i am trying to build a jigsaw puzzle which has no lid and is missing half of the pieces. i am unable to show you what it will be, but i can show you some of the pieces and why they matter to me. if you are building a different puzzle, it is possible that these pieces won't mean much to you, maybe they won't fit or they won't fit yet. then again, these might just be the pieces you're looking for. this is summing up, please find previous editions here.

• magic ink: information software and the graphical interface, by bret victor. today's ubiquitous gui has its roots in doug engelbart's groundshattering research in the mid-'60s. the concepts he invented were further developed at xerox parc in the '70s, and successfully commercialized in the apple macintosh in the early '80s, whereupon they essentially froze. twenty years later, despite thousand-fold improvements along every technological dimension, the concepts behind today's interfaces are almost identical to those in the initial mac. similar stories abound. for example, a telephone that could be "dialed" with a string of digits was the hot new thing ninety years ago. today, the "phone number" is ubiquitous and entrenched, despite countless revolutions in underlying technology. culture changes much more slowly than technological capability. the lesson is that, even today, we are designing for tomorrow's technology. cultural inertia will carry today's design choices to whatever technology comes next. in a world where science can outpace science fiction, predicting future technology can be a nostradamean challenge, but the responsible designer has no choice. a successful design will outlive the world it was designed for. highly recommended
• visualisation and cognition: drawing things together, by bruno latour. it is not perception which is at stake in this problem of visualization and cognition. new inscriptions, and new ways of perceiving them, are the results of something deeper. if you wish to go out of your way and come back heavily equipped so as to force others to go out of their ways, the main problem to solve is that of mobilization. you have to go and to come back with the "things" if your moves are not to be wasted. but the "things" you gathered and displaced have to be presentable all at once to those you want to convince and who did not go there. in sum, you have to invent objects which have the properties of being mobile but also immutable, presentable, readable and combinable with one another. highly recommended (pdf)
• cargo cult software engineering, the issue that has fallen by the wayside while we've been debating process vs. commitment is so blatant that it may simply have been so obvious that we have overlooked it. we should not be debating process vs. commitment; we should be debating competence vs. incompetence. the real difference is not which style is chosen, but what education, training, and understanding is brought to bear on the project. rather than debating process vs. commitment, we should be looking for ways to raise the average level of developer and manager competence. that will improve our chances of success regardless of which development style we choose
• nude portraits, photography project by trevor christensen