Matthew Honan’s experiment with the location-aware lifestyle.

“Simply put, location changes everything. This one input, our coordinates, has the potential to change all the outputs. Where we shop, who we talk to, what we read, what we search for, where we go; they all change once we merge location and the Web. I wanted to know more about this new frontier, so I became a geo-guinea pig. My plan is to load every cool and interesting location-aware program I could find onto my iPhone and use them as often as possible. For a few weeks, whenever I arrived at a new place, I would announce it through multiple social geo-apps… I would become the most location-aware person on the Internet…

The trouble started right away. I was going to be gone for a week on business. Did I really want to tell the world that I was out of town? It wasn’t just leaving my wife home alone that concerned me… anyone who cared to look at my Flickr page could see my computers, my spendy bicycle, and my large flat-screen TV all pinpointed on an online photo map. Hell, with a few clicks you could get driving directions right to my place…”

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1. Matthew Honan, Issue 17.02, Wired Magazine.

“There are other priorities now. Perhaps in 30 years it will be interesting to come back and speak about the beauty of a chair or a lamp, but today that seems a bit obscene. Even during the time it takes to do this interview, people will die from a lack of water… everyone talks about ecology, but we need to make it happen, not speak about it.”

“I hope the current economic crisis will lead to people looking for longevity. In an average house I see an enormous turn-a-round of stuff. There are plenty of homes where nothing is more than five years old. What happened to the things that preceded them? What happened to the possessions of previous generations? It’s almost like people had no parents or grand parents. Nothing has been passed on.”

Philippe Starck, Sir Terence Conran and Kirstie Allsopp discuss the future of design in midst of a recession, and an interesting yet generous response by Andrew Smith.

1. Caroline Roux, The Guardian.