Group items tagged

The vaunted "third space" isn't home, and isn't work-it's more like the living room of society at large.  It's a place where you are neither family nor co-worker, and yet where the values, interests, gossip, complaints and inspirations of these two other spheres intersect.  It's a place at least one step removed from the structures of work and home, more random, and yet familiar enough to breed a sense of identity and connection.  It's a place of both possibility and comfort, where the unexpected and the mundane transcend and mingle. And nine times out of ten, it's a bar.

options for improving personal futures: do-it-yourself homesteading (home as driver of economic value not respository for consumer goods) shared consumption employment: choice between making a living and creating a life

Very interesting article about what it means now and what it might mean in 2075 mean to live in a rural community. Note the list questions ranging from transportation systems to schools to "rural services".

This will have huge economic and societal impact.  Are we considering this new future as people live longer?

What's needed...is a lot more public debate about the risks of inaction. "Risk is something we all understand in our daily lives...and if people were to think more about the risk of inaction, we think they would be more inclined to take action." How can museums help move the conversation forward?

"What happens when its customers are a generation that prefers urban living?"  same question could be asked by suburban museums. 

Older mothers make sense when young adults are living with the parents longer. How will this change what museums need to provide in terms of family experiences?

Is the end of landlines near?

Book review of a rosier view of digital technology and how it improves our lives.

"rather than learning how to remember"...we're learning how to find the answers that are already out there. This is going on my to-read list. Goodreads, anyone?

I still wonder about the ethical issues of people having these devices and what they could do to living creatures.......

I live just a few miles from where the Pop-UP MANGo happened. I can tell you that while the community-participation aspect of this kind of "planning" is terrrific, it undermines overall city planning in terms of space use, traffic mitigation, and access. What's the proper balance?

Emotional attachment to robots?  As they become integrated into our lives-and our museums-how will we relate to them?  

A new study observes the growing economic and income divide's impact on America's neighborhoods. Researchers have found the proportion of Americans living in 'middle class' neighborhoods declining, while 'rich' and 'poor' neighborhoods are growing.

Living in close proximity to ever-rising water can be a difficult prospect, and while the Dutch have come up with all sorts of ways to work with instead of against it, this is a new achievement: apartments that float.

This map shows the location of every independent coffee shop in Brooklyn and the walking-shed community associated with it. Independent coffee shops are positive markers of a living community. They function as social spaces, urban offices, and places to see the world go by. Communities are often formed by having spaces in which people can have casual interactions, and local and walkable coffee shops create those conditions, not only in the coffee shop themselves, but on the sidewalks around them. We use maps to know where these coffee shop communities exist and where, by placing new coffee shops, we can help form them. We applied two steps to generate the data displayed by the map. First, we used the Google Places API to locate all coffee shops in a given city. Second, for each point in the map we queried the walking route and distance to its nearest coffee shop using the Google Distance Matrix API. In the final map the colored areas represent a region which is walkable to a specific coffee shop (within one kilometer or 0.7 miles). The intensity of color at each point indicates its distance from its corresponding coffee shop.

The future of sustainablity museums structures may benefit from: asphalt that re-sets itself with a dose of induction heating, concrete that patches up crack with the help of its living bacterial aggregate, and a recent discovery that some metals have self-healing properties.

This is pretty crazy!