Otherwise

Pragmatic to a fault

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

He’s back.

But most people who aren’t baby-brained or blue-pilled saw it coming in the distance.

The Democrats resisted running with, frankly, any vision, causing Kamala Harris to receive 11 million fewer votes last week than Joe Biden did in 2020. With 95% of votes counted, Trump received nearly the same amount as four years ago. So, rather than wholly embracing fascism, the reality is that the American people abstained from liberalism.

The inexplicable thing here is that the Harris campaign started with some semblance of a vision—“brat summer,” “weird,” “we’re not going back”—before playing back the almost completely disintegrated loops titled “Bipartisanism” and “Republicans are our friends, actually.”

Democrats dared the American people to a game of chicken and lost. We (as people, as designers) are playing a similar game: cultural change or ecological collapse. Although all the technology necessary for a sustainable transition exists, we lack the will to turn sustainability from a social anomaly into a social norm. We lack vision. And with the planet, we don’t have the choice to abstain or look away.

Unlikely bedfellows

Think of a popular social movement. Any of them. 1960’s Civil Rights, The French Revolution, The Arab Spring. What did these have in common?

They constructed new social narratives, building them on a foundation of what could be instead of simply rejecting what was. They drew a map so people knew where the movement would take them.

While the climate movement might have been invested in social narratives at one point, the movement in its current state focuses on technical solutions like Net Zero, carbon credits, direct air capture, and solar geoengineering. It doesn’t show people another way to live or visualize what the future could be like. Most people don’t know what these terms mean. Through their vagueness, they depict an uninspiring world that’s essentially the same as the current one: unequal, individualized, and exhausting, but with high-tech ways to create energy and avoid emissions. Technofascism isn’t exactly enticing.

For all the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and generally terrible beliefs that exist on the far right, they do know how to communicate. Their focus on narrative and in/out-groups shows a lot more returns than the minutia and means-testing that the left, or the sustainability movement, for that matter, relies on.

How can we—progressives, designers, climate activists, creative people—co-opt right-wing communication strategies, not to return to a so-called golden era but to improve the world and make the climate movement a social norm?

Teaching an old dog old tricks

One way is to use a favorite tactic of the far right: solidarity.

Solidarity creates an “Us versus Them,” a memorable mental image that clearly divides good and evil. The right tends to use this distinction to frame Mexicans as rapists, Arabs as terrorists, and trans people as predators. But there are two sides to solidarity.

The typical reactionary solidarity employed by the right reinforces the status quo, keeping things the same as they always were, which often means entrenching control and division and increasing pain, even for those who employ it:

Racism, while it elevates whiteness, is weaponized to erode the welfare and wages that would enable white people to lead healthier, less precarious lives. Misogyny hurts men economically and emotionally, as gendered pay gaps suppress overall wages and through the trap of destructive and often violent standards of masculinity. Transphobia impacts everyone by imposing state-sponsored gender norms and curtailing freedom and self-expression. Ableism, by devaluing and dehumanizing the disabled, dissuades people from demanding the social services and public assistance they need as they cope with illness or aging. Solidarity, 2023; xxxiv

Rather than facilitating regressive change, transformative solidarity shows us a clear path toward progressive change. It tells a story of a better future and helps us visualize the kind of change we can bring by valuing wholeness instead of sameness:

Transformative solidarity must conjure possibility, as much as address an injustice. By constructing an Us to fight a specific and oppressive Them, we commit ourselves to a future where that wrong is righted—a positive vision to accompany the negation. This forward-looking, utopian aspect is key; without it, solidarity is reactionary, reinforces the status quo, or loses steam. This future-oriented dimension works against the limits of the current moment, creating new collective identities—enslaved, peasant, woman, worker, queer, disabled, debtor—and imagining the forms of power these groups can wield. Solidarity, 2023; 73

This idea of transformative solidarity is nothing new. It has been used throughout the past 600 years to create broad alliances: in 1400s post-feudal Europe before capitalism took hold, with late-1800s French Solidarists and pan-Africanists, and in the 20th century with socialist revolutions across South America and Africa (many of which were eventually crushed by US-backed coups, but that’s for another newsletter).

Despite this long history, we’ve lost touch with solidarity, often seeing it as cliché, corny, or naive, especially since the 1980s. Thatcher’s conception—and Reagan’s promotion of the idea—that “There is no alternative” to the market has completely dominated the past 40 years. This idea introduced neoliberalism to the mainstream and repositioned individualism as the ultimate freedom. But by now, it should be clear that individualism that exists without collectivism implies freedom for some, not freedom for all.

Solidarity in motion

Humanity depends on nature, just like individual humans depend on each other; Elon and Don’s fortunes didn’t appear from thin air, nor did the vast amount of coal, oil, timber, water, wildlife, and vegetables we consume daily. We need to fundamentally change our mindset from seeing the rest of nature less as Them and more as Us. The real Them are those humans who continue to drive us at full speed toward the precipice of planetary boundaries; it is they that we need to have solidarity against on behalf of the rest of nature.

If we give it time, the climate movement will grow in the gap between Us and Them, but we need to fill this gap with collective IRL actions. Individualized online actions are as easy to ignore as they are to take; organizing in-person is harder but shows dedication and builds identity. Designers need to consider what that means inside and outside the creative industry.

One starting point is the labor movement classics: coordinated and thoughtful boycotts, worker-owned coops, and industry-wide unions. Another is finding a commons to build. Solidarity is more likely to be built with these unsexy theories and actions than the commercial output the design industry mistakes as ‘culture’; the aesthetic that grows from those actions is the true culture. If organized people create power, and money often stands in for people, organized people who speak with their wallets are doubly effective.

When various groups join in solidarity, polarization between Us and Them can become a tool for improvement instead of destruction. This doesn't happen automatically because people are in the same situation but because they're led to recognize themselves in others and question the status quo; it has to be cultivated and consciously made. It has to become a lifestyle, not a tagline.

Here are some ways to get started:

Putting the social back in media

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 11:00:19 GMT

This week, I found a lot of articles about media, culture, and power and their influence on one another. Important subjects since a big aspect of climate action and sustainable design is figuring out how to make the dog wag the tail instead of the other way around.

This week
🍄 How can people take a more active role in media?
🔮 Visions
👀 Finds we made along the way

🍄 How can people take a more active role in media?

This article helps tease out the answer to the question, "What is the role of media in the climate crisis?"

Rather than media being a tug-o-war between public and private sectors, Gaggio proposes creating a "public-private-plural" tripod to return balance and 'biodiversity' to our media ecosystems and give a voice back to citizens.

This transition is, in some way, starting to happen with the growth of ActivityPub and BlueSky's AT Protocol; these promising but as-of-yet-unproven decentralized protocols could help break down the walled gardens of social media. At the very least, they could help clear room for community spaces that resist commodification.

Read the article below 👇🏽

The mechanistic model of the world produced a global economy in which actions are constantly taken in the name of growth, regardless of their long-term impact on living systems. [Media literacy expert Antonio] Lopez reminds us that in order to address the ecological crisis, it is necessary "to transform our mental models from mechanism to something related to systems thinking and ecological intelligence." [...]

The remit of a public service is to grow cultural capital, but today economic capital is the only universally recognised value in the globalised world. [...]

There is a pattern. Companies break through by innovating, in content, technology, or service. They acquire a critical mass by creating value for customers, then shift their focus to delivering audiences to advertisers, and finally — if and when they reach a dominant position — turn to capture most of the value for their shareholders. Cory Doctorow memorably defined this process in the digital domain as "Enshittification".

For Mintzberg, restoring balance in society requires moving past two-sided politics and giving equal weight to three sectors: Public (political), Private (economic), and Plural (social), representing governments, businesses, and communities. The plural sector is not a middle way between the other two. It is made of communities, associations, cooperatives, NGOs, religious groups, movements and social initiatives. The critical difference is that none of it is owned by private companies or controlled by the government.

Read → Media Ecology by Federico Gaggio

🔮 Visions

Three small ideas to help challenge your thinking:

We need to face the deep degenerative roots and entanglements in the causes of the Earth crisis. Without this, our efforts will just be ‘busy work’, or strategies for coping that achieve little. We will be always forcing a false balance between economy and society, or between nature and human needs. The media, campaign groups and institutions will be obsessing on one sub-crisis after another and pursuing token measures for them, ignoring the others. Moreover, they will continue to ignore the root causes rather than identifying leverage points to stop the harm.

→ Bridget McKenzie in The Roles of Culture in Response to the Earth Crisis

[W]hile conventional efforts in energy efficiency and renewable energy are important parts of the sustainability puzzle, they will never be truly effective if we ignore the other half of the puzzle, which is our own hunger for physical power over the environment. [...] Until such time that we have the collective self-control to know when enough is actually enough, developing more powerful energy technologies will likely just feed our addiction to energy consumption and its corresponding environmental destruction.

→ Tom Greenwood in How much power do we actually need?

For businesses, the attraction of establishing abundance as a social and personal goal is that the goal can never be achieved. Human desire cannot be sated. No matter how much we get, it’s not going to be enough.

→ Nicholas Carr in All What Is Delicious to Man

👀 Finds we made along the way

Not quite the wheat, but not quite the chaff

Sublime is a collaborative mashup of are.na, obsidian, and notion
Seven core principles for intentional culture change
Designing Desirability: Making Sustainability Aspirational

Thinking beyond the 20th century’s reductive design methods

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 14:45:47 GMT

Simplification and multiplication; hallmarks of the 20th century.

When we think of modernism, we think of Bauhaus. By now, its rational, minimal style seems like an almost intrinsic part of design, with major elements acting as the basic visual template for Western design more than 100 years after its founding.

But the European Bauhaus—the original version of its younger American counterpart—was about more than aesthetics. A focus on social issues and ‘intangible spacial qualities’ differentiated it from the school that traveled to the US. That second iteration, whose founders fled to various cities in the US due to political strife in Nazi Germany, was ultimately more interested in ”adopting the Modernist aesthetic because it was a highly popular and profitable one. The holistic tenets were lost in what was the wholly different economic climate of a mid-twentieth century capitalist environment.” (Schranz, 2024; 62)

The European Bauhaus placed a “great emphasis placed on intuition. If the Bauhaus became synonymous with a rigid, white-rendered international style, its early years were far more expressionist.” Is it time that we reacquaint ourselves with what may be a less data-precise but more humanistic way of designing?

What if rationality isn’t the designer’s most valuable skill and simplification their greatest asset? What if those are intuition and wise decision-making? I’d argue that we know this deep down, but to survive in the current design paradigm, we misattribute many of our actions to rational thinking.

Let’s see how.

Unknown knowns

It’s hard to blame designers individually for embracing rationalism; more or less, over the last century, the industry has fully committed to it as a visual style and strategic process. The continued deification of modernist design heroes, extensive coverage in design school curricula, and the business world’s wholesale adoption of the style don’t give us many alternatives if we want to be successful in this industry. Peer pressure is a helluva drug.

