1. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
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  11. Anderson, Gretchen 7
  12. anxiety 9
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  14. Aptekar-Cassels, Wesley 5
  15. Arango, Jorge 4
  16. architecture 110
  17. art 86
  18. Asimov, Isaac 5
  19. attention 17
  20. Auping, Michael 6
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  25. Behrensmeyer, Anna K. 7
  26. Bell, Larry 3
  27. Bjarnason, Baldur 5
  28. Blake, William 5
  29. blogging 21
  30. body 11
  31. Boeing, Geoff 7
  32. boredom 9
  33. Botton, Alain de 38
  34. Brand, Stewart 4
  35. Bringhurst, Robert 16
  36. Brooks, Frederick P. 22
  37. Broskoski, Charles 6
  38. brutalism 7
  39. building 16
  40. bureaucracy 12
  41. Burnham, Bo 9
  42. business 15
  43. Byron, Lord 14
  44. Cagan, Marty 6
  45. Calvino, Italo 21
  46. Camus, Albert 13
  47. care 6
  48. Carruth, Shane 15
  49. Cegłowski, Maciej 6
  50. Cervantes, Miguel de 7
  51. chance 11
  52. change 16
  53. Chiang, Ted 4
  54. Chimero, Frank 17
  55. choice 8
  56. cities 51
  57. Clark, Robin 3
  58. Cleary, Thomas 8
  59. Cleary, J.C. 8
  60. code 20
  61. collaboration 16
  62. collections 31
  63. Collison, Simon 3
  64. color 23
  65. commonplace 10
  66. communication 31
  67. community 7
  68. complexity 11
  69. connection 24
  70. constraints 25
  71. construction 9
  72. content 9
  73. Corbusier, Le 13
  74. Coyier, Chris 4
  75. craft 65
  76. creativity 58
  77. crime 9
  78. Critchlow, Tom 5
  79. critique 10
  80. Cross, Nigel 12
  81. Cross, Anita Clayburn 10
  82. css 11
  83. culture 13
  84. curiosity 11
  85. cycles 7
  86. Danielewski, Mark Z. 4
  87. darkness 28
  88. Darwin, Will 10
  89. data 8
  90. death 38
  91. Debord, Guy 6
  92. decisions 9
  93. design 131
  94. details 30
  95. Dickinson, Emily 9
  96. Dieste, Eladio 4
  97. discovery 9
  98. doors 7
  99. Dorn, Brandon 11
  100. drawing 23
  101. Drucker, Peter F. 15
  102. Duany, Andres 18
  103. Eatock, Daniel 4
  104. economics 13
  105. efficiency 7
  106. Eisenman, Peter 8
  107. Eliot, T.S. 14
  108. emotion 8
  109. ending 14
  110. engineering 11
  111. Eno, Brian 4
  112. ethics 14
  113. euphony 38
  114. Evans, Benedict 4
  115. evolution 9
  116. experience 14
  117. farming 8
  118. fashion 11
  119. features 25
  120. feedback 6
  121. flaws 10
  122. Flexner, Abraham 8
  123. food 16
  124. form 18
  125. Fowler, Martin 4
  126. Franklin, Ursula M. 30
  127. friendship 6
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  132. Garfield, Emily 4
  133. Garfunkel, Art 6
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  136. goals 9
  137. Gombrich, E. H. 4
  138. goodness 12
  139. Graham, Paul 37
  140. graphics 13
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  142. Hamming, Richard 45
  143. happiness 17
  144. Harford, Tim 4
  145. Harper, Thomas J. 15
  146. Hayes, Brian 28
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  157. Hoyt, Ben 5
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  159. Hudlow, Gandalf 4
  160. humanity 16
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  162. Huxley, Aldous 7
  163. hypermedia 22
  164. i 18
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  166. identity 33
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  169. information 42
  170. infrastructure 17
  171. innovation 14
  172. interaction 10
  173. interest 10
  174. interfaces 36
  175. intuition 8
  176. invention 10
  177. Irwin, Robert 65
  178. Isaacson, Walter 28
  179. Ishikawa, Sara 33
  180. iteration 13
  181. Ive, Jonathan 6
  182. Jackson, Steven J. 14
  183. Jacobs, Jane 54
  184. Jacobs, Alan 5
  185. Jobs, Steve 20
  186. Jones, Nick 5
  187. Kahn, Louis 4
  188. Kakuzō, Okakura 23
  189. Kaufman, Kenn 4
  190. Keith, Jeremy 6
  191. Keller, Jenny 10
  192. Kelly, Kevin 3
  193. Keqin, Yuanwu 8
  194. Ketheswaran, Pirijan 6
  195. Kingdon, Jonathan 5
  196. Kitching, Roger 7
  197. Klein, Laura 4
  198. Kleon, Austin 13
  199. Klinkenborg, Verlyn 24
  200. Klyn, Dan 20
  201. knowledge 28
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  203. Kramer, Karen L. 10
  204. Krishna, Golden 10
  205. Kuma, Kengo 18
  206. language 20
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  209. light 31
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  214. Luu, Dan 8
  215. Lynch, Kevin 12
  216. MacIver, David R. 8
  217. MacWright, Tom 5
  218. Magnus, Margaret 12
  219. making 77
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  221. Manaugh, Geoff 27
  222. Markson, David 16
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  224. material 39
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  226. McCarter, Robert 21
  227. meaning 33
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  229. melancholy 51
  230. memory 28
  231. metaphor 10
  232. metrics 19
  233. microsites 49
  234. Miller, J. Abbott 10
  235. Mills, C. Wright 9
  236. minimalism 10
  237. Miyazaki, Hayao 30
  238. Mod, Craig 15
  239. modularity 6
  240. Mollison, Bill 31
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  246. names 11
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  248. nature 51
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  327. Smith, Cyril Stanley 29
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  330. socializing 7
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  333. solitude 12
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  336. sound 14
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  352. Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō 15
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Technology

