Elon Musk is doing something even more interesting design wise, than Jobs did. Jobs imported decades old German modernist product design, which, unlike architecture, never really made it to the US, and applied Bauhaus modernism to software design. Musk is postmodern...
...in the best way. He's using retro cultural influences, Flash Gordon era rockets and Stealth Fighter like, origami style, car design from 70s Lotus, to deliberately invert the current norm and show that you can be playful with products that are much more ambitious than Apple's.
You can tell at a glance that this is real design in the sense of a human being making creative choices, rather than abrogation through focus groups under the euphemism of 'human centric design' (which is really the opposite).
And it's now shifting into a new gear at both SpaceX and Tesla, where the exterior of both rockets and cars were, until recently, conventional and most of the innovation was in the interior, getting rid of buttons and dials and replacing them with screens.
Postmodernism in literature and social science is largely toxic bullshit and unrelated to it's meaning in design. In architecture it ended up being tame but in product design, Musk could take it to a new level.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Here is a recipe for how to build a place like this. Importantly, it has to be a recipe, not a design.
Establish a simple hierarchy like the human body: a head (here, the cathedral), and the rest. At building level either consciously use symmetry or consciously break it.
Have squarish spaces between buildings for people to interact. Put trees in them where possible.
Prioritise pedestrians over bicycles and bicycles and motor scooters over cars. Remove on street parking and remove bicycle lanes where spaces can be pedestrian first.
Fantastic thread. Why movies are full of recycling franchises like Marvel while innovation in indie fringes doesn't percolate up. I suspect reason for this is the following:
Mainstream is hyperconnected, over-dense network (groupthink, ossified) and is potentially disrupted only when overall network becomes a small world one (goldilocks area between connected and Balkanized) and stuff that appears in the creative niches can bubble up to mainstream.
Reason it isn't bubbling up to mainstream is that niches have also been hijacked with their own form of groupthink (Taleb's tyranny of the minority), meaning that alternative though or creativity is suppressed where the niches are in open forum or connect to the mainstream.
1. Crypto is a technical solution to pure Internet infrastructure, it can’t prevent laws against it. Financial services consist of a technical and regulatory component.
2. The adoption of Internet based currency tokens by central banks uses a crypto based technical solution to replace banking rails with the Internet. It doesn’t use the crypto aspect for regulation so is not decentralised.
3. DeFi extends crypto solutions to financial products and ownership more widely. Financial products are basically fungible contracts and ownership, transferable non fungible ones.
Coinbase is like Netscape. It's a well designed UI on top of a new network (Bitcoin/web) created using a new protocol (Bitcoin spec/HTTP). It's worth more than Netscape because it holds currency but maybe it should be valued based on financial services, not tech stock growth.
Like Netscape and unlike, say, Facebook, it doesn't own its own protocol. It's not a platform in the traditional sense.
Now you could argue that Coinbase is like Google which sits directly on the web and therefore doesn't own its own protocol, but Google monetizes its traffic not its deposits or their transactions.