While rationalist design has sustainable potential because of its modest, clean aesthetic, its real effect is increased commodification and less sustainability. “I imagine our current situation will cause future generations to shudder at the way in which we today fill our homes, our cities, and our landscape with a chaos of assorted junk,” [Dieter] Rams said in 1976. “The times of thoughtless design, which can only flourish in times of thoughtless production for thoughtless consumption, are over. We cannot afford any more thoughtlessness.”

If only Dieter were right. Rather than avoiding thoughtlessness, rationalist design stimulates economic growth and consumption through cost reduction on the manufacturing end and increased desirability on the consumer end—similar to how, in the 1800s, corporations increased margins by using mechanization to imitate the ‘artist’s touch’ while employing far fewer artists than before.

We’re also told that rationalism ‘makes sense’ and that we can make correct, bulletproof decisions by basing design decisions on so-called universal principles. There’s an aspect of moral authority; you can’t argue with geometry, so rationalism must be universally ‘good design.’ But in a world with a plurality of universes and myriad methods to apply geometry, how can just one way of thinking take the title of good design?

It’s important to note that this ‘emotion-free’ way of thinking is built on the false premise that we can make completely emotionless decisions; even the fact that you value rationalism over intuition or ornamentation is, in some way, an emotional perspective. What are values, if not a reflection of deep-seated emotions?

While revolutionary in its day, the ongoing attempt to disassociate from our emotions leads to a disassociation from nature and the qualities that make us human. This ‘othering’ allows us to exploit and appropriate one another, wildlife, and the planet’s natural abundance. But nature lives in the physical world, not on a balance sheet, so as we’re seeing now—with the climate starting to act more erratically—actions have consequences, even if they happen decades or centuries in the future.

Play logic

Despite attempts to present themselves logically, to a large extent, designers do deeply intuitive work. Anyone who has built a brand, product, or business could tell you this. Our work risks mundanity when built on purely rational, mathematical principles. It needs humanity and intuitive nudging to make it feel just right. From naming, typographic forms, and audio composition to color palettes, brand systems, and illustration, there’s often a smudging of the rules—a lens de-correction—that needs to be applied to make our work look, sound, or feel right even though it’s technically wrong.

Often lacking a business degree, do designers feel we must emphasize our rational side to gain credibility—to get a “seat at the table,” as we tend to call it? Especially with bigger brands, we’re nearly obliged to justify every decision, not only because there could be millions (or billions) of dollars in revenue on the line but also to satisfy decision-makers who might not see the work until later stages. Rather than methods to make sense of the world, in the modern day, rationality, quantification, and provably ‘correct’ solutions seem to be the price we pay to get our work through and avoid starving artistry.

So, rationality makes getting approvals easier, but intuition (and years of experience) makes the work connective. How do we clear space for what’s important? I want to make a high-level connection to what Holly Haworth says in Solastalgia concerning humanity’s contact with nature:

A story can be told about how the disappearance of the world around us corresponded with the replacement of the feeling human body with machines. The Industrial Revolution mechanized handiwork. Mechanical innovations seemed to hold out the promise of mass-producing happiness. Workers’ hands were cut off often in factories, as they rushed to operate machinery. Modern people used their hands less and less as simple household tasks became automated, and goods they would have made by hand could be bought at stores. As each decade passed, the hands touched more human-made things, less of the earth from which the “raw” materials for those things came. …

We have touched every place on the planet now, but as our species’ reach has expanded, ironically, we touch the world less and less with our hands, and we’ve lost the feeling that we are being touched back. To touch is active, but to be touched is passive; it requires us to acknowledge the agency and power of what touches us.

In conjunction with rationalism’s emotional erasure, this ‘dematerialization’—epitomized by the featureless rectangles we carry daily—further divorces us from our physical senses and the ability to know what nature feels like. In the current moment, when we’re on track for 3.1ºC warming by 2100, what makes less sense than creating design work that adds another layer of abstraction and increases the separation between us and the world?

We clear space by realizing that the economy—and design—depends on the livability of the planet, not the other way around.

Many worlds

There may be one physical world, but there are many ways to live in it. Rationalist designers' “universal” conception of design was—and is—a paternalistic, Eurocentric way of saying their way was the only way.

We miss a lot of subtext when we only think, act, and design rationally; maybe that’s why, over fifty years after Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World, the design industry still responds to climate change with little more than (more) sustainable materials. The industry at large sees it as irrational to consider wider system change. Perhaps the only thing more irrational is the thought that the system should stay the same.

Rationalism has forced our ideas of intelligence, imagination, and the future into a narrow perspective that is not inclusive and, by necessity, removes alternative ways of thinking. It forces us to live in a “One-World World,” say some design theorists like Arturo Escobar and sociologist John Law. Plant communication seems irrational if you only think about communicating as humans do, and introducing wolves into a habitat to save deer seems irrational until you learn about ecosystem management. Likewise, using design for something more than business seems silly until you realize our industry is at the center of a planet-destroying machine called capitalism.

The 21st century—and the unfolding climate crisis it will surely be known for—are asking us to think more intuitively as people and designers. To think beyond the rational, mechanical, and reductive methods of the 20th century.

An intuitive, social focus will help us think in systems—which we desperately need to do because, as it turns out, design affects the entire world around it. Not in a ‘we’ll save the world way,’ but in an ‘actions have consequences’ way. We can no longer nihilistically isolate ourselves in the corner, but by the same token, we can’t believe we hold all the answers; the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Shades of grey

The problem with intuition is that it’s not exact. Leading only with intuition can cause us to miss things, just like leading only with rationalism might. Biases are inherent.

But rationality, for all its quantification, doesn’t eliminate biases either—summed up nicely by influential Austrian modernist Adolf Loos’ belief that ‘ornament is a crime’ and linked with earlier, now obsolete forms of human evolution. For him, a lack of ornament was a sign of a more advanced civilization. (Yes, if you’re wondering, he was super racist.)

As we’ve seen from the last 40+ years of neoliberalism and privatization, data-driven decisions don’t seem to work so well for all but a sliver of society. Rationalism—at least in how it’s currently deployed through technology, capitalism, and control—tends to turn social value and commonly held goods into private, commodifiable business value.

If rationality is, at least in part, causing the poly crisis, maybe our response should be, at least in part, "more-than-rational”—intuition, emotions, poetry, art, and more. Maybe developing an emotional connection with nature inspires you to change how you design a business, a brand system, or how the furniture you create will move through various ecosystems. Maybe it drives you to integrate non-human personas into your design process.

The authors of Relationality recommend ‘going awkward’ instead of going forward, which

might mean flourishing in the cracks and fissures of oppressive designs and practices; attuning to the intuitive, the irrational, the feminine, the sacred, the ineffable; building rhizomes in all kinds of possible directions with like-minded experiments, concepts, and struggles; committing to place despite the pressure to delocalize and de-communalize; creating pluriversal kinds of collective intelligence on the heels of digitality; meditating on and organizing horizontally for the phasing out of a civilization premised on infinite growth, unbridled competition, and extractive capitalism.

No one way of seeing the world is complete; we must develop the right methods for the circumstances. But the 21st century might have to be one in which we make design productive instead of reductive, lead with intuition rather than the rational methodology that seems to have led us astray, and regain the Bauhaus’s social focus that’s long been abandoned in lieu of KPIs and MVPs.

Unpacking AI's lofty promises and lowly returns

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 16:00:49 GMT

This week is about questioning the promises AI advocates sell us—hyper-productivity, unlimited creativity, and...text message summarization, to name a few. While some of these solutions might be useful, what are we willing to give up in return? And is the return even worth it in the first place?

Is uncertainty such a bad thing?

We live in a unique time where the powers that be in Silicon Valley—and, by proxy, the design industry—implore us to believe that any content is better than slow or no content. Even if that content is both made and consumed by machines. They push us to ignore the unproductive, questioning, and inefficient side of creativity.

But what kind of world do we get when we continually scratch this itch for ROI? What's the point of using AI to make a thoughtful and hard thing thoughtless and easy?

This week's main article is about what technologies like AI (and social media and web 2.0) give their inventors and what they take away from the rest of us.

Read below 👇🏽

In his book Non-things, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han draws a distinction between two styles of reading: the pornographic and the erotic. The pornographic reader “is looking for something to be uncovered.” He wants to get to the point, as expeditiously as possible. The erotic reader takes pleasure in the act of reading itself. He “lingers” with the words. “The words are the skin, and the skin does not enclose a meaning.” I would broaden Han’s distinction to describe perception in general. The pornographic mind is concerned only with what can be made explicit, what can be turned into information. It seeks to pierce the obscuring veils of mystery and wonder, beauty and ambiguity, to get to the gist of the matter. The erotic mind likes the veils. It sees them not as obscuring but as pleasurable and even revelatory.

The mind of the LLM is purely pornographic. It excels at the shallow, formulaic crafts of summary and mimicry. The tactile and the sensual are beyond its ken. The only meaning it knows is that which can be rendered explicitly. For a machine, such narrow-mindedness is a strength, essential to the efficient production of practical outputs. One looks to an LLM to pierce the veils, not linger on them. But when we substitute the LLM’s dead speech for our own living speech, we also adopt its point of view. Our mind becomes pornographic in its desire for naked information.

Read → Dead Labor, Dead Speech by Nicholas Carr

🔮 Visions

Three small ideas to help challenge your thinking:

Why are we assuming that people want more, faster? Has anyone ever said, “if only I could make unlimited presentations”?

What if we want to craft one presentation, but do it beautifully?

What if we actually, genuinely, love the in-between moments when we return to a draft after days have passed, sharpening one word here, adding a better verb there.

Great software products aren’t simply a collection of buttons, icons, and menus. They shape how we think and who we aspire to be.

The problem isn’t that machines are becoming more human-like, it’s that humans are becoming more machine-like in an effort to keep up.

→ Sari Azout in What does slow AI look like?

[The idea that “AI will solve climate change”] is not merely foolish but dangerous—it’s another means of persuading otherwise smart people that immediate action isn’t necessary, that technological advancements are a trump card, that an all hands on deck effort to slash emissions and transition to proven renewable technologies isn’t necessary right now. It’s techno-utopianism of the worst kind; the kind that saps the will to act.

→ Brian Merchant in AI will never solve this

AI-produced things “sort of suck” not merely because they are inherently derivative and often erroneous; they suck because AI is only ever a simulation of care, and it improves by allowing people to be more careless. AI is fundamentally “artificial intentionality” rather than “artificial intelligence.”

Tech companies seem to hope that they can make a brute-force case that “having intention” is inconvenient, just as they continually try to persuade users that interacting with other people is inconvenient (rather than the point of life).

