“To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.”
Don DeLillo
from "The Names"
I wake-up, have my realization sprayed, and now: no reality."
The Bang and Olufsen Serene is the anti-iPhone. Or it was before the marriage between B&O and their manufacturing partner Samsung went south.
As a design object it's polarizing and spectacular, luscious and maddening. It bucks a raft of industry trends and glides obliviously past consumer expectations: something of a Bang and Olufsen tradition. Living with a Serene day-to-day requires lot of patience as well as a willingness to abandon wholesale a lot of reasonable expectations for a mobile device.
Where to start. On my carrier in the U.S. (T-mobile) it was ultimately impossible to set up the Serene to send or retrieve email or multimedia messages, so after a long struggle I threw in the towel. Next, the experience of dialing a number –never mind pecking out a text message– on the circular keypad runs from awkward to militantly counterintuitive, depending on your patience and the length of message (note: shorter isn't just better, it may very well be all you have the time to compose). And about that circular keypad: for a company that prides itself on innovative and superior solutions, the same diabolical, hand-cramping idea was abandoned as unworkable over 40 years ago by AT&T's Bell Laboratories before reaching the market, then attempted unsuccessfully by Nokia decades later to a chorus of hoots, jeers and mountains of scorn in the marketplace. Why repeat a competitor’s failed approach?
In the end, all of this is irrelevant to a niche product like the Serene. Designed by an audio company, the Serene delivers crisp, better-than-landline-quality voice communication, but either by default or design –take your pick– it makes any other activity so grudging and onerous that the user is discouraged from even trying. Ironically, It's this distinction alone that makes the Serene the anti-iPhone. While the iPhone’s ludicrously unreliable and overextended network is seldom able to make or complete a voice call, but offers a zillion applications to keep the user distracted, the Serene offers few features beyond the ability to hold a conversation in sparkling, interruption-free clarity, and this it does exceedingly well.
"If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act." -Don DeLillo
The automated kitchen-of-tomorrow has featured prominently in science fiction since ...forever. The food dispenser is one of those ideas that seems an obvious enough next step if one assumes making dinner is nothing but toil. Of course in practice, the preparation of meals is an enjoyable activity, bound up in cultural and social traditions and needs that transcend the convenience of some automat-like contraption extruding dinner onto a conveyer belt. This might be why the more elaborate depictions of science fictional food dispensers are seen in spacecrafts and not in some imagined future home: surely astronauts and those people on Star Trek have better things to do than sauté spinach or poach an egg.
Of them all, 2001: A Space Odyssey's gleaming little General Mills-branded galley is my design favorite: intricate, sleek and practically seething with 1960's technological optimism, it's food preparation activities are so removed from human interaction that it functions as nothing more than an elaborate vending machine. While there has been little progress, or apparent interest, in fully automated food prep (outside my own home, anyway), smaller, incremental advancements soldier on with ever more sophisticated and complex ovens, cook tops, robotic Nespresso machines and the like making deeper inroads into the kitchen daily.
Recently, appliance giant Philips has posted several advanced and novel food preparation concepts that take more ambitious strides towards bringing molecular gastronomy to market. The standout concept Philips has proposed is a stereolithographic "food printer", that can both reconfigure and combine various foodstuff and ingredients, then "...‘print’ them in an array of unique shapes and consistencies, in much the same way as 3-D representations of product concepts are now produced" through repurposed ink jet printer technology (interesting article here, accompanying, somewhat cheesy video here).
"If you want a happy ending that depends, of course, on where you stop your story." Orson Welles
"Faith and family: nothing's more important for our state. Vast riches, beauty, and strategic placement --remember the adversaries scoffed, calling this help the United States.
Hi Alaska.
Know that besides me, Alaskan's grasp what can be purchased in this great land and globe, mocking "Seward's Folly". Secure Alaska, so Alaska could the people serve. Our beloved Alaska I want serving boldly as a territory to ridicule."
