make and mend,

 

As I have observed before in this phone blog (see "ingredients") most of the world doesn't mind taking the lid off things and fixing them, as was once the case in Europe.  This shop, one of a whole street in Mong Kok (in the Yau Tsim Mong District on Kowloon) is filled with mended electrical goods - drills, compressors, etc.

Interestingly, the whole maker culture in the UK has been reborn through a fresh look at ICT resulting (at last! hurrah!!) from a firm nudge by our creative industries (the "Next Gen" Livingstone + Hope report from NESTA) and some strong words from Eric Schmidt of Google - which might result in some "lids off computing" and children who are once again allowed to make and mend with technology.

other cultures' crafts...

 

Not much to say about this amazing display of tastiness in Hong Kong, on sale at a railway station, except perhaps that they are all made of ice-cream.

Other people's skills and crafts never fail to delight and amaze, do they?

communications technology

 

 Students today find it hard to imagine a world of phones fixed to walls, let alone a world of cables and telegrams! but this pneumatic cash and communications matrix in an early department store - still on view in Melbourne - is a wonderfully complex piece of communication technology (another picture is here http://rubble.heppell.net/media_forum/comms.jpg )

Pegasus

The Pegasus in London's wonderful and iconic Science Museum ran its first program in December 1959 and is still regularly demonstrated. It is the size of a room and the oldest working digital electronic computer in the world.


Visiting to help with a project there I couldn't resist the "face" on the control panel. Back in 1959 I think we wanted our computers to be sentient!

Playful engineering

Loved hhis clock, designed and built at Asprey in London's New Bond Street. The mechanism is designed for show, of course, but had all kinds of little tricks and surprises that made just watching it tick a delight. Skilled engineers on top of their game...