1. These 1980s Dollhouses, made for an architect’s competition
In 1983 Architectural Design Magazine launched a competition to for architects to design a doll house. Find more on Present & Correct.
2. The Artist’s House in Paris, 1913
By Czech artist, Tavík František Šimon (1877-1942). Found on Art Nau.
3. A woman applied to Disney in 1938 for an apprentice position. This was her rejection letter:
Found on Reddit.
4. A delightful look at the behind the scenes voice recording of Wes Anderson’s 2009 Fantastic Mr. Fox
5. “Cool Japan”
Cool Japan is the actual name of a Japanese government initiative since 2010 that aims to promote Japan’s attractiveness abroad, part of Japan’s overall brand strategy. It does this by focusing on the aspects of Japanese culture that non-Japanese people find “cool” such as anime, games, cuisine etc.
Found on Wikipedia.
6. Before ChatGPT, There Was ELIZA, a 1960s Chatbot
60 years after Joseph Weizenbaum first began developing it, ELIZA — which you can try online here — seems to be holding its own in that arena. “In a preprint research paper titled ‘Does GPT‑4 Pass the Turing Test?,’ two researchers from UC San Diego pitted OpenAI’s GPT‑4 AI language model against human participants, GPT‑3.5, and ELIZA to see which could trick participants into thinking it was human with the greatest success,” reports Ars Technica’s Benj Edwards. This study found that “human participants correctly identified other humans in only 63 percent of the interactions,” and that ELIZA, with its tricks of reflecting users’ input back at them, “surpassed the AI model that powers the free version of ChatGPT.”
More found on Open Culture.
7. A still-working search engine from 1999
8. The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same
From the generic hipster cafe to the ‘Instagram wall’, the internet has pushed us towards a kind of global ubiquity – and this phenomenon is only going to intensify.
The growth of Instagram gave international cafe owners and baristas a way to follow one another in real time and gradually, via algorithmic recommendations, begin consuming the same kinds of content. One cafe owner’s personal taste would drift toward what the rest of them liked, too, eventually coalescing. On the customer side, Yelp, Foursquare and Google Maps drove people like me – who could also follow the popular coffee aesthetics on Instagram – toward cafes that conformed with what they wanted to see by putting them at the top of searches or highlighting them on a map.
An article on The Guardian.
9. Analysing Design Trends through American Restaurant Menus
A project found on the New York Times.
10. House of Scientists in Lviv, in Ukraine
The House of Scientists was an independent form of uniting workers from scientific institutions and higher schools established in various cities initialing during Soviet era.
Photograph by Serdar Egemonoglu
11. The lost world of French Algiers
Found on Alchemie Books.
12. Egypt started a project to cover the pyramids in granite with a gold top as they originally were, opinions are split about the project
The project has begun with the Menkaure pyramid, which was originally encased in granite but over time lost part of its covering. Mostafa Waziri, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has dubbed it “the project of the century.” See the beginnings of the project here.
Read the article & varying opinions on France 24.
