Optical Glass House A Building by Hiroshi Nakamura www.archdaily.com Show image 0 Show image 1 A façade of some 6,000 pure-glass blocks (50mm x 235mm x 50mm) was employed. The pure-glass blocks, with their large mass-per-unit area, effectively shut out sound and enable the creation of an open, clearly articulated garden that admits the city scenery. To realize such a façade, glass casting was employed to produce glass of extremely high transparency from borosilicate, the raw material for optical glass. The casting process was exceedingly difficult, for it required both slow cooling to remove residual stress from within the glass, and high dimensional accuracy. Even then, however, the glass retained micro-level surface asperities, but we actively welcomed this effect, for it would produce unexpected optical illusions in the interior space. wabi-sabi
Undoing the Toxic Dogmatism of Digital Design An Essay by Lisa Angela lisa-angela-fftv.medium.com Design educators and industry leaders have never reached a consensus about what comprises a “good enough” foundational education for digital design. We do not properly retire methods (or ways of conducting them) that have been shown to be ineffective. Design team seniority levels are meaningless. We’ve collectively lost the safety (and subsequently the desire) to explore and fail. We afford well-known design leaders too much power to dictate how design is discussed and conducted. We have no ethical standards. Inclusive design and accessibility are afterthoughts — both in design education and in practice. Design Discourse is in a State of Arrested DevelopmentWaking up from the dream of UXSermon for WIAD Bristol 2021On Design Thinking ethicsuxsoftware