Sumi
I was especially inspired today by the beautiful photo on the home page for the MUJI Awards. To me, the amazing thing about design is the way that information is communicated on a deep and almost unconscious level. It is something that I strive to create in my own designs around information, although not always successfully.
This is a design competition to look at the "extremities" of a room instead of the major pieces, called Sumi. From what I could gather, "sumi" is a Japanese word that means "corner/edge/end". From the time I spent living there, I am sure that any understanding that I have, there is probably a great deal of cultural inflection that I am completely missing, so please forgive me.
In the realm of architected.info we almost always deal with the extremities. The really interesting problems always come at the edges, at the places where two or more data sets collide and become something new. The collision causes conflict, and with it comes opportunity for greater understanding. Pushing bits from server to server is easy. Making something truly wonderful takes vision.
BTW, I first saw the link for this on Signal Vs. Noise.
technorati tags: sumi, design, architecture, ETL, data, information, integration
