Maldon Salt (Page 10)

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On what software designers can learn from Japanese knife makers.

From Kinfolk, Volume Eight: The Cutting Edge, by Ethan Kawasaki. The knife is unequivocally the most important tool in the kitchen: It is an icon in the culinary arts. Cooks get them tattooed on their bodies. You don’t touch another cook’s knives. A knife is one of the

On architecture, skeuomorphism, and "peopled" spaces.

Architect William J. Hirsch Jr, in his book Designing Your Perfect House, expounds on the necessity of the artisanal and the handmade in “peopling” spaces: …the inclusion of materials that indicate a human hand contributed to [peopled spaces]. Hardwood floors, tiles, carved wooden details, hammered metal door handles, and fieldstone

The shoes I wore to meet the architect....

were weathered white oxfords with robin’s egg blue wingtips. Shoes with a point-of-view. To design a house is an intimate, opinionated thing. For it is within houses that we are our most intimate: naked, raw, vulnerable and honest. It is within houses that we are our most opinionated: yelling,

On how engineers and scientists are like guardian angels.

“Wasn’t that a miracle? she remarked. Her guardian angels were with her that day.” Those were the words of my sister-in-law a couple of years ago after Will’s older sister walked away unscathed from a rollover collision. Stopping an object’s momentum requires force acting over a period

A writer's writer.

To write well, one must read well. I listened to a great interview with David Sedaris on Fresh Air this week and also discovered the author James Salter. Salter is a writer – a writer’s writer – featured in a recent New Yorker and interviewed in the Paris Review: I’m

Who designed that high chair?

In its most recent iteration, the New York Times Sunday Magazine (one of my favorite publications) has a column titled “Who made that ______?” (insert common yet interesting object here). The Stokke Tripp Trapp high chair would be a good candidate for this column. What is it about Scandinavians and design?

On leaning in.

Dear Sheryl Sandberg, I read about your book. The one where you tell women in technology to “lean in”. The one where you tell women in technology not to “leave before you leave”. But what if you lean in and they punch you in the face? What if you lean

On designers as choreographers.

The austerity of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet was refreshing. Geometric, simple, white, like the galleries of a modern art museum. The visual opposite of the Nutcracker set design, so complicated and frilly. Interaction design, like dance, is a time-based medium. I sat there watching the beautiful, graceful

On fizz and fog.

Oslo, Mies, and me. Seattle’s Discovery Park, December 2012. Only the head of a Dublin pint froths like that. Milky white density; super foam. Unless you count the merinque of that baked Alaska I made one time. One time when I was young and married and living in a

Why I still don't have a Kindle.

I am not one to shy away from technology. I love it, actually. Excited for the Singularity. And yet, I still don’t have a Kindle (or any other eReader for that matter, unless you count my phone. I lost my iPad on my first day at Microsoft and haven’