beautiful machines

MIT's Technology Review magazine has some good reading and viewing this month with its featured "Beautiful Machines" articles. Apple's design philosophy is in there, along with a fun video segment that leads off with Bruce Sterling. Always entertaining and worth watching just for the 5 minutes of the closest thing the design community has to its own stand-up comedian.

Their Objects of Desire article (with apologies to Adrian Forty) has some great pictures of design of the recent past. I was pleased to see both NeXT and Netscape 1.0N making it into the mix, having spent a lot of hours sitting staring at both.



Always shocking to see how familiar much of that UI is in today's XP/MacOSX/Vista world of operating systems...

Some great objects that combine the visceral, behavioural, and reflective elements of design.