→ Rob Horning in Artificial intentionality

A new metric for design beyond ‘growth’

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 16:00:09 GMT

By the time I post this, Hurricane Milton, the fastest Atlantic storm in history to advance from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane, will have made landfall in Florida, barely two weeks after Hurricane Helene tore from Florida to Asheville, North Carolina—a town 300 miles (483Km) from the coast.

This hypergrowth is the new normal, both in nature and society. But as growth happens quicker, we’re given less time to react, and with that comes less quality and more stress. At a certain point, something breaks.

News of Apple potentially steering away from annual updates—at least for some of its products—is a small sign of that breakage, a moment of clarity, a shift we wouldn’t have imagined even five years ago. It may seem like a small step, but it’s a moment of admission that shows that even Apple, today the world’s most valuable company by market cap, has limits.

It also signals the growing consensus that we can no longer see growth as a universal good. Stability is the new growth. In this case, I mean growth as the exponential advancement of technology, the speed of life, and economic growth, not personal, spiritual, or emotional growth.

But this idea still hasn’t grabbed hold in the design industry at large; design is still seen as a way to plan, build, and communicate with the goal of increasing profits and reach. In short, design is used as a growth catalyst. Considering the current state of the world—from the climate to mental health crises—does pursuing endless growth through design avoid a—the?—main goal of design: to make wise, thoughtful decisions?

Rising undercurrents

For years, there has been a surging anti-growth undercurrent. TikTok trends like “quiet quitting,” “act your wage,” and “bare minimum Mondays” only put a name to familiar feelings nearly all of us have had at some point.

Outside of work—and this is purely anecdotal—there’s been a sharp uptick in the number of people I’ve talked to who daydream of moving to a small town and starting some version of a commune—or at least communal housing. Various friends have contacted me about moving to Barcelona to escape the inflated prices of the US and Northern European countries.

In economics research, ‘degrowth’ has existed since at least 2013. A concept in part defined by the voluntary winding down of ‘extraneous’ sectors, it has formed, thanks in part to a sub-discipline called ‘ecological economics,’ which foregrounds issues like “intergenerational equity, irreversibility of environmental change, uncertainty of long-term outcomes, and sustainable development.”

With the worsening climate crisis, these undercurrents have become visible. Degrowth as a solution has exploded into relative popularity, or it has at least moved from the ‘innovators’ to the ‘early adopters’ phase, with discussions popping up on various news channels, editorials, and newspapers.

Anti-capitalism and capitalist critique—barely mentioned in mainstream culture in the mid-aughts and twenties—have also caught on because of the system’s increasingly apparent ties to growth and unsustainability. Even Greta Thunberg, one of climate change’s most prominent spokespeople and a media favorite, has transitioned toward a more anti-capitalist and anti-colonial ethic over the past few years. We’ll see how that affects the media’s coverage of her.

Degrowth and design

So what does ‘degrowth’ mean besides a casual reversal of the social system we’ve grown accustomed to over the past few centuries? 🫠

While I can’t describe all of the ins and outs here—for that, you may have to read a book like Less is More or, more broadly, Doughnut Economics—I want to talk about some of the central tenets and how they could benefit design.

What is degrowth?

The main idea is something many can agree with: our obsession with growth—and in particular, with quantity over quality of growth—causes widespread destruction, human suffering, and waste. For society to continue without major catastrophes, we’ll need to change our entire conception of what growth is good for. Namely, we have to decide when not to grow, on purpose.

Cool, simple enough. 🥹 But how?

The first aspect is restructuring how we produce our products and services, with the idea that shared risk exploits less. Many things change when the main goal isn’t more GDP: power relationships, cash flow, wealth sharing, and—a polarizing feature of degrowth—decision-making processes about what to produce and how. It’s no surprise that cooperativism plays a big role in degrowth, but anti-colonialism may play an even bigger one. Through this lens, it’s vital to not only acknowledge but undo the power dynamics of the colonial and post-colonial world. “Justice is … key to solving the climate crisis,” says Jason Hickel, author of one of the more popular degrowth manuals.

Based on this first element, degrowth proponents also say the purpose of work should be realigned with social well-being. Right now, the profits of growth are reinvested in more growth, but they could just as easily be invested in what people need to live well: healthcare, education, parks, good jobs, and, crucially, free time.

When we’re busy—as we ever-increasingly are—we fill our free time with dopamine-rich and carbon-intensive activities like long-haul flights, on-demand food delivery, and retail therapy. Studies show that “when people are given time off, they tend to gravitate towards lower-impact activities: exercise, volunteering, learning, and socializing with friends and family.”

Finally, community and relationality become guiding principles that indicate that we only exist because of our relationships with other humans and non-humans. This is the opposite of what a growth-based system asks: that everyone be a separate, marketable consumer. Likewise, our mind doesn’t simply exist in the brain, ready to be exported like an .mp4 to another body when we die. It’s an inseparable part of our embodied experience that wouldn’t exist without the rest of our senses.

In short, degrowth helps change our ‘social purpose’ from market-driven to community-driven.

What does this look like in design?

Transition from techno-optimism to socio-optimism

Instead of seeing all tech progress as inherently good, we can begin to view it through a more conscious social lens. Rather than being first to a new technology, we can take a broadly Apple-esque approach: they may not be first to do something, but when they do, the bar for quality is set high (except for their new Camera Control button 🥹).

What does X Technology do for humanity? How can we use Y Technology to create new social relationships? Should we promote Z Technology if we know its popularity will be socially detrimental? How might we create value that can’t be commodified?

These questions imply a shift from the designer as a ‘salesperson,’ as Ruben Pater says, to the designer as a social actor. They also help us avoid losing credibility by uncritically promoting new, overly-hyped technologies that lack substance.

Embracing complexity instead of simplicity

Modern cultures tend to simplify. They flatten time and space. This is ostensibly to make life easier and create more accessibility. I won’t deny how comfortable this can be, but ultimately, that same ease creates a monoculture where everything is a copy of everything else. Even new social media—Read, Cara, etc.—rehash the same like-comment-subscribe-timeline paradigm that’s been the norm for over a decade. It seems that modern culture tends to flatten culture itself.

Instead, designers could embrace the beauty of complexity by embracing degrowth. What if we show the ‘seamfullness’ instead of the seamlessness in digital applications, so people know where their data goes and what it’s used for? What if we lean into the beauty of local cultures and designers instead of applying a ‘global’ aesthetic? What if we let messy, unproductive, but culturally rich systems flourish?

Progress and the standard of living

“But what about progress and raising the standard of living?”

This is a common counter-argument to any critique of growth or productivity. If progress comes from growth, then growth is not only necessary but inherently good.

The catch is that, often, social progress doesn’t come from economic growth. Indeed, in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, a period of massive economic growth, there was a regression in living standards for nearly everyone except the upper classes. Benefitting from extreme enclosure and land appropriation, where many people were forced into cities to survive,

Industrial capitalism took off, but at extraordinary human cost. Simon Szreter, one of the world’s leading experts on historical public health data, has shown that this first century of the Industrial Revolution was characterised by a striking deterioration in life expectancy, down to levels not seen since the Black Death in the fourteenth century. In Manchester and Liverpool, the two giants of industrialisation, life expectancy collapsed compared to non-industrialised parts of the country. In Manchester it fell to a mere twenty-five years.

Much progress in life expectancy and well-being is not due to economic growth but to public works and social movements that demanded more of their governments. Left to the market alone, economic growth can worsen public health outcomes.

It’s not growth or capitalism that creates innovation; it’s human nature. The forty-hour work week, child labor laws, social security, and public sanitation all became normalized in opposition to what the market wanted. Ironically, the market is again threatening some of these victories.

Degrowth has also, at times, been misconstrued as a totalitarian approach to sustainability—after all, who decides what industries are unnecessary?

This argument might seem superficially reasonable until you realize that a small group of people already decide what industries matter and grow. But they do so through undemocratic means. In the US, for example, corporate owners—through the sway of their lobbyists—have the power to decide that a functional public transit system or universal healthcare shouldn’t exist.

This conflation of degrowth with conservative politics ignores that degrowth is about intentional, democratic decision-making and reintegration with the rest of nature. Essentially, degrowth is sustainable design.

So again, we can no longer see growth as a universal good. It needs to be replaced—at least in the minority world—with stability. This means a drastic change in the way we approach design, but at the same time, it means returning to design’s basic definition: to make wise, thoughtful decisions.

Pushing the industry and your practice forward may mean acting on some of the questions above or simply talking about these ideas with friends and colleagues who may be interested.

Most of us are dying for a change, and degrowth could help. While capitalism and exponential growth may seem ‘natural,’ the reality is that they’re part of a young, volatile system waiting to be disrupted.

Power, Politics, and Climate Change

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 17:05:19 GMT

This week, I wanted to share some articles examining existing power structures and why it's so hard to change them. From mindsets to technology to protests to mapmaking, these articles might help you separate the real from the unreal.

Culture is key to climate action

An insightful exploration of why it's so hard to change minds and actions, where everyone can be useful in the climate crisis, and what being "untethered" means for respecting nature.

While I don't think staying in your hometown automatically means you have a closer connection with the nature surrounding it or necessarily use it as a "prism [to] bend all decisions through," I do think Scott is on to something when he says we often move to new cities for economic opportunities, and that rational relationship lets us more readily disconnect from climate harms that may visit us.

🔮 Visions

Three small ideas to help challenge your thinking:

[T]echnology is intrinsically political. So what might look like a perfect technological solution to an environmental problem is *always* something messier, more imperfect. Every such solution creates winners and losers, even if they’re not immediately obvious. So whether or not “tech will save us” really depends on which “tech” and which “us.”

→ Jo Lindsay Walton in Pause

We deceive ourselves that our online paltry protests are effective because it allows us to believe we’ve done the work; because the *real work*, as the subconscious believes, comes at a cost we’re not willing to pay if we don’t have to. This level of self-deception is what billion dollar tech companies know how to exploit, because we largely are appeased by the type of symbolic feedback we can receive on these platforms, and it allows us to avoid the real work, and stay on their platforms. ... The power structure of our world doesn't care much what you’re posting online. It cares what you are spending your entire life force on, how your job and total behavior align in opposition to the oppression.

→ Spencer R. Scott in Once You Get the Message, Hang Up the Phone

Brandon Letsinger believes that one of the most important things that bioregionalists can do is to create new types of maps. “Maps are not neutral,” said Letsinger. “They are created with agenda and purpose. Quite often, they are created by national governments or economic entities that have their own interests. The ultimate purpose of the map will be to make money for the company or to express its [political] interests.”

Bioregional mapping depicts “everything that's left off of Google Maps and other traditional maps,” said Letsinger. The idea is to create maps that give the land a voice by charting the presence of wildlife, migratory patterns, water flows, and other notable ecological phenomena as they intersect with human communities and their cultures.

