Exchanging Information
Induced communication
Half of design is facilitation
A city speaks to you mostly by accident
From body to body
Talking with Clinton
The Iridium System
Serendipity
z-z-z
Imagine that we had no voice and no tongue
Socrates: Imagine that we have no voice and no tongue, but want to communicate with one another. Wouldn’t we like the deaf and the dumb make signs with the hands and the head and the rest of the body?
Hermogenes: There would be no choice, Socrates.
Socrates: We would imitate the nature of the thing: lifting the hands to heaven would mean lightness and upwardness. Heaviness and downwardness would be expressed by letting them drop toward the ground...
Hermogenes: I don’t see that we could do anything else.
Socrates: And when we want to express ourselves with the voice or tongue or mouth, the expression is simply their imitation of what we want to express?
Hermogenes: I think, it must be so.We must go with them
"You cannot make what you want to make, but what the material permits you to make. You cannot make out of marble what you would make out of wood, or out of wood what you would make out of stone. Each material has its own life, and one cannot without punishment destroy a living material to make a dumb senseless thing. That is, we must not try to make our materials speak our language, we must go with them to the point where others will understand their language."
— Constantin Brancusi
He had but to speak
He had but to speak aloud the words that came into his head, and those around him would fall in line.
Ping-pong patterns
The role of asynchronicity in unraveling social and political patterns without apparent replacement with other patterns cannot be overestimated. The ping-pong pattern of verbal communication is no longer tied to space or time.
The Art of Looking Sideways
A Book by Alan FletcherCover art for Alan Fletcher's wonderfully expansive commonplace book.
Envisioning Information
A Book by Edward TufteBeautiful Evidence
A Book by Edward TufteThe Visual Display of Quantitative Information
A Book by Edward TufteThe Elements of Style
A Book by William Strunk Jr. & E.B. White- Choose a suitable design and hold to it
- Make the paragraph the unit of composition
- Use the active voice
- Put statements in positive form
- Specific, definite, concrete
Interaction of Color
A Book by Josef AlbersThe Ladder of Abstraction
An Essay by Bret VictorUnderstanding Understanding
A Book by Richard Saul WurmanVisual Explanations
A Book by Edward TufteThe Sense of Style
A Book by Steven PinkerI don’t believe in Zoom fatigue
An Article by Matt WebbIt’s not Zoom fatigue, it’s Zoom whiplash.
It’s a hunch. I can’t prove this.
The trick to get around this is to move smoothly up and down the gradient of social interaction intensity, never dropping below a basic floor of presence: the sense that there are other people in the same place as you.
Instead of having two modes, “in a call” and “on my own,” we need to think about multiple ways of being together which, minimally, could be:
- In a video call
- In an anteroom to a video call, hearing the sound of others
- In a doc together
- On my desktop but with the sense that colleagues are around
And the job of the designer is to ensure that their software ensures the existence of these different contexts, instead of having the binary on-a-call/not-on-a-call, and to design the transitions between them.
e-worm.club
A Website by Zach ShermanI’m building a custom pleroma client so that my friends and I can have a cute, self-hosted social network to post about politics and art. Besides being much more visually interesting than our facebook messenger groupchat, e-worm also attempts to solve design problems around conversational, collaborative thinking. The biggest of these problems is the inherent ephemerality of our groupchat— it doesn’t really succeed as a collaborative thinking space because it has no long-term memory. When messages are constantly buried under new ones, it places the burden on us to remember previous conversations. So the ultimate design goal for e-worm is to create a self-archiving conversational interface that preserves thought and helps us keep thinking new things rather than going in intellectual circles.
The medium is the message
A Quote by Marshall McLuhanWriting and Speaking
An Essay by Paul GrahamBeing a really good speaker is not merely orthogonal to having good ideas, but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction...there's a tradeoff between smoothness and ideas. All the time you spend practicing a talk, you could instead spend making it better.
What happened when I stopped using Emojis
An Article by Clo S.In March 2021, I went through a fun self-imposed experiment: no emoji for 2 weeks. Not on social media, not in private messages, not even as Slack or Discord reactions. No emoticon either: the goal was to communicate without illustrations, only with words. I did a semi-rigorous (a.k.a. half-assed) diary study, taking notes on my feelings and behaviour.
Hypertext 2020
A WebsiteMakespace.fun
An ApplicationIn today’s software, live video feeds are stuck inside static rectangles that can’t go anywhere. MakeSpace flips all that on its head. Your cursor is your live face, and you can roam free, controlling who and what you want to be close to.
The life and death of an internet onion
In her piece "A drop of love in the cloud" (2018), artist Fei Liu writes about the like/heart button as a flattening affordance of giving affirmation and love. The text-editor provides a much more expressive input.
But even people who can't communicate well because of language barriers can express love through actions, like cooking food. Can we create other "love inputs" that might allow us to "reach across the chasm of a seamless signal"?
What is expressing "real" love or affirmation about? Is it about effort, thoughtfulness, generosity, something else? What might a thoughtful or generous interface feel or behave like?
The Evolution and Fate of Botanical Field Books
To serve as a reminder
Looking back at my notebooks now, the information seems fairly sketchy, often abbreviated, and fairly uninformative. The purpose was merely to serve as a reminder for when, that evening, I would write up my notes in a proper field book.
Sterile creatures
Now that we are in the era of personal computers, traditional field books are being replaced by computer files. By default such “field books” are sterile creatures—all the words are spelled properly, the location data are exact to a matter of a few feet, and everything is properly formatted. In the spring of 1998, I penciled my last entry into my signature field book with the bright orange cover. Thereafter I have maintained a computer-based field book.
Oh, all the right stuff is there, clear, crisp and, well, dull… I tend to be overly particular about it—the format has to be right, everything properly spelled, the descriptive sequence in the proper order, and even the observations drafted with the final publication in mind (rather than what I happen to see at the moment). The emotions of finding something new, once mentioned in my handwritten field books, are now missing, as if my mental editor says “no, that is not proper for a scientific journal.”
Further and further away
In looking over my own forty-five years of keeping a record of plant specimens, I find that I am personally moving further and further away from the words I generate, becoming more aloof and separate from the experience of the actual event of collecting, concentrating instead on the precision of where and when. It is merely record keeping for the sole purpose of giving the facts.
With the decline of letter writing and the sterilization of field books, what we are losing is the individual. Field books are like letters that are replaced by often ephemeral emails. I fear that as we move further into the computer age we will similarly lose the detailed historical record that field books once provided. Sadly, the personalities of botanists will also be lost, for such musings as might be found in a field book are often telling to those wishing to know more of the past.