First time. Dan seems to know what the cool kids are up to. Email me if you wanna meet up — chad at this domain.

An excellent list of book recommendations from Adam Richardson to add to my books category.

It’s not on his list of recommendations, but his recent review of War Made New is also worth reading.

1. Order a Viva Le France (spiced hot chocolate) at Filter. Sit and compare the peculiarities of their hipster clientele to that of your own neighborhood coffeeshop.
2. Visit U.S.#1. Admire the vintage western shirts and boots, but instead get the leather jacket — your wardrobe already has more snaps than buttons. Besides, it’s cold outside.
3. Go to a 40th birthday party, followed directly by a 30th birthday party. Collectively discuss only babies and sing a Raffi song together at the first (make sure you’re at a reasonably nice restaurant first), then drink heavily to celebrate the Raffi-free state of your life at the second.
4. Get a serious hankering for red meat. Skip all typical steakhouses (sorry, Morton’s) and go to Fogo de Chão, a Brazilian churrascuria. Order a good cabernet sauvignon, then eat. And eat. Commune with your fellow carnivores: wolves, saber-toothed lions, and those horrific dinosaurs with scythe-like claws. Order increasingly rare cuts until you upend the table with a roar when they won’t bring it to you raw. Wake up with a stomachache.
5. Meet an old friend at the University of Chicago. Discuss the legal ramifications of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (make sure they’re a nuclear policy expert first) while admiring the Oxford-esque architecture, built with the finest of oil tycoon money. Buy some Goffman at the first-rate Seminary Co-op Bookstore. Try to justify to yourself that, academically speaking, your great-grandfather is John Dewey. Feel increasingly pretentious until you throw up in your mouth a little bit, then go take goofy pictures of yourself — by yourself — in front of The Bean in Millennium Park.

Doing a very quick redesign after six years of the same. With any luck the dust will be settled in a week or so. Thanks.

Set of interviews I’d come across a while back and filed away. Maybe a little heady and systems theory-esque, it still looks like a broad, interesting mix of people. I’m reading the Lucy Suchman interview right now.

Going Dutch? Design pros and cons of the Netherlands

By John Thackara of Doors of Perception on how the priorities of governments and a country’s existing design culture affects what’s designed (and how it’s designed). I’d love to work in another country for a few years after graduating, so the little bit of intercountry comparison left me wanting to know more.

The article also mentions STEIM, a music and acoustics research/design lab whose work was shown at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference I went to in June. Hearing Michel Waisvisz perform has been (at the risk of overstatement) one of the sonic highlights of my life.

There’s lots of other good stuff from John’s In the Bubble series of articles and mini-essays.

If time and money allow, I’ll hopefully be checking out the Doors of Perception conference next year. Others I’m thinking about include DIS (Designing Interactive Systems) and possibly HITS (Humans | Interaction | Technology | Strategy). Others I’m missing? I wish there was a conference out there that was a bit less formal, a bit more hands on, but that’s a conversation for another time.