Close
  • Into the system of flight

    It seems this transformation, from physical object to vector of data, is a general and oft-repeated process in the history of technology, where new inventions begin in an early experimental phase in which they are treated and behave as singular individual things, but then evolve into vectors in a diffuse and regimented system as the technology advances and becomes standardized.

    In the early history of aviation, airplanes were just airplanes, and each time a plane landed or crashed was a singular event. Today, I am told by airline-industry insiders, if you are a billionaire interested in starting your own airline, it is far easier to procure leases for actual physical airplanes, than it is to obtain approval for a new flight route. Making the individual thing fly is not a problem; inserting it into the system of flight, getting its data relayed to the ATC towers and to flightaware.com, is.

    Justin E. H. Smith, It's All Over
    1. ​​The navigation is our property​​
    • flight
    • systems
    • technology
  • Only a commercial and utilitarian view

    By World War II, we seem to have come to take new gadgets for granted or relied upon advertising to inform us of what was new. Whereas our great-grandparents apparently found the latest improvement on the fountain pen or the bicycle of intellectual interest, most people in our generation take only a commercial and utilitarian view of such things.

    Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things
    • technology

    Contrasts with the 1800's and early 1900's, in which were held world fairs and exhibitions, and printed magazines like Scientific American and the Illustrated London News.

  • An ethics of mutual care

    Foregrounding maintenance and repair as an aspect of technological work invites not only new functional but also moral relations to the world of technology. It references what is in fact a very old but routinely forgotten relationship of humans to things in the world: namely, an ethics of mutual care and responsibility.

    Steven J. Jackson, Rethinking Repair
    • ethics
    • humanity
    • morality
    • technology
  • Imagine the world like a cake

    Imagine the world like a cake. Imagine that you slice it into the customary slices by vertical cuts. Each slice of that cake should signify for us, a constituency. Each is geographically located as one segment of the larger cake. Each slice is more influenced by its immediate neighbors than by what might be in the cake quite far away.

