Observing The Things That Matter
We assemble emerging signals, connections and patterns and tie them together with the people, places and things that draw our attention.
A compendium of ideas for a world in transition.
This magazine’s so extraordinarily good that it makes Montréal look hipper than Berlin.
—Bruce Sterling
I haven’t been this excited about a magazine in a long, long time—perhaps not since I read Louis Rossetto’s pitch for WIRED on The Well back in the early 1990s.
—Peter Rukavina
It’s one of those magazines you want to save for the weekend to enjoy. You want to spend time with it.
—Tyler Brûlé, Monocle Editor in Chief
It says lean back with me, read me over the course of 2-3 weeks… it says important, serious and engaging. You know you will disconnect totally with this magazine in your hands.
—Mario Garcia, newspaper and magazine designer
Considered, elegant, beautiful and relevant.
James Lynch, fforest
Lovely. It’s my kind of mag; one that goes in my bookcase to keep in very nice condition.
—Richard Spencer-Powell, Monocle Creative Director
I just received a copy of The Alpine Review. It's stunning, important and inspiring. And, I just had to write to let you know.
—David Hieatt, Hiut Denim Company
Gorgeous and fascinating.
—Kat Meyer, O’Reilly Tools of Change
It has the scope of a book. I look forward to next Spring’s edition, though I’ve plenty to keep me reading meanwhile.
—magCulture
Our Raison d’être
Massive changes are happening in all areas of our lives. Technologies, cultures, climates, businesses, laws and beliefs are all twisting and pulling at the fabric of our world.
In this state of flux, the free flow of people, trends, subcultures, products and services is enabled. More and more people connect, assemble, work and create, unimpaired by physical or societal distances.
In this new environment, old fashions, techniques, crafts, ideas, mores and philosophies can be found, brought back, appropriated, absorbed and remixed with the new.
It all makes for fertile ground where all forms of creativity can thrive. Some old industries and structures are drying up while new, globalized and energetic ones are growing.
The Alpine Review is a bi-annual magazine that tracks changes in thought, systems and creations around the world.
It’s about ideas, people and places that matter, that have the potential to influence or inspire the operators of change in society. Tied together with a uniting theme or philosophy, each issue keeps you informed and inspired.
Shift. Disrupt. Make mountains.
In This Issue
Sensemaking
by Jon Kolko
To maintain any semblance of happiness, the skill most of us will require in the future is sensemaking: the ability to connect discrete insights and synthesize large quantities of often incomplete or conflicting information. But as Jon Kolko argues, only a few are armed with this magic ability and it requires hard, hard work.
Playfulness and Processuality
by David Cox
David Cox interviews Bruce Sterling on the so-called ‘New Aesthetic’ to examine ideas such as ‘processuality’; identifying patterns that connect machine sensor vision, aerial imaging, beauty in digital ‘mistakes’ and a general folding in of the digital into the real. The shock of the new has not felt quite this romantic since the early 1990s.
The Olde Aesthetic
by Nick Foster
Did the Olde Aesthetic arise as a counter to the fast-food monotony of the digital world or does the comfort of an Olde Aesthetic life lead to better clarity when considering the future?
Warby Parker
Branding by Design
Forget your father’s optometry—New York-based Warby Parker has been changing the eyewear game making glasses hip, sexy, literary and even socially responsible in a couple of short years. With a focus on pinpointed and precise design for every way you come to experience their brand, you might think the company was created by craftsmen. In fact, the founders come from a different side of the playing field—they’re Wharton graduates—but with their vision, what started off as a school project is now helping to rewrite the textbook on branding in the real world.
Edge of Eversion
by Patrick Tanguay
The distance has been breached. The physical world we inhabit and the digital world we created are now touching and becoming one. Where the overlap is most pronounced, on the foremost edges, people are making things, rekindling the old, creating the new, all enabled by an interconnected world.
Taleb’s Antifragility
by Louis-Jacques Darveau
In Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, the fourth installment of the Uncertainty Collection, Nassim Nicholas Taleb gives us a handbook on seeing things coming, by spotting the fragile, and conversely advocating in favour of people, organizations and ways of thinking, that are more than merely robust— they are antifragile.
Shared Ownership
Shared ownership. Collective consumption. The unplanned economy. Call it what you will—a new movement of the age old concept of sharing property is gaining in popularity thanks to a boost in digital technologies and a decline in institutional trust. The more consumers empower themselves by having their communities get the most out of goods and services, the more the traditional system will have to react, from changing to whom goods and services are sold, to changing the definitions of what a sale, an asset and money are in such a system.
The Internet of Things
by Martin Spindler
Cloud, Big Data and now the Internet of Things? Only one of them is being developed in garages. We explore the impact of connected objects and how it is more than just the latest in a round of buzzwords.
The City of Now
by Peter Bihr
Berlin is a manifestation of all that The Alpine Review thinks about: It lives the notions of a flat, networked world, of constant remixing of ideas, of crafts and technology and culture intersections. Shaped by the patterns of decentralization, non-regulation, lack of interference, an emergence of can-do spirit; adding up to a city in a state of constant flux, equipped with a bustling creative scene, an unenforceable smoking ban and an airport-turned-park.
Imagination As a New Currency
British author, philosopher and business consultant, Robert Rowland Smith, answers some questions for The Alpine Review. Together we discuss philosophy, imagination and ‘endarkenment’.