Reviews The Freedom Chair From Humanscale

Thus, the Freedom chair is free of controls. There's one lever on the thing - for adjusting seat height. Beyond that, there are no knobs, locks, or buttons. The arms move up and down in tandem when you gently pluck them forward. You can set the chair's height, you can adjust the seat pan a little, and you can toggle the backrest so the curve hits the small of your back, where it belongs. That's it. You shouldn't have to think about the chair again, or touch a knob.

Pop!Casts

Author, journalist and contributing editor at Wired magazine Bruce Sterling understands why people get confused about new technology concepts. In what he sees as a culture war of web semantics, Bruce gets the audience’s attention with a unique call for a new vocabulary to better describe experiences with technology.


"Mashups [...] "nobody's going to listen to mashup's -- in another ten years. Mashups are novelty music.
They're like the monster mash.They have no musical staying power. You know -- you're pursuing a phantom there.
It's bad music. I mean it's not bad -- it's you know a pastiche, it's like magazine collage; you know which can be good for what it is.
But to pretend that that's like tremendous creative work -- no!
It's a tremendous creative power -- and it can have a tremendous audience, but it's not tremendously good.
You know and we need a little bit of aesetic honesty in confronting things like this.
Just because it's new and people with laptops can do it and get away with it and find an audience for it does not make it a real cultural advance. It's an epiphenomenon."


SXSW 2006 Keynote 2006-03-14 00:48:40

SXSW 2007 Rant 2007-03-13 00:59:15

The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole 2004-06-11 01:37:25

We're gonna glam, spend and consume our way into planetary survival. My own favorite sci-fi planetary-saving scheme for naming, numbering and linking to the Internet every piece of junk we create so that it can be corralled and briskly recycled, creating a cradle-to-cradle postindustrial order and averting planetary doom, may sound pretty shocking and alien. But I wrote that book while in residency at a famous design school. I received an honorary doctorate there and the book was published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It gets great reviews, designers love it. It's not even science fiction -- it's a cybergreen manifesto.