→ David Bollier in Cascadia and the Global Resurgence of Bioregional Activism

Friction is a reminder

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 02:00:54 GMT

Low-lying ethereal clouds clashed, nearly at eye level, with the mountains ahead of us; those covered in emerald green trees, thick grasses, and dotted with barely-intelligible specks of white, which I knew to be sheep. The obsidian asphalt complemented a vibrant, earthy color palette that any Scot would be familiar with. As a passenger in the back seat of my wife's parent's small VW crossover, driving along a string of beautiful backroads in the Spanish region of País Vasco from her hometown of Vitoria to Bilbao, I dreamt of being a character in a dreamy Studio Ghibli masterpiece.

A few days later, the return to Vitoria was a quick 55 minutes on the N-622 that passed so rapidly that it evaporated from my memory by the end of the trip.

All stories, fictional or not, have some friction. In the story above, the friction is between the beauty of going slow, the efficiency of going fast, and the effect each has on imagination. Friction is an element that fulfills our desire for conflict and resolution. One that makes the story memorable. Stories have flawed characters, goals they want to achieve, and obstacles that stand in their way; friction is the indispensable core of all of these.

What's odd is how we try to eliminate as much friction as possible in real life. In design, it's as constant a nemesis as Comic Sans. But that makes me ask, by creating frictionlessness through well-designed products, services, and algorithms—whose side effects often reduce human contact and any iota of discomfort or self-reflection—are we also making life less memorable?

Despite our industry's efforts this century, striving for complete frictionlessness feels like a mistake. Without friction, there's no opportunity to learn or connect. When everything is taken care of, we continue to exist in individualized bubbles, ushered to the next thing we're told to care about. Without friction, we lose a path to understanding, confidence, and sufficiency.

I want to take that a step further and say that frictionlessness keeps designers, and those who use the products and services they make, from truly understanding and identifying with the climate crisis. Being open to experiencing friction is the first step to changing your and your community's 'frame,' or worldview, as Spencer Scott says:

A climate activist, in the most basic sense, is asking you to shift the relative weights of your frames. They are asking people to rearrange their time/energy/resource allocation to align with a sustained emergency value-set that might be mutually exclusive with many preexisting value sets.

The catch? There is a large social opportunity cost for initiating a “wartime” mentality when your social group doesn’t.

A lack of friction gives us many things in modern life: we can order food at a restaurant and have a robot bring it to us, instantly translate from one language to another, and fill our refrigerator without ever leaving the house, for instance. In a way, living in the minority world brings us a satisfying predictability and convenience. But we often ignore the social drawbacks. How does that friction-free ease affect our social bonds and add to the loneliness epidemic (not to mention externalized harm in the rest of the world)?

Friction doesn't exist in a vacuum or linear spectrum, but in a chaotic ecosystem, so we must consider what and who else its elimination affects.

How does using Material X change Environment Y? How does Business Model B improve the lives of the surrounding population that Business Model A ignores? Learning about the climate crisis is full of friction—full of inconvenience and unpredictability that forces you to rethink how you work, socialize, and operate in the world. That may be part of why many people sweep the issue under the rug. They have more immediate pains to remedy, so finding the time and energy to understand how their actions affect lives other than their own falls down the list of priorities.

But I think that's part of the problem. Many try to face the friction of the climate crisis alone, in the vein of an individual consumer, when we should do it with community-oriented thinking. We need to allow the climate crisis to push us to embrace the messiness of humanity rather than see it as something to scrub clean. That's the only way we can break through to another way of being besides this one, which is not working for so many.

That's not to say we should increase friction across the board. No one wants to touch a hard-to-use interface or service. However, the conscious use of friction to create connections between people (or between humans and non-humans) needs to become a central design goal rather than the myopic reduction of friction to increase sales.

Design theorist Arturo Escobar says that friction, "the messy and shifting, what some might call the excess or the incomprehensible, is necessary. Excess, often experienced as pain, grief, or other forms of rupture, are the motor of life and are often essential parts of a bridge or portal to relationality [a social narrative that says we exist because of the links we make with a community, the land, spirituality, etc., rather than the dualist idea of existing separate or independently from them]."

Frictionlessness is often advertised with the idea that it "lowers the bar for entry" and "democratizes" design. I can't argue that the time and energy saved by reducing friction is immense. But, many times, having a bar for entry makes an experience worthwhile, and its removal creates a transactional experience where there once used to be community.

The design process, for instance, is interesting and worthwhile because—not in spite—of its uncomfortableness. Alongside labor and environmental concerns, friction is one of the main reasons I'm against technologies like AI, which attempt to remove the discomfort of developing creative concepts. Discomfort is a vital part of the process, and we should resist buffing it to a smooth finish.

Of course, there is nuance to the situation. Frictionlessness can be helpful when it brings people together, and friction can be harmful when it pulls them apart. But my point is that we have to take the time to use friction as a tool, not a goal.

Lou Downe writes in Good Services that

It’s easy to see all steps within a service as annoying hassles; bits of a broken process that could be eliminated altogether. We dream of a bright shiny future where everything is done for us, and delivered without us even having to ask. Or do we? Every new step in your service is a transitional moment. The difference between choosing and buying it, or buying and returning something.

Those "transitional" moments—those instants of reflection—are vital. 'Good friction' shows our values and makes us aware of what we find essential on both a personal and communal level. It can help mold communities and movements, such as those surrounding the climate crisis.

So, how can we put this 'good friction' back into our lives? When does choosing the scenic route over the express one make sense? How can we make friction enjoyable and worthwhile? And how can we make it a reminder of the world we want to see?

Imperfectly perfect design

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 00:00:36 GMT

Source photo by Roel van Sabben.

This week, I want to share some stories about the design industry's pursuit of perfection and why it may be time to transition to imperfection as a goal.

Is flawlessness falling out of fashion?

There’s been a vibe shift the past couple of years where genie-in-a-bottle design solutions aren’t sought after like they were in the 2010s. People are actively seeking out imperfection and limitations: apps that make it hard to access other apps and phones that do little more than call and text.

This article by Thorsten Jonas helps connect this trend—if you can call it that—to a sustainable mindset and helps us imagine an “ecosystemic” design process that looks beyond designing for hyperspecific users without accounting for broader systemic effects.

Here's a snippet of the full article, which includes some design process changes that Thorsten recommends:

By seeking perfection for somebody or something, we always take from somebody else. Perfection is not an absolute state. It is just one perspective in a complex, bigger system. The perfect solution always comes with negative impacts on other elements / players in the system. Seeking perfection creates injustice by default. [...]

A perfect delivery app might build up a great UX and convenience for the user. But at the same time the delivery rides are not paid well or small grocery stores have to close because they cannot match the business model of the delivery service. [...]

When building and designing digital products, we try to build the best product for our users. We need to change this [and] design from the beginning for a solution that is balanced with its surrounding ecosystem and on purpose, not just perfect to the user. [...]

Once we have dismantled negative impacts to the ecosystem we can seek for connections with the user- and business-needs we want to fulfil. Which of these needs are very harmful? This is an additional information layer to the classic user- and business-needs to help us understand and evaluate the negative impacts of each of them.

Read → Imperfect design for a better future by Thorsten Jonas

🏗️ Reconstructions

Three bite-sized ideas to help challenge your thinking:

With friction we don’t mean malfunctioning technology. If you don’t find the help-button, that is not the sort of friction we talk about. Friction is resistance that stems from movement, actions and engagement. It is desire, it is boredom. Friction is meeting people physically. Shutting down the site intentionally after some time in order to go out could be intentional friction. Friction can be much more fun than seamlessness.

→ Luna Maurer and Roel Wouters in Embracing friction

If the science tells us we need a transition and change in behaviour, then the websites we visit should reflect that. If every job is a climate job then every website can be a climate website.

Think about the last recipe site you visited. What if the first recipes and all featured recipes you were served were part of a climate friendly diet? Travel sites could push stories and guides about low carbon travel and sustainable accommodation. Design and construction websites could prioritise content about alternative building materials and low carbon mobility projects.

→ Andy Davies in Reducing “Business as Usual” content on platforms

Every technology gives us a new power, but it also takes something away from us. With every new technology, we risk becoming a little less human, and this is never more true than with AI. [...] Paradoxically, while AI might seem to be dragging us into a less human future, it might just be the thing that wakes us up and prompts us to look deep within ourselves to ask what really makes us special and unique as human beings.

→ Tom Greenwood in What does it mean to be human?

Crossing design’s climate skill chasm

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 15:00:58 GMT

I have bad news: your design agency is unlikely to solve the climate crisis. At least not through design.

Our individual technical knowledge and the industry’s laser focus on business are only part of what’s necessary for the next generation of design; the world needs more meaningful skills beyond improving efficiencies, making brands grow, and spurring endless sales.

Making design the only lens through which we see sustainable actions creates a situation where a physical output—countless printed objects or tons of data center emissions—is all but guaranteed. But there are other ways to be sustainable apart from our actual design work, like changing the business model of our design studios, incorporating business design into our client work, socializing or commoning resources across the industry, or educating other designers on the changing cultural role of design.

In other words, not everything has to be a one-to-one relationship between us and our visual (or industrial, or fashion) design work.

Matthew Wizinsky points out in his book Design after Capitalism that we can act on three familiar levels—Project, Practice, and Discipline—to be more sustainable and erode a capitalist system that serves almost no one. By asking open questions like How might we incentivize collaboration, participation, negotiation, and compromise? on the Project level, or How might we appropriate and distribute social surplus collectively, with and for the practice and its community? on the Practice level, we can think differently about how to make products and how our industry should exist in the world.

Four principles are applied to these three levels: social power, community economies, degrowth, and ‘post-capitalist subjectivities,’ the last two dealing with how to reduce ‘overgrown’ economic sectors and how to imagine ourselves in a post-capitalist world, respectively. These principles give us an outlet to act through design as something besides ‘Designer.’ Acting as Designers limits us to the posters, manifestos, and commercial projects that, as we’ve seen, have little impact or are easily co-opted; it also limits our idea of what’s possible through design.

We must reframe our idea of “Design” and what it means to work in design.

A couple of months ago, on the Frontiers of Commoning podcast, design researcher Safouan Azouzi compared the English and Arabic definitions of “design.” In English—and the Western world in general—the concept of design centers on ‘problem-solving.’ But in Arabic, the word for design, تصميم (“tasmim”), comes from صَمَّمَ (“ṣammama”), which simply means ‘decision-making.’

You could look at the Arabic definition as ‘problem avoiding’ instead of problem-solving, he says.

With this in mind, how much of Western design’s problem-solving has been problem-shifting—to other people, classes, or regions? And how much could we benefit from the wisdom of not trying to solve the world’s problems? Just like at home, we’ll never get to the end of the world’s to-do list; a more novel idea of design might focus on making decisions about current issues rather than being perfectionistic about how the future should be.

