One of the more ingenious things I’ve seen in some time. Speaks for itself, I think.

From the Platform21 website:

Platform21 is a platform for people curious about the future. An old, round chapel in Amsterdam is our public design laboratory. Here we organise exhibitions, lectures and other events.

To us, design is a vehicle to dream about the future. What is possible, what will change and where lay the most exciting creative challenges? Every new project starts from a recent theme. This can be the future of the car or the possibilities of a technique like folding. Within such a theme we ask designers, artists, architects and scientists for a creative contribution. Existing works are combined with work in progress. Platform21 thus functions as an international meeting place, real and virtual, where professionals, amateurs and public inspire each other.

Two very insightful interviews posted this morning:
Chris Wilson over at The Marketing Fresh Peel interviews Piers Fawkes of PSFK as part of his Future of Work series. Fawkes opens up on his views of the changes in the workplace that Gen-Y will face:
Gen Yers are going to work for scores of companies and they need [...]

1,435mm is a decidedly significant, if seemingly arbitrary figure.
As it happens, it the precise amount of space between train track rails dictated by Standard Gauge (occasionally referred to as Stephenson Gauge), and the specification used on some 60% of the world’s railway mileage.
Four feet, eight and one-half inches – a standard that allows trains to [...]

Helge Tenno, always about six hours ahead of the rest of us on 180360720.no, has a great post today summarizing a panel from the PSFK Salon this past weekend focused on the mobile user in which he relates a discussion about a patchwork approach to location-based solutions.

Put more eloquently: Mobile is about people, not technology, and the intersection of these two will be increasingly-defined by applications and tools that are uniquely combined by people to suit their individual needs and desires – not provided from a single, global source.

Helge writes:

The Patchwork implies that it is the combination of intelligence in and sensing by these local applications that the “grand machinery” will be produced. Not by a dumber, global, giant solution.

This is wonderfully well-put, I think.

More:

It’s about understanding my life, the activities I perform, which ones are relevant for your company. And discovering how you can ad value to this based on presence (being accessible when the situation occurs, not on the laptop four hours later), people (person + herd = culture) and place (location + time).

Click through and have a read. While you’re there, poke around. Tenno is right on top of things, and a heck of a good writer.

When Jonathan MacDonald suggests that we ought to be talking about what mobile does, not what it is, he makes a fantastically salient point – a point that people are finally beginning to grasp as the discussion moves from platforms and hardware to a million simple, highly-configurable pieces of software.