Via Nicolas — Upcoming piece about the asynchronous city:

This weekend, I was at this un-conference, event, workshop called The Overlap in the misty Pacific Grove along the coast of California near Monterey. It’s a mix of designers and self-described business types and some who were both, mixing it up with a variety of loosely structured “technologies” to explore, test, pr…

The Overlap 09 was a weekend workshop in Pacific Grove, California where designers and business people came together to explore new ways of thinking and collaborating. The event featured storytelling, body storming, and prototype cards to inspire creativity and innovation. Participants engaged in activities that challenged traditional design approaches, fostering a space for experimentation and discovery. The workshop emphasized the importance of human connection and the role of design in shaping future possibilities. This is a very lightly and perhaps poorly fashioned reposting of a blog post from 2009 that appeared on the old Near Future Laboratory blog. I am gradually moving all the old posts over here to the new blog. This one is about a workshop I attended called The Overlap. It was a great experience and I wanted to preserve the notes I made at the time.

Last visit to London, I made a quick stop at the National Gallery in London to see this for real, Joseph Wright of Darby’s “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air-Pump”, which has relevance for me from my work and interests in the history and social studies of science. This was one of those odd tourist-y moments for me,…

This isn’t bad and its not a BSOD rant. Only, well — I guess it is in a matter of speaking. Perhaps not quite an instance of atemporality but there was a bit of a dizzy feeling I got when this crap computer I use every so often told me to call my hardware vendor. Who the heck is that, to start with?

Four parcels in one day, all good, gooey, design-y stuff.

Ooooh. Those code jockeys in the Laboratory have been mucking about in the ol’ locker room, giving each other rat-tails, chucking firecrackers in the halls and having a good horsin’ around. Smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap booze. Everything. Stink bombs in the girl’s room. Whatever. It’s a regular Lord of the F…

I found out about this Nintendo DS game from Kevin who found out about it from Russell. I literally just got it yesterday, but it’s pretty exciting to see. I can only imagine in my head out the play dynamics unfold, but I’ll be playing with it and have some more thoughts before long.

Finally, Objectified came to Los Angeles for a night. The Laboratory was a bit eager and a bit fan-boy-y. Some stages of hunger for the stories perspective and objectives of design, broadly. We felt like a small transition was made — there was a joke that the Laboratory “got”; there were personalities we recognized…