In This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein says

Slavery wasn’t a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn’t a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn’t a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn’t a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one.

Right now, the design industry—and seemingly the Western world at large—doesn’t seem too bothered by the change in the climate. To provoke a change, we need to make climate change a crisis. We need movements and ideas to make them bothered and create a crisis worth addressing.

Bridges to cross

What kinds of movements and ideas make a crisis worth addressing?

We can look to social media as an example: until now, the concept revolved around self-contained gardens with extremely high walls. But with the enshittification of basically all networks—but primarily Twitter—the idea of a ‘Fediverse’ or ‘open social web’ has caught on. In the future, through protocols like ActivityPub and AT, you’ll be able to easily take your followers from one platform to another; in theory, this and other improvements should de-shitify the multiple platforms that, at present, seem to actively hate their users. Threads, Mastodon, and BlueSky are built on these technologies, with many more, like Tumblr, WordPress, and Ghost making the transition.

These protocols act as bridges from one internet to another. They’re ideas and actions that highlight long-held and widespread feelings. With climate change, there are a few bridges we need to cross to turn it from an edge case to a crisis. These bridges would, hopefully, lead from the destructive industry we’re currently propping up to a more balanced future one.

Well-being

First, we need to focus on well-being instead of growth. At growth’s extreme, we see people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. At the time of writing, Musk has $247.2 billion to his name. Bezos has $195.6 billion. They’ve grown (financially) to the highest heights imaginable, but how much better are their customers or employees for it? How much better are LVMH and Inditex’s customers or employees for their high valuations and shareholder returns?

Beyond a certain point, growth is purposeless unless it’s a means to something better, not simply more growth. Like money or technology, using it as the driving ethic for what you do creates a vicious cycle. ‘Enough’ as a principle signifies meagerness and apathy.

If we want to design more in line with nature and to be about ‘problem avoiding,’ we, as people, communities, and industry, need to consider the impact of our designs and hold peoples’ well-being as a core design principle. Unintended outcomes of design—like the addictive effects of infinite scrolling—must be seen as flaws to be minimized rather than trivial side effects to be ignored in pursuit of profits or engagement.

How much of our work—whether your specific job is in communications or landscape design—is ‘calorically empty’ and socially isolating rather than ‘nutrient-dense’ and socially integrative?

Sufficiency

A second bridge that runs directly alongside the first is from efficiency to sufficiency. While growth demands efficiency to make more growth viable, well-being implies you build as much as necessary, not as much as possible. The expansive gap between these ideas gives us room to question how we see the planet, society, and our personal lives—from our conception of nature to our understanding of the purpose of work to how we raise our children.

While efficiency favors the fortunate individuals with access to means, sufficiency favors communities regardless of their means. This naturally creates different types of products, designs, and ideas.

Systemic thinking

Wrapped up in this is a third bridge to cross: a move from reductive to systemic thinking.

I understand why the design industry has so highly valued efficiency and reductiveness. It’s easier to be more efficient than sufficient. Centering sufficiency is messy and complex. Lots of people and consequences to think about. Lots of intersecting systems to consider. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s less productive—just less reductive.

A typical grid-plan city might have wide, straight streets, but it often misses the character of medieval cities or neighborhoods built before city planning was so rigid. A lack of permanent street seating might let people move more quickly through busy streets, but it also prohibits them from stopping to chat. Productivity can be attached to more than a dollar amount.

Maria Farrell notes that

when we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late. That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.”

The impulse to simplify complex and messy—but thriving—systems stems from our preoccupation with control. But is that a habit that still serves us? Has it ever?

It’s worth examining how many of our social habits were temporary mends that have unconsciously calcified and if those deposits of salt do more harm than good. Maybe modernism and reductivism have reached their end of life. They’re certainly well past their prime.

Designers, choose your player: AI or Earth

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 17:45:09 GMT

This week, I want to talk about AI (yes, again). I'd love to stop, but it continues to be a hot-button topic in design—although Wall Street does seem to be cooling on it.

🙅🏽‍♂️ AI is incompatible with environmentalism

As much as designers love to be on the cutting edge of tech, this article made me come to a strong conclusion: any designer who cares about the climate should abandon AI. Or at least relegate it to a 'break in case of emergency' tool. It goes without saying that using it as a personal Google or calculator is a waste.

AI follows the same doublespeak pattern of other tech advancements of the past 15 years—from social media to the cloud—which we thought were innocuous but ended up being socially or environmentally detrimental. (The cloud, a euphemism for 'data center,' has a bigger carbon footprint than the airline industry.)

The difference between AI and those technologies is that AI is still nascent. There's still time to scuttle the ship.

The real question we need to ask ourselves is this: Is the upside (?) of summarizing emails, getting feedback without talking to another living person, having personalized stock imagery—or, god forbid, an imaginary Friend—worth the downside of running the planet further into the ground?

I don't think it is, and it's more apparent to me than ever that we have more to gain by developing a worldview centered around nature than one centered around technology.

Anyway, here's a bit from the article:

[I]nsatiable hunger for power is slowing the transition to green energy. When the owner of two coal-fired power plants in Maryland filed plans to close last year, PJM asked them to keep running till at least 2028 to ensure grid reliability. Meanwhile, AI is also being used to actively increase fossil fuel production. Shell, for example, has aggressively deployed AI to find and produce deep-sea oil. [...]

Even before Google’s AI integration this spring, the average internet user’s digital activity generated 229 kilograms of carbon dioxide a year. That means the world’s current internet use already accounts for about 40 percent of the per capita carbon budget needed to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius. [...]

“It’s difficult to reckon with the physical harms of AI, says Brian Chen, policy director at the nonprofit Data & Society, because “tech companies invisibilize the consequences of these systems, most people don’t have to think about it.”

Latin America, for example, is now seeing a surge in data center development, including near drought-stricken Mexico City, which is hurtling toward a day in the near future when its taps run dry. [...]

People don’t realize that when the groundwater is exhausted, there’s no alternative.

“They don’t live in the natural world,” Ward says. “They live in a world where there’s a pipe in the wall, and you get water, and they have no idea where it comes from.”

He adds, “But when it’s gone, it’s gone.”

Read → The Hidden Environmental Impact of AI by Lois Parshley

🏗️ Reconstructions

Three bite-sized ideas to help challenge your thinking:

It can sometimes feel as though we have given up on any bold ideas about how we might want to live in the future. All we hear is artificial intelligence, ‘AI’. At the same time, ‘sustainable’ design feels trapped in a narrow framework defined by concepts such as ‘net zero’. It is in shaving mode: shaving off some carbon here, some plastic there and some waste over there. This is all crucial work, but if we struggle to achieve net zero, it is partly because carbon counting feels like accountancy, not a compelling vision of the future.

→ Justin McGuirk in The Impact of Design: Symptoms, Systems and Stories

It can be easy to get lost in numbers, but what they point to is an obvious truth: generative AI is an environmental disaster that’s accelerating natural destruction and the climate crisis at the very moment alarms are sounding about the precious little time that remains to turn things around. Tech companies once pitched themselves as the purveyors of a more ethical form of capitalism. They wanted us to believe they would balance corporate profit with environmental sustainability, such that the digital future was marketed as inherently more sustainable than the analog past. It’s clearer than ever that was a lie.

→ Paris Marx in Generative AI is a climate disaster

I will reflexively convert a personal story into a lesson or metaphor—sometimes even as it's happening. I've learned to experience life as a series of content opportunities. And I know I'm not alone.

Kate Tyson once texted me a screenshot of a LinkedIn update that started with an eye-catching line about checking into the emergency room. After teasing that the experience got them thinking, the update pivoted to ask, "What can an emergency room visit teach you about running a better business?" For all I know, the rest of the post was thoughtful and well-considered. It’s not the content itself that’s at issue. The issue (or one of them) is what happens when our creative reflex becomes turning a personal story into valuable content.

Our stories cease to be our stories—and become instruments for attracting attention.

→ Tara McMullin in Unpacking the Attention Fetish

Does ‘climate branding’ miss the bigger picture of systems change?

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 17:00:51 GMT

Have you all seen this Chobani spot from a few years ago?

It borrows from the “solarpunk” style of futurism that paints a world where humans, technology, and nature are balanced. Robots harvest apples, rain is made at will, and we finally get the flying cars we’ve been asking for. (Apparently, Chobani is also the only consumer packaged good that survived into the future.)

This ad and other climate branding projects that superficially portray sustainable futures put us at risk of entrenching branding as a tool for greenwashing rather than for systemic change. The incentive continues to be 'buy different' instead of 'think different.' “Natural” forms, imagery, and colors are used to sell a lifestyle more than signal values, and graphics are easily appropriated.

While I’m thrilled that nature is going mainstream and the design industry is moving from easily forgotten climate pledges and manifestos to tangible work, recently, the most high-profile projects generally belong to a few categories: carbon offsets, impact VCs, and sustainable materials.

Notably, these industries’ impact prolongs the problems they claim to fight.

Offsets

Carbon offsets allow companies—from tech companies to construction firms, car manufacturers to (incredibly) fossil-fuel producers—to claim they’re “carbon neutral” while, for the most part, continuing with business as usual by simply paying to make their carbon usage ‘go away.’ They offload the work of harm reduction onto other people. To put it another way, it’s hard to claim you’re neat if, in reality, it’s an underpaid maid from a developing country who is responsible for keeping your house clean.

Companies externalize the responsibility (and admittedly hard work) of developing a sustainable worldview and making concrete changes by paying someone else in another part of the world not to pollute. Carbon insetting, on the other hand, internalizes that responsibility.

Impact VCs

As I’ve mentioned before, impact VCs, just like regular VCs, still look for exponential monetary growth in their climate startups, which implies an exponential effort to cut costs, grow margins, and monopolize markets. This tends to create conditions that hurt workers and the environment—something the startups are ostensibly against.

Until VCs change their payment structure, the trajectory of the climate tech startups they fund will be unsustainable because the payment structure demands that.

Sustainable Materials

The last of these industries, sustainable materials, is theoretically valuable, but, in the long term, it’s liable to do more harm than good because of the rebound effect; like with VCs, when the economic objective is growth, any new efficiencies go toward making more growth. So, despite our material and methodological advancements over the past century, we still pollute and work just as much as a century ago.

For material innovations to matter long-term, we need to find another metric for success beyond growth and GDP. In the meantime, material sustainability helps us sell more things people don’t need.

What the companies that finance our branding projects do well is fall into the trap of sustainability as usual: they set unrealistic goals and quickly abandon them when they don’t show profit or can’t charge more for the premium perception that sustainability brings. Despite new sustainability campaigns, AI has caused Microsoft’s emissions to jump 30% since they pledged in 2020 to go carbon-negative by 2030. And despite Nike’s well-branded sustainability initiative, they’ve cut 30% of their sustainability staff (never mind that this initiative set out with the mental gymnastics of doubling growth and halving impact).