    What technology has done in the world increasingly is to put horizontal cuts in that cake. You don't only talk up and down. Now you can talk across barriers.

    Ursula M. Franklin, Every Tool Shapes the Task
    • technology
  • Induced communication

    I remain mystified by what seems like an exponential increase in the need to communicate induced by the availability of a ready new means to do so, just as new highway capacity produces increased traffic. Witness the cabdrivers who talk uninterrupted on the phone as they travel the city, or the truly huge numbers of people who speak on the phone as they walk down the street: the medium has clearly become the message, if the meaning of the message remains somewhat opaque.

    Michael Sorkin, 20 Minutes in Manhattan
    1. ​​The medium is the message​​
    2. ​​Like trying to cure obesity by loosening your belt​​
    • communication
    • technology
    • media
  • Estrangement and detachment, hospitals and airports

    It is thought-provoking that this sense of estrangement and detachment is often evoked by the technologically most advanced settings, such as hospitals and airports.

    Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses
    • technology
    • loneliness
  • Fascination with control

    Fascination with this potential for control of our environment has prompted the invention of mechanical systems that have made natural thermal strategies seem obsolete by comparison.

    Lisa Heschong, Thermal Delight in Architecture
    1. ​​Controlled environments​​
    • technology
    • control
  • The technology shelf

    Motorola developed what it called a 'technology shelf', created by a small group of engineers, on which were placed possible technical solutions that other teams might use in the future; rather than trying to solve the problem outright, it developed tools whose immediate value was not clear.

    Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
    1. ​​The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge​​
    • problems
    • technology
  • Chilled-out anxiety

    Working in the typical dot-com office was an admixture of frenetic pace and a relaxed overall atmosphere, exemplifying that chilled-out anxiety which was the general mood of the 1990’s.

    Nikil Saval, Cubed
    • technology
    • anxiety
  • The most seamless and wonderful way

    I believe our job as designers is to give you what you need as quickly and elegantly as we can. Our job as designers is to take you away from technology. Our job as designers is to make you smile. To make a profit by providing you something that enhances your life in the most seamless and wonderful way possible.

    Golden Krishna, The Best Interface is No Interface
    • technology
    • ux
  • Savage, hostile, and cruel

    Some may find puzzling or distasteful the parallel I am drawing between the study of nature and the study of technology. After all, nature is good and good for you, whereas everyone knows that technology is ugly, evil, and dangerous.

    A few centuries ago—say, on the American western frontier—a quite different view prevailed. Nature was seen as savage, hostile, cruel. Mountains and forests were barriers, not refuges. The lights of civilization were a comforting sight. We took our charter from the book of Genesis, which grants mankind dominion over the beasts, and felt it was both our entitlement and our duty to tame the wilderness, fell the trees, plow the land, and dam the rivers.

    Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape
    • nature
    • technology
    • industry
    • infrastructure
  • Creations of human artifice

    In the twenty-first century, the question most of us ask when disaster strikes is not "How could God let that happen?" but "Who screwed up?" This is a salutary development: We take responsibility for the world we live in. Whether or not our world is the best of all possible worlds, it is a world we have made for ourselves. We live in an engineered landscape, on an engineered planet. Our cities and farms, our dwellings and vehicles, our power plans and communication networks—these are all creations of human artifice. If we don't like it here, we have only ourselves to blame.

    Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape
    • humanity
    • infrastructure
    • technology
    • disaster
  • Technology is a system

    Technology is not the sum of the artifacts, of the wheels and gears, of the rails and electronic transmitters. Technology is a system. It entails far more than its individual material components. Technology involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset.

    Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology
    • technology
    • systems
  • Technological middle age

    In the automobile's technological middle age, it is hard, if not impossible, to tune or repair one's own vehicle. Technical standardization of cars has occurred, and with it the elimination of the user's access to the machine itself. At the same time, the infrastructures that once served those who did not use automobiles atrophied and vanished. Some may say they were deliberately starved out. Railways gave way to more and more roadways. And thus a technology that had been perceived to liberate its users began to enslave them.

    Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology
    • technology
    • freedom
    • infrastructure
  • Screening out the world

    "The point is to get people to peel those visors off their faces, to remove the goggles, to abandon the screens. Those screens whose very purpose is to screen the actual world out. Who cares about virtuality when there's all this reality—this incredible, inexhaustible, insatiable, astonishing reality—present all around!"

    Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
    • reality
    • technology
  • Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape

    A Book by Brian Hayes
    industrial-landscape.com
    1. ​​Savage, hostile, and cruel​​
    2. ​​Nature undisturbed​​
    3. ​​The raw materials of society​​
    4. ​​The dragline​​
    5. ​​Dark satanic steel​​
    1. ​​The Factory Photographs​​
    • infrastructure
    • technology
    • urbanism
    • industry
    • networks
  • The Real World of Technology

    A Lecture by Ursula M. Franklin
    www.amazon.com
    1. ​​Technology is a system​​
    2. ​​Fish and water​​
    3. ​​Defining activities​​
    4. ​​Holistic and prescriptive technologies​​
    5. ​​That which requires caring​​
    1. ​​From hands to machines​​
    2. ​​The design systems between us​​
    3. ​​Stress systems​​
    • technology
    • work
    • society
    • craft
  • A Brief Rant

    An Essay by Bret Victor
    worrydream.com
    1. ​​Like, just a post complaining that screens should be better​​
    • design
    • technology
    • www
    • interaction
    • body
  • Primer

    A Film by Shane Carruth
    www.imdb.com
    1. ​​A normal wooden pencil​​
    2. ​​Something more​​
    3. ​​At the top of the page​​
    4. ​​Paranoia​​
    5. ​​He had but to speak​​
    • time
    • technology
    • experiments
  • Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

    An Article by Parimal Satyal
    neustadt.fr

    We are quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it.

    1. ​​A fly in the spider's web​​
    2. ​​If you run a website​​
    3. ​​I chose out​​
    4. ​​What do we want the web to be?​​
    1. ​​The Rise Of User-Hostile Software​​
    • www
    • technology
    • ux
  • Our Comrade The Electron

    A Talk by Maciej Cegłowski
    idlewords.com
    • technology
    • music
    • futurism
  • The Future of Programming

    A Talk by Bret Victor
    worrydream.com
    • programming
    • code
    • technology
    • interaction
    • software
  • Always Already Programming

    An Article by Melanie Hoff
    gist.github.com

    Everyone who interacts with computers has in important ways always already been programming them.

    Every time you make a folder or rename a file on your computer, the actions you take through moving your mouse and clicking on buttons, translate into text-based commands or scripts which eventually translate into binary.

    Why are the common conceptions of what a programmer and user is so divorced from each other? The distinction between programmer and user is reinforced and maintained by a tech industry that benefits from a population rendered computationally passive. If we accept and adopt the role of less agency, we then make it harder for ourselves to come into more agency.

    • programming
    • interfaces
    • technology
  • Snipping the dead blooms

    A Quote by Robin Sloan
    newpublic.substack.com

    I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that's about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you're snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I'll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don't like this anymore,” and I will delete it.

    But that's care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn't have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they're both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.

    • care
    • repair
    • www
    • gardens
    • technology
  • Builder Brain

    An Essay by Charlie Warzel
    newsletters.theatlantic.com

    The Builder mindset often eschews policy completely and focuses on the macro issues, rather than the micro complexities. It is a mindset that seeks to find very elaborate, hypothetical-but-definitely-paradigm-shifting, futuristic technology to fix current problems, instead of focusing on a series of boring-sounding and modest reforms that might help people now.

    …The worst version of Builder mentality is that their dreams become reality, but instead of maintaining their creations, they simply move onto the next Big Thing, leaving others to deal with the mess they’ve made.

