The spatial dimension of democracy Since the time of the Greeks, democracy has been understood to have a spatial dimension and so, by extension, an element of scale. Plato measured the polis, the unit of democratic citizenship, at five hundred citizens, an extremely tractable size for a community that seeks to express itself through direct engagement. Michael Sorkin, 20 Minutes in Manhattan democracypoliticscommunity
What kind of world it's going to be The wonderful thing about living in a world of our own creation is that we get to choose what kind of world it's going to be—at least in principle. But the promise is meaningful only if a broad enough "we" can be engaged in the process. At present, mechanisms and democratic institutions for making collective decisions about the deployment of technology are hopelessly cumbersome. How can anyone make a sensible choice without being able to weigh one alternative against another? Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape democracypoliticsclimatechoice
Designing detail My heart belongs to the details. I actually always found them to be more important than the big picture. Nothing works without details. They are everything, the baseline of quality. Truly functional design only comes from the most careful and intense attention to detail. Although he did not directly design all products and even had very little to do with some of them, he constantly encouraged tiny improvements that could make a good design better. This attention to detail ranged from the acuteness of angles in forms; the size, feels and distances between switches; the integration of handle fixings; the placement and nature of graphic elements on the products themselves and extended to product photography and packaging. Designing detail is about achieving a fine balance in all aspects and areas of the product, including those external to the object. Sophie Lovell & Dieter Rams, Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible The details of construction details