filed under culture and sociology

July 11th 2022
filed under hyperlinks, articles, culture and sociology

A proposal for (re)designing tools and systems to better understand the complexity of the interrelationships and interdependencies between the digital economy and the environmental emergency.
[…]
The Everything manifesto is a collection of proposals for changing humans complicated relationship with change. Each proposal is framed as a hypothetical question to use and debrief our collective imaginations, because hypotheticals are a fascinating way to learn how to think and can help us better understand something as complex as reality, by dealing with the powerful concept of “what if”.
There is a beautiful question encoded in hypotheticals: What would you do if the world was different?

I just came across The Everything Manifesto, written back in 2019 by IAM co-founders Lucy Black-Swan and Andres Colmenares. Still –or more than ever?– very much worth reading.

medium.com/iam-journal/the-everything-manifesto-a-thought-experiment-for-the-next-billion-seconds-bcd9b9c938dc
July 9th 2022
filed under hyperlinks, articles, culture and sociology

And any attempts to reduce urban car use tend to do better when designed from the bottom up. Barcelona’s “superblocks” programme, which takes sets of nine blocks within its grid system and limits cars to the roads around the outside of the set (as well as reducing speed limits and removing on-street parking) was shaped by having resident input on every stage of the process, from design to implementation. Early indicators suggest the policy has been wildly popular with residents, has seen nitrogen dioxide air pollution fall by 25 percent in some areas, and will prevent an estimated 667 premature deaths each year, saving an estimated 1.7 billion euros.

Wired UK has recently published an interesting article on London’s effort to reduce the number of motorists in its inner city and why in general, People Hate the Idea of Car-Free Cities—Until They Live in One. Of course, my favourite city Barcelona is a prime example of how to implement a working solution without aggressive opposition or a big backlash from the residents.

wired.co.uk/article/car-free-cities-opposition
June 3rd 2022
filed under hyperlinks, videos, culture and sociology

© ZDF

Was passiert hinter den Kulissen, wenn wir klicken, swipen, bestellen, matchen? Wie funktioniert die neue digitale Welt? Wer zieht hier die Fäden? Wer sind die Gewinner und Verlierer?

German television station ZDF recently started a documentation series about the digital world called Digital Empire. The first episode was about AI and the bias it might come with —based on its originators and their worldview, thus fostering inequality.

An important theme to start with, I’m curious about which topics the team is covering in the upcoming episodes.

zdf.de/dokumentation/digital-empire
May 27th 2022
filed under hyperlinks, videos, culture and sociology, design

© ARTE (via Youtube)

Great German short documentary by franco-german television station ARTE about Machiya, a traditional architectural style from Japan.

The entire series Stadt, Land, Kunst (City, Country, Art) is fascinating —not only but all the more when the segments are about my place of longing.

arte.tv/de/search/?q=Stadt+Land+Kunst
November 22nd 2021
filed under hyperlinks, articles, culture and sociology, recources and tools

Curious people become smart by accident.
Their curiosity simply pushes them into various rabbit holes.
Guided by a childish desire to understand why something is the way it is, they end up exploring webs full of strange to them, initially, things.
The relentless desire to explore the world we live in. To understand why people behave the way they do. To investigate what caused something to work makes them read articles, books, even old newspapers and look for solutions outside their field of work.

This essay on Why Curiosity Is Better Than Being Smart? sent me down the rabbit hole that is the website of Ivaylo Durmonski. A huge collection of long-form essays and book summaries “for avid readers and thinkers alike”. Bookmarked.

durmonski.com/life-advice/curiosity-is-better-than-being-smart/
November 15th 2021
filed under hyperlinks, articles, culture and sociology

A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.

Interesting article from Metropolis on the urban design of Japan’s capital and Why Tokyo Works.

metropolisjapan.com/why-tokyo-works/
November 14th 2021
filed under hyperlinks, articles, culture and sociology

The most influential companies in the world put all their energy into getting us to click, react, and consume. If you work on a computer, procrastination awaits you everywhere, all the time. How do you beat it and get things done?

A well-written, practical guide from one of my favourite studios, Swiss-Japanese iA Inc., to help End Procrastination —just in time for the upcoming new workweek.

ia.net/topics/end-procrastination
November 4th 2021
filed under hyperlinks, articles, culture and sociology

Tsundoku (積ん読) is a beautiful Japanese word describing the habit of acquiring books but letting them pile up without reading them. I used to feel guilty about this tendency, and would strive to only buy new books once I had finished the ones I owned. However, the concept of the antilibrary has completely changed my mindset when it comes to unread books. Unread books can be as powerful as the ones we have read, if we choose to consider them in the right light.

Having a bunch of unread books piling up on my bedside table and jamming up my shelves, I can absolutely empathize with Anne-Laure Le Cunff on this one. After reading her essay on the power of unread books, I won’t feel as guilty about getting more and more books despite those waiting already to be read anymore —I’m just building an antilibrary myself.