By making these ‘solutions’ attractive, I wouldn’t say designers and design agencies are wholly responsible for what amounts to greenwashing, but we can’t, in good faith, claim we’re wholly innocent. Just because we see more sustainability work doesn’t mean corporations consider it anything more than a line item on a list of tactics to increase sales.

That raises a couple of questions: Does climate branding sell sustainability or just the social desire for sustainability—the anticipation that, at last, businesses will put people and the planet over profits? What kind of power does design have when the impact of our work is greenwashing on the scale of unicorns and mega-corporations?

We’ll end up harming more than helping if we continue to craft an attractive, sustainable image for these environmentally and socially unsustainable companies that show zero reluctance to abandon initiatives at the slightest indication of more shareholder returns.

Next Level

If branding—and design in general—is to be genuinely helpful for climate action, we need to look at sustainability with a more holistic lens. We need to stop beautifying and hyping products without looking critically at their social and ecological effects; we need to ensure our work helps change the system rather than sustain the current one.

Cultural, social, and emotional dimensions of sustainability are just as—if not more—important than technology and materials because they’re further upstream. A saying goes, “The most sustainable product is the one that’s never made.” Likewise, the most sustainable design is the one that changes how we think about the world, organize our business, and interact with one another, not the one that uses a bit less ink, plastic, or paper.

A social framing to support our design decisions could help us engage with those upstream dimensions. Thinking about the world we collectively want to experience—as people, not designers—is what Stuart Walker calls ‘appreciative inquiry,’ which

tells us that the questions we ask should be directed toward those conditions we wish to attain.

If we ask, “How can we develop a more environmentally friendly product, such as a car or a clothes dryer?,” we are framing the question in a way that implicitly subsumes a problem—that is, currently available models have a problem that needs to be fixed. By framing the question in this manner, the inevitable result will be a new design concept. Alternatively, we might ask, “How can we live in ways that are attuned to natural systems and facilitate environmental care?”

Addressing this kind of question would result in very different understandings about our priorities, needs, and desires.

A future-oriented design industry shouldn’t ignore finding efficiencies—but it also needs to make deep investments in the big picture. It should value downstream social effects, not just increasing quarterly revenue. But because the questions are broader, they’ll likely require more diverse teams—maybe ones that include anthropologists, sociologists, or geologists alongside designers and strategists.

That might help make a structural change. At least, it has more chance than a fresh logo, mission statement, or plant-based inks would.

What makes a friend?

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 16:00:47 GMT

Computer Friend—surely just as good as a real friend, right?

This week, I'm pretty much obliged to mention the new AI companion, Friend, and the narrative it encourages 🫠 If you haven't heard of it, you should really watch their launch video/ragebait before jumping into this week’s main article.

👯 Embracing Sub-Optimal Relationships

L.M. Sacasas gives us an excellent dissection of Friend, the vision of the future it promotes, and why we might be tempted to use it out of necessity.

The always-listening Friend, and AI in general, mark a point where companies have, on top of commodifying our homes (Airbnb) and cars (Uber), started to commodify our memories, imagination, and relationships. Material resources are now largely spoken for, and the system is pushing people to mine society’s immaterial elements. Being designers, we might even be involved in beautifying and normalizing that mining.

Apart from the social element, Friend makes me think about the design culture that buttresses these absurd ideas. We see, once again, that technology and a vague idea of 'progress' can’t be the value system that drives what we do; technology itself isn’t a value but a carrier of the values you already have.

What does it say about our understanding of design when we, through our work, proudly and uncritically boost devices like Friend?

From the article:

It is good to be able to relate to the world in a manner that evokes and engages the various dimensions of our human personhood—embodied, imaginative, intellectual, emotional, moral, spiritual, etc.—particularly in relationship with others. But our techno-economic environment generates an experience of the world that is hostile to this ideal. It operates at a pace, scale, and intensity that undermines our capacity to relate to the world with the fulness of our presence, thought, and care. If affection is kindled by time and attention, the default settings of our techno-economic order undermine our capacity to give either. We are instead encouraged to live as machines rather than creatures, optimizing for all the wrong metrics.

And these same techno-economic structures instill in us a manufactured neediness so that we might be all the more beholden to the goods and services marketed with the promise of alleviating our plight and addressing the very neediness they cultivate. Social robots, AI assistants, VR, generative AI—each of these, as they are often marketed, can be usefully analyzed from this perspective. They are the system’s answers to the problems the system created and they serve the system not the person. [...]

Considered from a slightly more cynical perspective, we can see that there is a certain unfortunate logic at work: manufactured neediness prepares the ground for new commodities. The goal is not to alleviate loneliness or isolation by fostering vernacular human relationships, which, of course, cannot be readily monetized, but to insinuate, pejoratively, that such relationships are inefficient and full of friction. As Horning noted, “Chatbots are often marketed as though other people represent the main impediment to solving loneliness, and if you remove the threat of judgment and exclusion and rejection that other people represent, then no one will ever feel lonely again.”

Read → Embracing Sub-Optimal Relationships by L.M. Sacasas

🏗️ Reconstructions

Here are three bite-sized ideas to help challenge your thinking:

[M]ost crises – such as the 2008 financial meltdown or the recent droughts in Spain – are rarely in and of themselves sufficient to induce rapid and far-reaching policy change (unlike a war). Rather, the historical evidence suggests that a crisis is most likely to create substantive change if two other factors are simultaneously present: movements and ideas.

→ Roman Krznaric in The disruption nexus

[T]he best narratives and metaphors for thinking about how life works come not from our technologies (machines, computers) but from life itself. Some biologists now argue that we should think of all living systems, from single cells upwards, not as mechanical contraptions but as cognitive agents, capable of sifting and integrating information against the backdrop of their own internal states in order to achieve some self-determined goal. [...] The ‘organic technology’ of language, where meaning arises through context and cannot be atomised into component parts, is a constantly useful analogy. Life must be its own metaphor.

And shouldn’t we have seen that all along? For what, after all, is extraordinary – and challenging to scientific description – about living matter is not its molecules but its aliveness, its agency.

→ Philip Ball in We are not machines

[M]aking art is already a fundamentally democratic process. [...] It just takes time, effort, training, dedication, a development of craft. AI advocates have tried to argue that AI helps disabled people create art—but the already plenty vibrant disabled artist community shut that down extremely quickly. No, it’s making a living practicing art is the tricky part, the already deeply precarious part—and it’s that part to which the AI companies are taking a battering ram. [...]

The democratization pitch is aimed not at aspiring artists, but at tech enthusiasts who may or may not feel that largely abstracted gatekeepers have been unkind to them or derided their cultural contributions, who feel satisfaction at seeing slick-looking images produced from their prompting and eagerly share and promote the results, and industries who read the ‘democratize’ lingo as code for ‘cheap’, and would like to automate the production of images, text, or video.

→ Brian Merchant in AI is not "democratizing creativity." It's doing the opposite

Do we really need to learn about the climate crisis? We’re just designers, after all.

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 16:00:20 GMT

credit: Joe Hamilton

Although designers acknowledge the climate crisis more than ever, the industry is still rife with resistance and indifference. Action is seen more as a noble cause than a survival technique.

While it might feel like the climate crisis is just one more thing on an already insurmountable pile of methods and frameworks to learn, scuttling the livability of humanity’s only known inhabitable planet feels slightly more important than learning to code (or these days, learning to prompt).

Still, we don’t act. Why?

Loci of resistance

Within design

Although we’re shifting toward an ostensibly more collaborative working model, the design industry still rests on exceptionalism and individualism. The need to differentiate and demonstrate expertise is overwhelmingly strong across the industry, from individual designers to international agencies. Because of this, studios gravitate toward high-profile, high-budget work that, as a byproduct, often enhances, enriches, and enlivens destructive industries.

Designers might not necessarily agree with the goals these corporations have—or they might just think of design as an apolitical, instrumental activity—but, either way, they want to be involved because, in some way, our portfolios express who we are as individuals.

There’s precedent for this in politics, too: “Many conservatives don’t oppose climate science because they are ignorant,” says Per Espen Stoknes. “Rather, it is a way of expressing who they are. This obstacle becomes the innermost barrier to climate communications: The messages crash against the wall of the self.”

Communal work is at the center of addressing the climate crisis. Does our resistance to getting involved stem from the dying era of the hero designer, where design solutions are granted from above instead of developed by the community that will use them? Does this communal messaging crash against the designer’s wall of the self when it becomes apparent our work is no longer an expression of who I am but of who we are, creating social dissonance that prevents us from doing what we know is correct simply because we feel we won’t fit in?

The urge to fit in is a strong one. I’ve had a similarly dissonant sensation while building this newsletter (and yet-to-be-released sub-projects). I constantly debate what it means for me as a designer if I do less design. Questions loop in my mind: If one calls themself a designer but doesn’t constantly add projects to their portfolio, are they still a designer? Do they, at some point, become a fraud?

Ultimately, what lets me rest is that the social dissonance of not fitting the stereotypical mold of a designer is less anxiety-inducing than the cognitive dissonance of knowing there are more sustainable ways to design but continuing full steam ahead with unsustainable but well-established practices.

That’s not to say I’m not forced at times to do business-as-usual design work. This is another, more immediate reason for our resistance: our profession and the lifestyle it grants us often block out competing worldviews. If that project helps us put food on the table, we’re generally not going to bite the hand that feeds; we’ll see Nike for the story they sell to athletes rather than their sweatshops.

Without design

However, another factor, maybe as significant as any, is how climate news is communicated, which leaves us disconnected.

For all the coverage the crisis gets, you’d think there would be more direct involvement, but our view hovers at 10,000 feet. We understand species are dying and ice caps are melting, but what does that mean for our day-to-day lives, especially as designers? “Typography can change the world just kidding” has never felt truer.

The climate crisis feels impossibly large and hard to change, let alone understand, making us and design feel useless. The inherent distance and ambiguity in this framing make us disassociate. So, the climate crisis remains an issue perpetually ‘over there’ and not quite urgent enough for us to care (for now, at least, depending on where you are).

In contrast, while the hole in the ozone layer (remember that?) was a huge problem, it had a clear and understandable solution: stop using aerosols. With comparatively little legislation and social change on our part, the issue was solved. In that case, lucky for us, the answer was within the confines of consumerism. The intersectional facets of the climate crisis (the ‘polycrisis’) are more diffuse and boundless.

Denial and avoidance often feel like better choices when there’s negative messaging and no clear solution to a problem. It may be that because of the messaging we receive outside of design, we perpetuate resistance within design. What if we reframed our relationship to the climate crisis?

via Silvio Lorusso, origin unknown

Finding a new frame

Could the actual barrier to action be the crisis’ destructive and diffuse framing, not simply designers’ preoccupation with their portfolio, market differentiation, or concern over what it means to be a designer? Are we losing because of our laser focus on loss?

