Joi Ito & Tim Brown on The Future of Making

The idea of making isn't just reserved for handmade bikes, artisan pickles, and Arduino helicopters. The future of making is a product of our human needs and the possibilities we create through technology. This is about a larger shift towards making and the unexpected movements that might occur. It's about how everyone from you to your grandma might design, make and consume products or experiences in the next 10 to 15 years. In this SxSW Interactive session Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab, and Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, will host a conversation that considers how we might fashion new tools for the future and then how those tools might influence our lives.

Ken Burns' New iPad App Turns U.S. History Into Beautiful Mixtapes

The app, simply called “Ken Burns,” allows the user to surf an overarching timeline year by year, seeing how clips from each film line up chronologically with – and, as Burns says, “speak to” – each other. Zoom in on 1869, for example, and a cloud of clips from The Civil War, The West, and The National Parks orbit in parallax formation around one another; swipe to 1930, and it’s clips from Jazz, Prohibition, Baseball, Huey Long, Thomas Hart Benton and The Dust Bowl. You can also watch its six playlists straight through – they range in length from 20 minutes to an hour long – or select individual clips à la carte.
 

The concept came out of a conversation Burns was having two years ago with MacKinnon, who is the music entrepreneur behind Hear Music and has known Burns since they worked together on music components for 2001′s Jazz.

“Ken and I were talking about how his films were in the search engines of iTunes and Netflix, and they’re always the top-rated thing when they run on PBS, but there wasn’t a digital place where all of his films were presented as one thing, as an integrated body of work,” says MacKinnon. “Then he paused for a second, and looked at me and said, ‘I really love my iPad.’”

Download the app but only if you are prepared to lose your day to it. 

Everything is a Remix, Case Study: The iPhone

Kirby Ferguson extends his fantastic series Everything is a Remix with a one-off case stufy of how remixing ideas and designs led to the iPhone. 

Radiolab Live: Apocalyptical

The great Radiolab podcast puts on a show, recorded live on stage in Seattle.

Dinosaurs, death, and destruction -- a thought-provoking and laughter-inducing dance on the grave of our inevitable demise. 

Cataclysmic destruction. Surprising survival. Radiolab turns its gaze to the topic of endings, both blazingly fast and agonizingly slow, in its live show Apocalyptical. With their signature blend of storytelling, science, and music, hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich romp through hundreds of millions of years of history to arrive at the end, again and again. Comedians Reggie Watts and Kurt Braunohler join the party, while musicians On Fillmore and Noveller create a cinematic live score before your eyes. 

A Brief History of Video Game Title Design

A brief history of video game title design, created for the “Talking Titles: How The Language of Cinema Changed Video Games” presentation by Art of the Title's Editor Will Perkins and Managing Editor Lola Landekic at gamercamp.ca.