    1. ​​A time to build and a time to repair​​
    • technology
    • building
    • society
    • repair
  • A time to build and a time to repair

    An Article by Elizabeth M. Renieris
    www.cigionline.org

    There is a time to build and a time to repair. Repairing what is broken is difficult and important work that requires contextualizing technology and working within creative constraints…If we just keep building without repairing what exists or applying lessons learned along the way, we will continue to spin our wheels as the same problems accumulate and amplify. In this way, our technology may evolve, but our relationship to it (and to each other) can only degrade.

    1. ​​Builder Brain​​
    • repair
    • building
    • technology
  • The Future Is Not Only Useless, It’s Expensive

    An Article by Dan Brooks
    www.gawker.com

    This is how NFTs make me feel: like the future is useless but expensive, and world-altering technology is now in the hands of a culture so aesthetically and spiritually impoverished that it should maybe go back to telling stories around the cooking fire for a while, just to remember how to mean something.

    1. ​​A particular deficiency of which they all partake​​
    • technology
    • futurism
    • meaning
  • How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

    A Research Paper by Andy Matuschak & Michael Nielsen
    numinous.productions
    Image from numinous.productions on 2021-11-05 at 8.05.31 AM.svg

    Conventional tech industry product practice will not produce deep enough subject matter insights to create transformative tools for thought.

    ...The aspiration is for any team serious about making transformative tools for thought. It’s to create a culture that combines the best parts of modern product practice with the best parts of the (very different) modern research culture. You need the insight-through-making loop to operate, whereby deep, original insights about the subject feed back to change and improve the system, and changes to the system result in deep, original insights about the subject.

    • making
    • thinking
    • tools
    • design
    • feedback
    • research
    • cognition
    • technology
    • software
  • Class 1 / Class 2 Problems

    An Article by Kevin Kelly
    kk.org

    There are two classes of problems caused by new technology. Class 1 problems are due to it not working perfectly. Class 2 problems are due to it working perfectly.

    ...Class 1 problems arise early and they are easy to imagine. Usually market forces will solve them. You could say, most Class 1 problems are solved along the way as they rush to become Class 2 problems. Class 2 problems are much harder to solve because they require more than just the invisible hand of the market to overcome them.

    ...Class 1 problems are caused by technology that is not perfect, and are solved by the marketplace. Class 2 problems are caused by technology that is perfect, and must be solved by extra-market forces such as cultural norms, regulation, and social imagination.

    • problems
    • technology
    • culture
    • society
  • The medium is the message

    A Quote by Marshall McLuhan
    1. ​​Induced communication​​
    2. ​​Only a mind opened to the quality of things​​
    • technology
    • communication
    • information
    • media
  • Stepping out of the firehose

    An Article by Benedict Evans
    www.ben-evans.com

    In 1800, if you’d said that you wanted something ‘made by hand’, that would be meaningless - everything was handmade. But half a century later, it could be a reaction against the age of the machine - of steam and coal-smoke and ‘dark satanic mills.’ The Arts and Crafts movement proposed slow, hand-made, imperfect craft in reaction to mass-produced ‘perfection’ (and a lot of other things besides). A century later this is one reason I’m fascinated by the new luxury goods platforms LVMH and Kering, or indeed Supreme. How do you mass-manufacture, mass-market and mass-retail things whose entire nature is supposedly that they’re individual?

    ...we keep building tools, but also we let go. That’s part of the progression - Arts and Crafts was a reaction against what became the machine age, but Bauhaus and futurism embraced it. If the ‘metaverse’ means anything, it reflects that we have all grown up with this now, and we’re looking at ways to absorb it, internalise it and reflect it in our lives and in popular culture - to take ownership of it. When software eats the world, it’s not software anymore.

    1. ​​Things that don't scale​​
    2. ​​Dark satanic mills​​
    • hypermedia
    • progress
    • society
    • technology
  • The Questions Concerning Technology

    An Essay by L.M. Sarcasas
    theconvivialsociety.substack.com
    • What sort of person will the use of this technology make of me?
    • What will the use of this technology encourage me to notice?
    • Does the use of this technology bring me joy?
    • What limits does the use of this technology impose upon me?
    • Upon what systems, technical or human, does my use of this technology depend? Are these systems just?
    • technology
    • ethics
    • collections

    The full list consists of 41 questions. These are a few of my favorites.