What we stand to lose is helpful, but only short-term. Of course, we need to avoid disaster, but then what? If there’s no long-term strategy for managing the climate ‘underbrush,’ humanity’s job is limited to damage control; rather than caretakers, we’re emergency responders limited to putting out fires.

Ironically, destruction-focused climate messaging grabs our attention but deters us from action. It has the same disabling effect as doomscrolling. It doesn’t help that news about the climate crisis—the biggest ecological event in the history of humanity—is presented alongside the latest gossip or corporate quarterly returns call, essentially creating hyperinflation in those topics’ significance. This is the same normalization that happens when we see tweets of genocide alongside exceedingly cool Olympic sharpshooters, a US presidential candidate saying we won’t need to vote again if he’s elected, and ChatGPT counting to 50 ‘like a human.’

Negative, individualized messaging—e.g., “86% of people don’t recycle”—deters us from action because it reinforces inaction as the social norm. If most people don’t recycle, what damage will my not recycling do? However, positive, socially focused messaging reaches places never imagined with negative messaging.

For example, who likes hearing that we need to use less? Pretty much no one. However, if that reduction is tied to a social identity, the action becomes intuitive. You get up early every morning because you’re a runner, not because you want to run. You design with less because you’re minimalist, not because you want to save bandwidth or materials. The identity and feeling part of a bigger cause makes something appealing, not necessarily the action itself.

Crises present us with opportunities for gain, not just for loss; they give us chances to understand what we stand for and uncover new allegiances. This framing unlocks climate action and imagination: it’s not just the destruction we can avoid globally but the worlds we can create locally.

With the present crisis, designers’ social status could change substantially—although it would no doubt degrade if we pigeonhole climate actions into the paradigm of the Hero Designer.

As temperatures move further into uncharted territory, more people are forced to migrate, and younger generations gain more purchasing and political power, designing through a climate lens will signal premium quality, thoughtfulness, and an eye toward the future. I firmly believe that within 10-15 years, a thorough structural understanding of the climate crisis will be more valuable—financially and socially—than the efficiency and innovation focus of the last hundred years.

Reciprocal change

This framing, that focusing on what we stand to gain changes what we find important, is nothing new. Although it’s rarely applied to the climate crisis, it’s evident in the way the design industry has changed since the turn of the millennium.

Thirty-five years ago, accessibility was barely a thing. Twenty-five years ago, neither was a collaborative model of design. Today, by focusing on the upside, we see digital interfaces improve when more people can use them, and products and services improve when created with and by the people who use them. When we focus on what we stand to lose, these advancements are instead seen as getting in the way of a ‘unified vision.’

The dialogue of a collaborative model creates space to develop what we consider essential. Relationships are inevitably valued in that back-and-forth, in contrast to the Hero Designer model, which eschews the ‘we’ for the ‘I.’

Likewise, dialogue and relationships are critical in climate action since it is through community, not individual triumphs, that we’ll make progress; ‘de-individualizing’ climate communications, organization, and solutions allows us to rebuild social bonds, provide support, and gain systemic understanding.

Returning to the original question of climate resistance in design, it’s vital to bring sustainable mindsets to design, not just design to sustainable mindsets. Sustainability doesn’t benefit from being another club, separate from all the others to which we belong, another framework to add to a list of expertise, or something corporations do as a bare minimum to gain social capital.

It’s interlinked with nearly every topic and activity imaginable and has to be an integrated conversation in the same way design has become. If we integrated it more into who we are as designers, it wouldn’t be another framework to learn; it would be the whole point of design.

🍄 Growth Imperatives No. 10: Origins

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 16:00:42 GMT

Credit: Female Pentimento

I wanted to try something new this week: Instead of three long excerpts and even longer articles—which can be a bit overwhelming, especially on mobile—I want to share one main article and a few interesting thoughts I've picked up along the way.

👽 Would being aliens' descendants make us more life-centered?

This article tells the hypothetical origin story of Ǵenh, a microscopic traveler from a distant planet who landed on our own. Spencer R. Scott crafts this story as a contrast to Judeo-Christian and Ashininaabe origin stories and examines how the dynamics of those stories affect their relationship with nature and life as a whole.

There's no doubt that origin stories help us understand the world. With this in mind, how would our not being of this world—of it being a liferaft rather than an inheritance or damnation—change our appreciation of it?

History has shown us that origin stories deeply affect our search for purpose and how we behave on this Earth. In the face of climate change, the importance of origin stories has never been more pronounced. [...]

What if we had grown up with the origin story of Ǵenh? What culture would we create if we saw Earth as a miraculous celestial garden bed that seeds scattered to the cosmic winds found, against all odds, a home in?

We might start to wonder what kind of garden it is we’ve landed on. We might internalize how miraculous it is that a planet, so perfectly outfitted for life, received a seed. For what science can tell, Earth appears to be extremely special in its ability to foster life. [...]

The power in the story of Ǵenh is less in re-imaging where we come from, and more in what it says about which direction we might choose to head. If we are merely seeds planted in an unlikely bed of soil wondering if we will flower, we see there is no guarantee for us, no space gardener, “no hint that help will come from elsewhere”. Whether we thrive or die in our pot of soil will be determined by our ability to accept the responsibility of this position. As the newest Inheritors of Life.

Read → The Book of Ǵenh: Reimagining our Origin Story for a Life-Centric Reorientation by Spencer R. Scott

🏗️ Reconstructions

You are akin to a planet. Within your body are different climates that give rise to different types of ecosystems. Within these different environments live varying types of species that altogether make up your microbiome. The swampy atmosphere of your armpits and feet play host to an entirely different cadre of life than the caverns of your gut and the cold tundras of your hands. But even between similar habitats, there is diversity to be found; for example, the palm of your right hand shares only a sixth of the same microbial species as that of your left hand.
— Willow Defebaugh in Being Human

The French priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin famously said that “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience”. In other words, our minds and souls are having a material experience here on Earth. You would imagine that a healthy society would therefore cherish both sides of this duality - the non-physical and the physical. The strange thing about our modern culture though is that we have rejected almost all concept of spirituality and, according to Watts, we have also forgotten the value of the material world, leaving us with nothing that we truly value. No wonder our society and environment are creaking at the seams.
— Tom Greenwood in Is materialism really such a bad thing?

Implicit in the promise of outsourcing and automation and time-saving devices is a freedom to be something other than what we ought to be. The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying.

In other words, the promise of liberation traps us within the tyranny of tiny tasks by convincing us to see the stuff of everyday life and ordinary relationships as obstacles in search of an elusive higher purpose—Creativity, Diversion, Wellness, Self-actualization, whatever. But in this way it turns out that we are only ever serving the demands of the system that wants nothing more than our ceaseless consumption and production.
— L.M. Sacasas in The Work of Art

How can design be "inspired by nature" without greenwashing?

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 13:00:40 GMT

cc: Maewenn Bourcelot

It’s well-known within the sustainable design community that phrases like “earth-friendly,” “inspired by nature,” or “for the planet” are greenwashing. Through their vagueness, they help companies avoid any real accountability. But is there no way for these things to be true? Surely, there are products and services that actually are inspired by nature, right?

If you search for ‘biomimicry,’ you’ll likely come up with one-to-one tech solutions—emulating sharkskin to swim faster, mimicking burrs to create fasteners, or imitating the shape of humpback whale fins to increase wind turbine efficiency. While these are technically nature-inspired and undoubtedly useful, they also offer a bland vision of what biomimetic technology and design could be.

That vision fits a little too nicely into the modern idea of progress and innovation, which is almost exclusively focused on material and economic growth and generally ignores any growth in emotional, personal, or communal well-being. It lacks the experimentation that would come with truly reframing our relationship with nature. The fact that biomimicry means aping plants’ and animals’ bodies but not their actions shows a superficial understanding of what makes nature nature.

In a way, these solutions are also greenwashing. This uni-directional, status quo vision continues the tradition of imagining what humanity can take from nature without contemplating what to give back; it’s the same dualist mindset we’ve used for centuries. In that way, the future isn’t so much a re-visioning of what could be, as it is a rerun of what already is.

Biomimicry shouldn’t necessarily be about creating organic or living forms but replicating the fundamental principles of dialogue and sufficiency that drive nature and learning how to apply them to our design process.

‘Forward’ is backward

Contrary to popular belief, oases are not natural paradises but highly productive, cultivated land. The misconception of oases as leisure spots comes from the influence of French colonists. A native culture exploited and oppressed was the dark side of that leisure.

Those colonists changed the literal structure and purpose of oases in Tunisia, shifting them from productive, tightly packed gardens with diverse plant life to sparse, monocultural plantations so crops were more accessible to harvest and return to the imperial core. Over decades, this had ecological impacts, like the loss of the three layers of vegetation that create the “oasis effect,” and social ones, such as the growing unpopularity of community-managed land. Privatization and competition took over, sapping the land of its abundance and the people of their solidarity.

So what is the real purpose of oases, if not a goldmine of produce or a resort to relax?

They’re a collaboration with nature. But I would also say they’re an excellent example of how to think about biomimicry and exercise those principles of dialogue and sufficiency.

While underground aquifers often feed oases, their cultivation also keeps those aquifers fed. This phenomenon is similar to the water cycle we see in nature: the humidity from plants in the Amazon creates rainfall, encouraging more plant growth, which creates more humidity and rainfall. A similar dialogue happens in oases. Each layer in the three-layer system supports one another to increase moisture and transpiration: Palm trees shade fruit trees, which then shade smaller vegetable bushes, whose transpiration—plants’ version of perspiration—returns moisture to the higher levels of vegetation.

Historically, people across Northern Africa have used the water from oases to create ‘acequias’ that feed their farmland. These canals of slow-moving water carry vital hydration from oases to neighbors’ plots and, because of their porous walls, support the growth of wild vegetables and vegetation along the way. This secondary effect causes the ground to become hydrophilic instead of hydrophobic, accepting water rather than rejecting it and creating the conditions for more water to fill the aquifers. Water is actually ‘created’ by slowing it down. Again, we see a dialogue between humanity and the rest of nature.

I say all of this because design also creates oases. However, right now, we do so with a colonial mentality, setting our sights on frictionlessness (relaxation, extraction, monetization) rather than resilience (cultivation, community, sufficiency). And as the underground aquifers of literal oases dry up due to mismanagement, at times, it feels like our aquifer of ideas has started to run dry.

‘Backward’ is forward

So, how can acequias and oases, in their pre-colonial meaning, influence design?