Now I just need a similar explanation to justify getting new records, even though I still haven’t listened to all of the ones I own already.

nesslabs.com/antilibrary
November 2nd 2021
filed under hyperlinks, culture and sociology

Minus is a finite social network where you get 100 posts—for life. While you can reply to a post as often as you like, every time you add to the feed, it subtracts from your lifetime total. When you reach 0 posts left, that’s it. No exceptions.

As mentioned in one of my first posts and repeatedly brought up since then, I think social media is fundamentally flawed in this day and age, a sentiment Ben Grosser certainly would agree upon.

In his work, the artist focuses on the cultural, social, and political effects of software and his latest project, Minus, is his take on a social network. It shares some aspects with traditional social media websites –like a main timeline and personal user profiles, but every user can publish only one hundred postings in total.

You can read more about the fascinating project on the artist’s website or join the network yourself —something I wouldn’t recommend for any other social network.

minus.social
October 14th 2021
filed under hyperlinks, articles, culture and sociology
Tokoro is used to describe the location or site of something, but it is also used to describe a state of being. In Japan, the idea of place is indistinguishable from the historical, cultural, social, and other connections contained within it. The idea of tokoro therefore implies the idea of context, as the place is inevitably connected with all the activities around it.

Being a designer, space obviously plays an existential role in my professional life, so naturally, I’m always happy to broaden my horizon with new ways of thinking about this subject matter. Like with Sekki, Wabi-Sabi, Ikigai and Shikake the Japanese have some interesting perspectives to offer.¹

Deriving from the foundational traditions of Shinto and Buddhism, the Japanese idea of space does not only seek to describe spatial set-ups but tends to focus on the connection between its occupants as well as the interplay of humans, the environment, and society at large.

The essay The Japanese words for “space” could change your view of the world gives us western readers a quick overview of the four different Japanese words for space called tokoro (所), ma (間), wa (和) and ba (場), providing a very different and therefore very interesting thinking about this topic. Not only but especially for designers an article worth reading.

¹ If you want to learn more about the Japanese concepts mentioned, I recommend the following books as an entry point:
- Wabi Sabi: Japanese Wisdom for a Perfectly Imperfect Life by Beth Kempton
- The Little Book of Ikigai: The secret Japanese way to live a happy and long life by Ken Mogi
- Shikake: The Japanese Art of Shaping Behavior Through Design by Naohiro Matsumura
qz.com/1181019/the-japanese-words-for-space-could-change-your-view-of-the-world
September 20th 2021
filed under hyperlinks, videos, art, culture and sociology, design

© Kirby Ferguson (via YouTube)

Our creativity comes from without, not from within. We are not self made, we are dependent on one another. Admitting this to ourselves isn’t an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness —it’s a liberation from our misconceptions, and it’s an incentive to not expect so much from ourselves, and to simply begin.

As creatives, we are usually driven to chase what we think of as purely original ideas. While I was studying design, a video series called Everything is a Remix was making the rounds, offering another –presumably much healthier– perspective on novelty and inspiration.

A decade later, Kirby Ferguson is apparently redoing the series for 2021 and I recommend every creative to watch it —but especially those who are still in training.

everythingisaremix.info
September 19th 2021
filed under hyperlinks, articles, culture and sociology

My lostness comes from the sense that our cultural collections are not wholly our own anymore. In the era of algorithmic feeds, it’s as if the bookshelves have started changing shape on their own in real time, shuffling some material to the front and downplaying the rest like a sleight-of-hand magician trying to make you pick a specific card — even as they let you believe it’s your own choice. And this lack of agency is undermining our connections to the culture that we love.

Even though I definitely don’t consider The digital death of collecting being something I myself might be affected anytime soon –I collect LPs, books and magazines, polaroids and probably even too much other physical stuff, I do fear Kyle Chayka’s observations might hold true for the general public —especially for the generations yet to discover the broad field of culture.

Another interesting essay adding to the sentiment that made me publish on this blog again in the first place.

kylechayka.substack.com/p/essay-the-digital-death-of-collecting
August 28th 2021
filed under hyperlinks, articles, culture and sociology

Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.

Interesting essay by Stewart Brand for the Journal of Design and Science, outlining the strengths of a construct called “Pace Layering”.

Even though he focuses on human society and a six-layered structure (Fashion/art, Commerce, Infrastructure, Governance, Culture, Nature) as the basis of a healthy civilization for the most part of Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning, Brand proposes all dynamic systems to be based on a structure made of multiple layers of different pace and size in order to be robust and durable.

In design –no matter the specific field, but especially in software and systems design, of course, we come across and/or form a lot of dynamic systems with the need to be adaptable, so pace layering might provide a valuable concept to build upon.

jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2