  • The return of fancy tools

    An Article by Tom MacWright
    macwright.com

    Technology is seeing a little return to complexity. Dreamweaver gave way to hand-coding websites, which is now leading into Webflow, which is a lot like Dreamweaver. Evernote give way to minimal Markdown notes, which are now becoming Notion, Coda, or Craft. Visual Studio was “disrupted” by Sublime Text and TextMate, which are now getting replaced by Visual Studio Code. JIRA was replaced by GitHub issues, which is getting outmoded by Linear. The pendulum swings back and forth, which isn’t a bad thing

    • complexity
    • simplicity
    • tools
    • software
    • technology
    • notetaking
  • Against Canvas

    An Article by Alan Jacobs
    ayjay.org

    Even with all the features and plugins, Canvas presumes certain ways of organizing classes that might not be universal, just typical. And if (like me) you’re an atypical user, you have to choose between constantly fighting with the system or gradually doing more and more things the way Canvas wants you to do them. This, by the way, is why it’s never true to say that technologies are neutral and what matters is how you use them: every technology without exception has affordances, certain actions that it makes easy, and other actions that it makes difficult or impossible. A technology whose affordances run contrary to your convictions can rob you of your independence — and any technology deployed on the scale of Canvas will inevitably do that. It will turn every teacher into an obedient Canvas-user. I don’t want to be an obedient Canvas-user.

    • technology
    • learning
    • ux
  • Why I'm losing faith in UX

    An Article by Mark Hurst
    creativegood.com
    Image from creativegood.com on 2021-02-04 at 7.45.47 PM.jpeg

    Increasingly, I think UX doesn't live up to its original meaning of "user experience." Instead, much of the discipline today, as it's practiced in Big Tech firms, is better described by a new name.

    UX is now "user exploitation."

    1. ​​Waking up from the dream of UX​​
    • ux
    • business
    • exploitation
    • technology
  • Broken world thinking

    A Fragment by Amanda Menking
    www.arenasolutions.com

    Consider, for example, how “broken world thinking” can benefit product design. What if the person (or team) who invented a new technology collaborated with the person (or team) who would one day repair the same technology? What if the innovation stakeholders and the infrastructure stakeholders collaborated closely with the end users? What if every new product designed by a technology company was designed in such as way as to factor in what happens to the product after planned obsolescence?

    • technology
    • repair
    • products
    • design
  • Withered or seasoned?

    An Article by Robin Sloan
    www.robinsloan.com

    The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply.

    This is the reason a Nintendo console never has the fastest chips or the beefiest specs of its generation; instead, its remixes components in an interesting and generative way. Think of the Gameboy’s monochrome screen, the Wii’s motion controller, the Switch’s smartphone form.

    [Gunpei Yokoi] is talking about reliability and predictability, in performance and supply alike. He wants the components to be boring, so their application can be daring.

    • innovation
    • technology
    • games
  • People expect technology to suck because it actually sucks

    An Article by Nikita Prokopov
    tonsky.me
    Screenshot of tonsky.me on 2020-09-25 at 9.46.16 AM.png
    Screenshot of tonsky.me on 2020-09-25 at 9.46.26 AM.png
    Screenshot of tonsky.me on 2020-09-25 at 9.46.38 AM.png
    Screenshot of tonsky.me on 2020-09-25 at 9.46.16 AM.png

    I decided to record every broken interaction I had during one day.

    If I decided to invest time into thinning this list down, I could theoretically...reduce this list from 27 down to 24. At least 24 annoyances per day I have to live with. That’s the world WE ALL are living in now. Welcome.

    • technology
    • software
    • ux

    A response to People expect technology to suck.

