Don't panic
Madrid’s Barajas airport won the RIBA Stirling Prize for architecture yesterday.
I accidently visited it on my way to Valencia in the summer because I had to plan my trip to be in front of a telly for the World Cup final and the best way to do it was to change at Madrid. I didn’t even know there was a new airport so it was a lovey surprise to step off a plane and into the future. I spent an hour or so just wandering around in awe with a smile on my face. It’s stunning.
Steven Johnson has a great piece in the New York Times Magazine today about Will Wright’s Spore. He writes about ‘zooming’ as the motif or our times — those moments when you switch scale radically but the patterns remain similar.
I first heard him talk about the idea at a talk he did for us at Demos last year. It struck me at the time that not only is it interesting but it’s also a really useful way of thinking about research. Unless you can spot patterns on multiple levels it’s unlikely that you’ve really got a handle on what’s going on.
Neil Mullarkey’s latest newsletter has a couple of links to podcasts with The Beermat Entrepreneurs.
First as L. Vaughan Spencer:
http://www.beermat.biz/short-podcasts/BeermatRadio-Ed13-SHORT.mp3
And then on the value of improvisation in Business:
http://www.beermat.biz/short-podcasts/BeermatRadio-Ed14-SHORT.mp3
There was also a brilliant bit (Real Player) on the Today programme that I meant to blog ages ago where Neil came on after Jack Straw’s 8.10 interview. It was at the height of the Labour party implosion so Straw was having to watch his words very carefully.
The strange thing was that he came back on and listened to his interview and then said why he had said things in certain ways. It gave you a behind the scenes look at politics that I’d like to see much more of.