Quite a sky this evening.
Better broadband please. kthxbai
Evening on the beach.
After some thought, I put today’s social & digital lunchbreak outside the reg wall, because the lead story is important for everyone in online publishing.
onemanandhisblog.com/2020/06/s…
(People who get it via email do get exclusive content, though…)
How to foster ‘shoshin’ - the beginner’s mind. Such a good discipline.
Fish.
Finally getting back to the beach.
It’s amazing the difference removing the feeling that the clock is ticking on your trip out makes.
Nice evening for a swim…
30 seconds of Shoreham Beach for you:
Shoreham Beach is a rare vegetated shingle habitat. And it’s just coming into bloom now.
Stunning.
What you need to know about Dominic Cummings
I’ve been reading Cummings’s blog since long before anyone had ever heard of him. Here’s what I’ve concluded from it… 1. He’s a compulsive autodidact. Nothing wrong with that, but…
As you might imagine, the picture does not get prettier from there onwards. One of the fascinating things about Cummings is that his history and his thinking is there for anyone to read - even if it is rather mutable…
First sea swim of the year. 🏊♀️
Kite surfers off Shoreham Beach.
Beach life.
Photographer friends: can you recommend a good hand strap?
“You’re muted” has been uttered more often in the last two months than in all the rest of human history combined.
Ingenious - forces social distancing on trains, while making it easier to commute by cycle: Increased bike storage proposed for socially distanced commutes
I want a kilt version of this social distancing ‘petticoat dress’.
There are probably a lot of future PhD theses in exploring why masks have become such a polarising issue in the US, compared to pretty much any other country.
An evisceration of Google Classroom
Google Classroom’s lackluster design is actually perfectly in line with the way we’ve always thought about the spaces we build for learning. Schools have by and large been conspicuously if not chronically underfunded, especially in comparison to spaces for work.
The last two months have proven that:
- There is lots of potential in online learning
- Most of the tools are, frankly, pretty poor
I hope Benedict Evans is right when he suggests that we are likely to see an explsion of startups in this space in the coming months.
The pandemic office job needs flexibility
I was influenced in this by the work of Nassim Taleb, who argues that a high degree of variation may be better than monotonous pursuit of a supposedly optimal average. This led me to think it might be better to partition work into periods of high sociability interspersed with days of self--seclusion, as an alternative to the neither-fish-nor-fowl halfway-house of the open-plan office.
I think this would both address some of the problems with offices during this pandemic period, and quite possibly lead to a more productive information worker workforce.
There’s a lot of pre-existing work on more variable workplace structures, most of which has been soundly ignored for decades. To give some context, I was writing about some of these issues for Estates Gazette 20-odd years ago. But everything remained trapped in the homogenous open-plan office approach.
There’s some real work do be done here around new ways of working, and new ways to use office space.
Om Malik: Is Shopify ready to be double-crossed by Facebook?
“Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal, Facebook!”
The Cambridge University decision seems sensible - push the low-hanging fruit online, work on how you handle the rest. Better to plan for strict social distancing with the ability to ease it, if the situation allows, than to just hope it will be easier by the autumn.
What will the pandemic do to real estate and the way we live in cities? Here’s a little bit of (informed) speculation: difficult times ahead - but something better could emerge.