The cubicle The cubicle had the effect of putting people close enough to each other to create serious social annoyances, but dividing them so that they didn’t actually feel that they were working together. It had all the hazards of privacy and sociability but the benefits of neither. It got so bad that nobody wanted them taken away; even those three walls offered some kind of psychological home, a place one could call one’s own. All these factors could deepen the frenzied solitude of an office worker. Nikil Saval, Cubed workteamworksolitudeprivacy
A fly in the spider's web We're very good at talking about immersive experiences, personalized content, growth hacking, responsive strategy, user centered design, social media activation, retargeting, CMS and user experience. But behind all this jargon lurks the uncomfortable idea that we might be accomplices in the destruction of a platform that was meant to empower and bring people together; the possibility that we are instead building a machine that surveils, subverts, manipulates, overwhelms and exploits people. It all comes down a simple but very dangerous shift: the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but as means of using her. Our visitor has become a data point, a customer profile, a potential lead — a proverbial fly in the spider's web. In the guise of user-centered design, we're building an increasingly user-hostile web. Parimal Satyal, Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web uxprivacy
I chose out What I'm against is the centralization of services; Facebook and Google are virtually everywhere today. Through share buttons, free services, mobile applications, login gateways and analytics, they are able to be present on virtually every website you visit. This gives them immense power and control. They get to unilaterally make decisions that affect our collective behavior, our expectations and our well-being. You're either with them or out. Well, I chose out. You see, the web wasn't meant to be a gated community. Parimal Satyal, Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web privacy
We have lost our sense of intimate life A Quote by Luis Barragán Take the use of enormous plate windows...they deprive our buildings of intimacy, the effect of shadow and atmosphere. Architects all over the world have been mistaken in the proportions which they have assigned to large plate windows or spaces opening to the outside. We have lost our sense of intimate life, and have become forced to live public lives, essentially away from home. 239. Small Panes privacywindows
Crafting repair Repair is a neglected, poorly understood, but all-important aspect of technical craftsmanship. The sociologist Douglas Harper believes that making and repairing form a single whole; he writes of those who do both that they possess the "knowledge that allows them to see beyond the elements of a technique to its overall purpose and coherence. This knowledge is the 'live intelligence, fallibly attuned to the actual circumstances' of life. It is the knowledge in which making and fixing are parts of a continuum." Put simply, it is by fixing things that we often get to understand how they work. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman Its place in the web of nature craftrepair