might seem minor in some ways, but there are profound implications in the proliferation of cards, given that they will become the way that billions of people consume and digest bits of information they’re seeking from Google over the next few years.

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How to Spot a Weak Argument→

A brief excerpt from Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel C. Dennett:

When you’re reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for “surely” in the document, and check each occurrence. Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word “surely” is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument. Why? Because it marks the very edge of what the author is actually sure about and hopes readers will also be sure about. (If the author were really sure all the readers would agree, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning.) Being at the edge, the author has had to make a judgment call about whether or not to attempt to demonstrate the point at issue, or provide evidence for it, and—because life is short—has decided in favor of bald assertion, with the presumably well-grounded anticipation of agreement. Just the sort of place to find an ill-examined “truism” that isn’t true!

Creativity Top 5: Week of May 13, 2013

At number 5 the "I wish my son had cancer" campaign is potent and heartbreaking. ​

It Is in Our Nature to Need Stories→

Jag Bhalla for Scientific American: 

It is in our nature to need stories. They are our earliest sciences, a kind of people-physics. Their logic is how we naturally think. They configure our biology, and how we feel, in ways long essential for our survival.

Like our language instinct, a story drive—an inborn hunger for story hearing and story making—emerges untutored universally in healthy children. Every culture bathes their children in stories to explain how the world works and to engage and educate their emotions. Perhaps story patterns could be considered another higher layer of language. A sort of meta-grammar shaped by and shaping conventions of character types, plots, and social-rule dilemmas prevalent in our culture.

Creative People Say No→

Kevin Ashton on Medium: ​

Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains is work: the work of becoming expert through study and practice, the work of finding solutions to problems and problems with those solutions, the work of trial and error, the work of thinking and perfecting, the work of creating. Creating consumes. It is all day, every day. It knows neither weekends nor vacations. It is not when we feel like it. It is habit, compulsion, obsession, vocation. The common thread that links creators is how they spend their time. No matter what you read, no matter what they claim, nearly all creators spend nearly all their time on the work of creation. There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes.

Saying “no” has more creative power than ideas, insights and talent combined. No guards time, the thread from which we weave our creations. The math of time is simple: you have less than you think and need more than you know.