Facebook designer Everett Katigbak and Gensler’s Randy Howder gave a joint presentation at Design at Scale in which they showed off plans for Facebook’s new headquarters, in the old Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park, California. In Howder’s words, the idea is to avoid creating a “Facebook theme park” and instead to design a campus that’s a “beacon for engineering talent.”
The new joint will surely have all the free food and fancy facilities we’ve come to expect from the Valley’s heavy hitters, but I also enjoyed the insight into Facebook’s internal culture, a much more difficult thing to manage when a company experiences such explosive growth. Katigbak talked of the “Facebook analog research lab”, as he put it, “a fancy name for a print studio.” With a graphic design background himself, Katigbak and a colleague, Ben Barry, started to create printed ephemera with which to adorn their surroundings. For instance, the linoleum block “like” icon seen here. The initiative, he said, wasn’t a matter of a top-down mandate to create cool printed artifacts, but a result of a culture that supports creativity in all its manifestations. “Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t say ‘it’d be cool if you printed stuff’,” said Katigbak. “This is how the culture thinks. We approach it with design rather than engineering.” Smart.
[Photos c/o Everett Katigbak.]
The United States of Broken Hearts: Stats/Reflections
To start, here are a few stats on the overall journey.
- Total trip length start to finish: 24 days
- Total riding days: 21 days
- Total miles: 2836 +- 5 miles. (the third to last day google maps blunder was the only non-exact day. I could figure it out, but don’t feel like it. I also spent 8 miles…
My brother reflects on his journey. Worth a read.
These signs are great to see when driving, not so much when riding a bike…
The United States of Broken Hearts: Day 2
Wasn’t able to post last night, so here’s the recap. Made the 75 mile trek from Victorville to Joshua tree fairly easy. After talking to a bike shop guy in town, I decided to attempt the 100 mile haul through the remainder of the mojave desert and just camp when I felt like it. There is no service…
My brother is blogging about his 24 day unsupported cycling journey across this great nation of ours. Live vicariously and follow along.
A family bustled into the Facebook lobby the other day and I happened to over hear them when they approached the guard… Hi. We’re a family of tourists. Is there anything to do here? Something about asking what it was that they could do here had me cracking up. I imagine the response they where hoping for would have involved an extremely high tech water slide that leads to an underground amusement park. Crude artist rendering above.
“The rise of the web was a rare instance when we learned new, positive information about human potential. Who would have guessed (at least at first) that millions of people would put so much effort into a project without the presence of advertising, commercial motive, threat of punishment, charismatic figures, identity politics, exploitation of the fear of death, or any of the other classic motivators of mankind. In vast numbers, people did something cooperatively, solely because it was a good idea, and it was beautiful.”
“It wanes and waxes with moons of chaos, and we’re in a full moon.”
Lessons
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this trip, it’s that when a strange girl in a foreign country gives you an unidentifiable pill, you take it.
I’ve been in the Philippines the past week with two friends/co-workers making a short film for work. We shot in the village of Layag-Layag outside of Zamboanga City. Layag-Layag is a community built on the beaches of the Celebes Sea, with nearly two miles of mangroves separating it from the mainland.
At high tide, the village is flooded, and the denizens wade and swim through warm waist-deep water, or paddle boats from home to home. At low tide, the landscape is crushed coral and mangrove trees.
The children formerly waded two miles through the mangroves to get to the Talon Talon Elementary School in the city. We’ll be telling their story.
I don’t know what it is about traveling that gets me all restless. I felt the same way when I camped for a week in Yosemite last summer, or backpacked briefly through Germany in 2007. There’s a lot of crazy shit to see out there… and traveling sort of makes you feel small yet big at the same time. Like with each new culture you see and person you meet you’re becoming a fuller person. It makes you want to talk to more people and go more places. Sleep less. Waste less.
The real problem is that this feeling wears off.
Oh, hello there!
Skip Bronkie here. Just going to lay it all out there. Occasionally.