  • The Mother of All Demos

    A Lecture by Douglas Engelbart
    en.wikipedia.org

    A name retroactively applied to a landmark computer demonstration, presented by Douglas Engelbart on December 9, 1968. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing:

    • windows,
    • hypertext,
    • graphics,
    • efficient navigation and command input,
    • video conferencing,
    • the computer mouse,
    • word processing,
    • dynamic file linking,
    • revision control,
    • and a collaborative real-time editor
    1. ​​Menus, Metaphors and Materials: Milestones of User Interface Design​​
    • interfaces
    • technology
  • What Do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on Facebook

    A Research Paper by Benjamin Grosser
    computationalculture.net
    Image from computationalculture.net on 2020-07-29 at 9.07.10 AM.png

    What are the effects of this enumeration, of these metrics that count our social interactions? In other words, how are the designs of Facebook leading us to act, and to interact in certain ways and not in others? For example, would we add as many friends if we weren’t constantly confronted with how many we have? Would we “like” as many ads if we weren’t told how many others liked them before us? Would we comment on others’ statuses as often if we weren’t told how many friends responded to each comment?

    In this paper, I question the effects of metrics from three angles. First I examine how our need for personal worth, within the confines of capitalism, transforms into an insatiable “desire for more.” Second, with this desire in mind, I analyze the metric components of Facebook’s interface using a software studies methodology, exploring how these numbers function and how they act upon the site’s users. Finally, I discuss my software, born from my research-based artistic practice, called Facebook Demetricator (2012-present). Facebook Demetricator removes all metrics from the Facebook interface, inviting the site’s users to try the system without the numbers and to see how that removal changes their experience. With this free web browser extension, I aim to disrupt the prescribed sociality produced through metrics, enabling a social media culture less dependent on quantification.

    • metrics
    • technology
  • Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web

    A Book by David Weinberger
    www.goodreads.com
    • www
    • technology

See also:
  1. ux
  2. infrastructure
  3. www
  4. software
  5. society
  6. repair
  7. design
  8. problems
  9. industry
  10. humanity
  11. systems
  12. communication
  13. media
  14. interaction
  15. futurism
  16. programming
  17. interfaces
  18. tools
  19. ethics
  20. building
  21. anxiety
  22. nature
  23. disaster
  24. freedom
  25. reality
  26. information
  27. body
  28. urbanism
  29. networks
  30. music
  31. time
  32. experiments
  33. code
  34. work
  35. craft
  36. metrics
  37. control
  38. loneliness
  39. business
  40. exploitation
  41. innovation
  42. games
  43. products
  44. learning
  45. complexity
  46. simplicity
  47. notetaking
  48. morality
  49. collections
  50. hypermedia
  51. progress
  52. flight
  53. making
  54. thinking
  55. feedback
  56. research
  57. cognition
  58. culture
  59. meaning
  60. care
  61. gardens
  1. Ursula M. Franklin
  2. Brian Hayes
  3. Bret Victor
  4. Robin Sloan
  5. Richard Sennett
  6. Golden Krishna
  7. Nikil Saval
  8. Lawrence Wechler
  9. Robert Irwin
  10. Marshall McLuhan
  11. Parimal Satyal
  12. Maciej Cegłowski
  13. Shane Carruth
  14. David Weinberger
  15. Benjamin Grosser
  16. Douglas Engelbart
  17. Michael Sorkin
  18. Lisa Heschong
  19. Juhani Pallasmaa
  20. Nikita Prokopov
  21. Mark Hurst
  22. Amanda Menking
  23. Alan Jacobs
  24. Tom MacWright
  25. Steven J. Jackson
  26. L.M. Sarcasas
  27. Henry Petroski
  28. Benedict Evans
  29. Justin E. H. Smith
  30. Andy Matuschak
  31. Michael Nielsen
  32. Kevin Kelly
  33. Dan Brooks
  34. Charlie Warzel
  35. Elizabeth M. Renieris
  36. Melanie Hoff