Tessa Jowell of the UK’s Department for Culture, Media, and Sport has a bit of a radical thought for a government funder: perhaps our ‘public purpose’ approach to funding and fostering the arts for their instrumental benefits is missing the point entirely. In a bullet-point essay she published in May, she offers a thoughtful argument […]
Archives for June 2004
Just don’t start playing solitaire
The New York Philharmonic recently tested a new audience information prototype (covered here in the New York Times, and also in Greg Sandow’s column), that feeds notes and insights about the current performance to the folks sitting out in the seats. It’s a wireless PDA-equivalent, currently called the Concert Companion, that’s designed as a performance-enhancement […]
The tyranny of templates
Graphic information specialist Edward Tufte (who I’ve talked about before) has some strong opinions about a favorite software program in the business world: Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that claimed to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: making us stupid, degrading the quality and credibility […]