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’.