It was explained to me this week that Paris has two principal towers: The Eiffel Tower and the awful tower. The awful tower is, of course, the Tour Montparnasse. Completed in 1973, the Tour Montparnasse is tall, brown, monolithic, and seemingly out of place with… Read More
I love change. In fact, a big part of what I do for a living is imagining what things could be in the future. However, the bias that humans have toward the status quo has been well documented by people like Seth Godin, as well… Read More
“Change makes us uncomfortable. Sunk costs are hard to ignore. Possibility comes with agency, and agency comes with risk.” –Seth Godin This is a quote from a recent blog post by Seth Godin talking about choice vs. convenience. His overarching argument is that we tend… Read More
I was reading about a proposed development earlier today (it doesn’t really matter which one for this story) and I immediately thought to myself, “wow, this is a beautiful development. I like what they’ve done here.” The project happens to be by one of my… Read More
Seth Godin’s blog post this morning, called “I hate this restaurant,” is really excellent. I would encourage you all to read it. In it, he talks about a mismatch of expectations. More specifically, he gives the example of somebody going to a restaurant and not… Read More
I went snowboarding today. As always it was a lot of fun. If only Toronto had mountains. Here is a Canadian video about snowboarding from 1985 that, I think, does an excellent job demonstrating how resistant to change we humans can sometimes be. The video… Read More
In 1988, William Samuelson (Boston University) and Richard Zeckhauser (Harvard University) published a seminal paper called, Status Quo Bias in Decision Making. In one of the experiments cited in the paper, two groups of people are given a hypothetical task that involves picking from a… Read More
I was over at the Riverside Bridge yesterday taking photos and I was reminded of Eldon Garnet’s installation called, TIME: AND A CLOCK (1995). The work spans a few physical sites, but perhaps the most well known component is the line of text on the… Read More
I just received the September issue of Monocle magazine. One of the features I always read is the “Observation” on the very last page. It reads as the editor in chief’s personal blog. In this issue he talks about the recent EU referendum and the… Read More
“If the decision ultimately of the council is to support the hybrid I think frankly it’ll be a major step backwards and you’re going to miss a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I’ll be very frank, we’ll be the laughingstock of the world.” -Paul… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 