observing the
things that matter

‘Measure twice, cut once.’ Peter Buchanan-Smith appreciates a job well done and has made a living meticulously crafting axes by hand in his Brooklyn studio. As Best Made Co. expands we have to ask, is everything still wonderful?

The distance has been breached. The physical world we inhabit and the digital world we created are now touching and becoming one. Where the overlap is most pronounced, on the foremost edges, people are making things, rekindling the old, creating the new, all enabled by an interconnected world.

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.

We’ve been told to watch our weight, count our calories and time our runs for quite a while now; but never before have we had the technology to measure all of our behavior so seamlessly, sensitively, automatically and intelligently.

If the new tools of technology are so great, why are so many of us trying to escape them?

Urban agriculture and community gardens are sprouting up all over the world, creating a breeding ground for learning experiences, community living and a better quality of life.

David Hieatt, co-founder of Hiut Denim and The Do Lectures in Wales, shares his love of histories, standing out, and doing one thing really well.

In Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Nassim Taleb gives us a handbook on seeing things coming, by spotting the fragile, and conversely advocating in favor of people, organizations and ways of thinking, that are more than merely robust—they are antifragile.

A physicist-turned-farmer is using open source technology for an innovative project that places the power to survive and thrive directly in the hands of every community.