I’ve posted about 250 photos to Flickr from our recent trip to Istanbul. Here’s a few favorites:

• A thoughtful consideration (that could have so easily gone curmudgeonly) on the changes in how (and how much) we consume art – Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover.
• Michael Pollan on the cultural shifts revealed by themes in food-related TV entertainment – The historical drift of cooking programs — from a genuine interest in producing food yourself to the spectacle of merely consuming it — surely owes a lot to the decline of cooking in our culture, but it also has something to do with the gravitational field that eventually overtakes anything in television’s orbit…Buying, not making, is what cooking shows are mostly now about — that and, increasingly, cooking shows themselves: the whole self-perpetuating spectacle of competition, success and celebrity that, with “The Next Food Network Star,” appears to have entered its baroque phase. The Food Network has figured out that we care much less about what’s cooking than who’s cooking.
• Nine Reasons RadioShack Shouldn’t Change Its Name – Best one is " RadioShack has problems beyond any issues with its name." Also they did already change name from Radio Shack to RadioShack.
• Radio Shack: Our friends call us The Shack – Do they really now? More proof that you can't simply declare yourself cool. Promo or overall rebranding, it reeks of inauthenticity.
• Understand My Needs – a multicultural perspective – A Japanese usability professional compares the norms of service that retailers provide in Japan with those elsewhere (say, his experience living in Canada), and then contrasts that to the common usability problems found in Japanese websites. Culture is a powerful lens to see what causes these differences, and how usability people can help improve the experience.

At the Musical Instrument Museum in Brussels, I took a picture of an old picture, presumably of the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer

The museum is filled with every crazy variation on musical instruments you can imagine (and then beyond) so this struck me because it doesn’t connote musical instrument the way everything else did. It looks like an old computer. Well, sure, old electronic music tech was computer tech. In the lab, at least. This didn’t come from two people banging sticks together and liking the noise, it came out of a computer lab, and so the destiny of that sort of musical instrument is cast from that point of origin.

Physical objects evoke a reaction and interpretation (of meaning, of function, of value) based on the symbols we’ve learned. Products, especially those based on advanced technology, will naturally reflect the assumptions of their creators (without some sort of intervention or um design) about form, interface, and thus meaning, function, and value.

See more of my Belgium pictures here.

• BusinessWeek looks at how Steelcase went from user research data to insights to opportunities – "But most innovations depend on nontraditional research methods—ethnographic studies, customer-created collages, and so on—that can't easily be sliced and diced in Excel. That means synthesis can be one of the most challenging steps in the innovation process." This is an issue I'll be addressing in my upcoming workshop at EPIC 2009 "Moving from Data to Insights to Opportunities"
• The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies – Not technically a museum (or even an Internet museum) as they've really just aggregated images that represent tools and ways of working that have or are in the process of obsoleting.

• Interesting and inspirational exhibit at SFMOMA: Looking In: Robert Frank's "The Americans" – "I'm always looking outside, trying to look inside, trying to say something that is true. But maybe nothing is really true, except what's out there. And what's out there is always changing."
• A hedge fund manager learns to say "no" to investment proposals, fighting to buck the trend of easy if ludicrous investing – I told him that it was the dumbest idea I’d heard in a long while, and that I’d sooner pile up hundred-dollar bills to make a bonfire than invest. I hung up abruptly, and I began to feel a long-forgotten rush. The rush of calling foolishness by its true name. The pleasure of meting out chastisement to presumption. The satisfaction of knowing that my no meant a death blow for this bad idea, because there wasn’t an uncritical yes waiting next door. I am capital’s gatekeeper, and you shall not pass!

• The Comic Strip Museum in Brussels (Centre Belge de la Bande Dessiné. Belgisch Centrum voor het Stripverhaal) – A really interesting museum; I had no idea of the rich and important history of comics in Belgium, beyond Smurfs and Tintin they've produces an insane number of titles over the decades.
• Comics is the ninth art? – Although this post attributes the source to someone besides Morris, it does offer a bit more explanation about the set of arts
• Maurice De Bevere aka Morris – Belgian comic strip author who (according to the Comic Strip Museum in Brussels) coined the term The Ninth Art to describe comics

Rack o’ seats, Tate Modern, London, July 2008

This is a nice touch: self-serve portable seating for your journey through an art museum.

Rhino art at the Centre Pompidou. Better pictures here and here

Cattle advertisement in the Bankside area of London.

Take the form of some large animal and paint it Ferrari red. Then cover it with layers of gloss. Is the result art or advertising? The context in which we experience it seems to make all the difference. A museum or outside a restaurant?

Note: a more detailed, and impassioned exploration is in I Know It When I See It. But they start with the big red rhino, too.

From the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

The text of warning tells you not to touch the piece, because it’s fragile. But the design of the warning implies that you shouldn’t cross the line. It’s a nice example of persuasive design.

I’ve uploaded some new pictures to the Museum of Foreign Grocery Products

I’ve got quite a few more to do.