Exploring industries and ideas from agriculture to pornography, marketing to axe-making, future business and ownership models to climate change, we’ve found connecting threads that tie them all together. Alpine Review Issue 1 is featuring over 80 topics, 10 interviews and 285 pages of ad-free, well-articulated and well-designed content. A Watchlist for the well-connected: Books, Events, People and Groups you should know about. City Focus – Berlin: fresh perspectives, innovative ideas, plus, a tourist-free guide to the best spots in the City of Now.
Sensemaking (by Jon Kolko)
To maintain any semblance of happiness, the skill most of us will require in the future is sensemaking: the ability to connect discrete insights and synthesize large quantities of often incomplete or conflicting information. But as Jon Kolko argues, only a few are armed with this magic ability and it requires hard, hard work.
Playfulness and Processuality (by David Cox)
David Cox interviews Bruce Sterling on the so-called ‘New Aesthetic’ to examine ideas such as ‘processuality’; identifying patterns that connect machine sensor vision, aerial imaging, beauty in digital ‘mistakes’ and a general folding in of the digital into the real. The shock of the new has not felt quite this romantic since the early 1990s.
Warby Parker, Branding by Design
Forget your father’s optometry—New York-based Warby Parker has been changing the eyewear game making glasses hip, sexy, literary and even socially responsible in a couple of short years. With a focus on pinpointed and precise design for every way you come to experience their brand, you might think the company was created by craftsmen. In fact, the founders come from a different side of the playing field—they’re Wharton graduates—but with their vision, what started off as a school project is now helping to rewrite the textbook on branding in the real world.
Shared Ownership
Shared ownership. Collective consumption. The unplanned economy. Call it what you will—a new movement of the age old concept of sharing property is gaining in popularity thanks to a boost in digital technologies and a decline in institutional trust. The more consumers empower themselves by having their communities get the most out of goods and services, the more the traditional system will have to react, from changing to whom goods and services are sold, to changing the definitions of what a sale, an asset and money are in such a system.
The Internet of Things (by Martin Spindler)
Cloud, Big Data and now the Internet of Things? Only one of them is being developed in garages. We explore the impact of connected objects and how it is more than just the latest in a round of buzzwords.
The City of Now (by Peter Bihr)
Berlin is a manifestation of all that THE ALPINE REVIEW thinks about: It lives the notions of a flat, networked world, of constant remixing of ideas, of crafts and technology and culture intersections. Shaped by the patterns of decentralization, non-regulation, lack of interference, an emergence of can-do spirit; adding up to a city in a state of constant flux, equipped with a bustling creative scene, an unenforceable smoking ban and an airport-turned-park.
and more…