Slow information

At one moment or another, we’ve all been hypnotized by social media, scrolling infinitely without knowing exactly where to. This happens when we ingest too much information too fast; we check out while our brain is hot-wired and taken for a joy ride. With a trip to the mountains or seaside, the opposite happens: we come back recharged specifically because of the reduced pace and volume of information we take in.

This reminds me of something L. M. Sacasas wrote recently in his newsletter. Quoting philosopher Albert Borgmann, he made the distinction between devices and things:

Something is technologically available, Borgmann explains, “if it has been rendered instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, and easy.” At the heart of [modern devices] is the promise of increasing availability.

Borgmann goes on to distinguish between things and devices. While devices tend toward technological availability, what things provide tend not to be instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, or easy. The difference between a thing and a device is a function of the sort of engagement that is required of user.

So, devices’ immediacy, ubiquity, and frictionlessness make falling into a social media trance much more likely. “Things”—instruments, sewing machines, cameras—feel so calm, at least partly, because they don’t have those qualities; they make us think and often have a singular purpose, such as music making or capturing a moment.

While there are times when ease and speed are good, these are now goals of every part of society, from dating to exercise, fashion to design. I would argue that many of these activities would benefit from a slower pace and that we don’t gain much from going faster. For instance, using AI to write an essay or email response doesn’t make you a better communicator; it outsources the process and makes a beeline toward the accomplishment. It ignores that the goal is to write, not to have written.

Slowing the in- and out-flow of information makes us more receptive in the same way that slowing water makes the ground more permeable. It gives us space to be “dreamy,” as David Lynch says. Or to create an animation masterpiece. How much do the devices and interfaces we design and use keep us from feeling anything other than speed? And how much does this speed keep us from feeling anything other than the drip of dopamine?

Resilience

The idea of three vegetation layers also fits nicely into the regenerative design idea of Three Horizons. This framework helps us understand the possible futures of an industry or society and the transitory period that bridges the gap between the old and new paradigms.

By exploring potential futures, we can understand what causes “business as usual,” what kind of future we want to build, and what disruptive actions push us there or drag us back to the status quo. Like pre-colonial oases, having in mind this global vision of the future gives us respite from The Future™, avoids the brittleness of monoculturalism, and creates the resilience of diversity.

But the future never stops coming, so we must build ongoing climate processes—not climate goals that we inevitably overshoot. We need to develop resilience that’s both durable and ephemeral, depending on the situation or environment’s needs. More than anything, it’s essential to be relevant: Does usage need to create beautiful wear, as in the case of a well-built wooden chair, or should a cup start disintegrating just hours after coming into contact with liquid?

With plastic, we’ve managed to paint ourselves into a corner of material durability and usage ephemerality (i.e., disposability). Often, it should be the other way around, with materials being ephemeral and usage being durable. We know this is possible because this was the norm from the beginning of humanity—conservatively, 300,000 years ago—until 1907, the year that plastic was invented.

Returning to the well

These lessons give us clues for how to “return to the well” of biomimicry; rather than a short-term execution, it becomes a long-term strategy that is integrated early in the process before any visual, industrial, or product design starts. Maybe a better way to say that is that it becomes the process; it should be a mindset, not the greenwashed marketing scheme that ‘sustainability’ has sadly morphed into.

The rest of nature produces things for others. It’s rare that one species’ waste or activities can’t be used for the benefit of another. In the indigenous history of humanity, we’ve often acted as caretakers of nature, with it becoming more abundant thanks to us. As I’ve mentioned, this role has largely been surrendered (and exterminated) over the past centuries. But I think bio-mimicry—the thought process, not the visual cliché—is one piece of the puzzle that could help us return to stewardship.

This way of thinking could remind us that humanity is defined by its relationships in the same way that nature is. Though we see ourselves as separate, above, and more evolved, we can’t deny our relationality with the rest of nature. Although Modern Man doesn’t want to be human, we can’t deny reality.

To acknowledge our inherent relationship with nature and the collaborative work needed to balance the system that is Earth, we must see the value in dialogue and sufficiency. Doing the opposite—giving sermons about growth and excess—often comes at the expense of people or places. It heavily dehumanizes our basic needs to tack on just 2-3% more GDP every year.

Like the biology it mimics, a bio-mimetic economy should deliver ‘nutrients’ across its entire body. Instead of the leggy, spindly growth we now see, we need to imagine and create an economy that grows dense and bushily. I don’t have all the answers to how we get there, but I wanted to leave you with a question:

How can design create thriving instead of growth? What do you think?

🍄 Growth Imperatives No. 9: Convenience

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 17:00:07 GMT

cc: @houseoferrors

This week is about (one of) the elephant(s) in the room: Convenience. There's lots to love and, on the surface, little to hate—but maybe we've just been looking at the topic with uncritical eyes. Today, I want to put some weight on the other side of the balance.

This week

🏁 What's a destination without a journey?
🐌 Do we need to de-ease life?
⛓️ Who does my convenience affect?

🏁 What's a destination without a journey?

Hyperfocusing on convenience can make us assume ease is always the best option, but by taking the difficulty out of everything, we also remove the experience, reducing life to a series of transactions rather than stories, relationships, or memories.

Maybe we should think twice about the things we want to make efficient. It doesn’t make sense to hurriedly finish something that fulfills us; for these activities, it's better to choose the long path than the short one.

Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us. [...]

Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides. [...]

Embracing inconvenience may sound odd, but we already do it without thinking of it as such. As if to mask the issue, we give other names to our inconvenient choices: We call them hobbies, avocations, callings, passions. These are the noninstrumental activities that help to define us. They reward us with character because they involve an encounter with meaningful resistance — with nature’s laws, with the limits of our own bodies — as in carving wood, melding raw ingredients, fixing a broken appliance, writing code, timing waves or facing the point when the runner’s legs and lungs begin to rebel against him.

Such activities take time, but they also give us time back. They expose us to the risk of frustration and failure, but they also can teach us something about the world and our place in it.

Read → The Tyranny of Convenience by Tim Wu

🐌 Do we need to de-ease life?

Although it's, at this point, cliché to mention we're all burnt out, this article does well to show that the burnout is coming from 'inside the house.' Well, inside our pockets at least.

The downside—whether intentional or not—of the 24-Hour On-Demand Ultra Convenient Lifestyle of the past 10-15 years has been an enclosure of the social commons. This enclosure acts like an antibiotic, wiping out both the bad and the good friction from relationships. This friction is seen by the tech and business community at large as a problem to solve rather than the normal functioning of human society.

So, to what extent can de-optimization be optimal for our mental health?

...as we all bumble along, burned out, isolated, and drowning in the demands of whatever life or career stage we’re at, we’re also expected to constantly consume and metabolize horrific world events in the background. This over-reliance on tech for every aspect of our lives “opens us up to new vectors of anxiety,” as this great post by Brett Scott put it, with “[our nervous systems] now plugged into a neurotic and hypersensitive globe-spanning information system that’s constantly pushing unnecessary things into your consciousness.”

So is it really any wonder that we might not be inclined to text our friend back about that plan four Thursdays from now, in between consuming images of genocide presented without any context or verifiable information, while trying to order dinner on our phone, and answer a Slack message after hours? [...]

I spent the first decade of my adulthood amassing a network of talented, connected friends all over the world, people who I could summon with a smartphone. Beyond that, I believed I needed to rely on no one but myself. So realizing all of this has been an identity-based shift for me, but it’s one I’m very grateful parenthood has given me. We’re in the process of figuring out how to re-orient our family’s life around this idea, and making those changes feels scary but good. As we do that, I’ve been comforted and energized by this idea — which I first heard in this interview with the novelist Zadie Smith — that caretaking is a kind of liberation.

It’s liberation from the idea that we can self-optimize ourselves to the point of not needing anyone else. That if we work hard enough to survive in a competitive economy, we’ll be able to buy, order, or summon anything we might need within 24 hours, and that is somehow progress. That instead of asking for help and support from the people and friends we know — they’re too burned out, don’t want to bother them, they live too far away — we should invest heavily in self care to inoculate ourselves from needing to ask anything of anyone.

These are all ideas that capitalism loves — more people living in their own atomized fiefdoms means selling more stuff and services and meal kits to keep up with the relentless pace of life — but are fundamentally antithetical to the ways that humans are designed to flourish.

Read → The friendship problem by Rosie Spinks

⛓️ Who does my convenience affect?

I thought this was a really interesting reflection on the effects of automation. Not the effects for the user, but the social effects: how does it change how we interact, what we believe, and ultimately what kind of work we do? In subtle ways, the convenience that comes with automation papers over its role as an aggravator of social division—a tool to dissipate social power.

Political scientist Robert D. Putnam, who has studied civic engagement since the 1960s, argues Americans are less engaged in politics than they used to be and are more isolated, spending less time with friends, family and neighbours.

Our social capital — which Putnam defines as the overarching belief about society that facilitates co-operation — diminishes when we lose opportunities to engage with people outside of our regular social networks.

This decline in social capital can be traced to changes in work and society more generally. Society, in other words, is becoming increasingly individualistic.

Public-facing automation may further diminish our social capital by decreasing our interactions with other people. As we pay for parking at parking machines, rent bowling shoes and lanes through an app, or order food from touchscreen kiosks, we interact less with the people who work these jobs.

Read → A rise in self-service technologies may cause a decline in our sense of community by Blake Lee-Whiting

What’s driving design culture?

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 16:00:53 GMT

cc: @wrapped.nil

Eleven years ago, at the beginning of my career, when I thought about what designers do, it seemed relatively straightforward. For whatever reason, my aunt would always go on about how I could ‘design wine labels’ and how excited she would be to have one I designed—but for me, design came down to a few things:

Beautification. Organization. Possibly expression.

Naive? A bit.

While these basics might have been true at one point, design has become much more than that. It’s now integral to how businesses communicate, operate, and strategize, and for a long time, it’s been the catalyst for increasing revenue. But we can do better. I’m not saying these elements of design are unnecessary. It just feels like we’ve hit a cultural wall by limiting our focus to 'what’s good for business.'

Design’s entanglement with capitalism buttresses that wall by faithfully supporting the system and mimicking its actions.

Although billions of dollars worth of products and services flow from producers to consumers every day, the system doesn’t create the abundance we’re told it does. Instead, it generates a scarcity of time, income, autonomy, and social connection (to name a few). In its current form, the design industry mirrors this with a scarcity of ideas.

That may seem odd since the design industry is known for its ideas; we’ve crafted a deep mythology around conjuring them at will. However, similar to our focus, the mythology of ideas is limited—in this case, to visual or strategic realms. When I talk about a scarcity of ideas, I mean the upstream social ideas often filtered out of our strategic and visual decisions. (How many creatives at Uber, Airbnb, or any associated agencies agree with how those businesses create precarity in housing or their drivers’ livelihood?)

This scarcity expresses itself in at least three ways:

I: Hype

The design industry enables capitalism’s bread and butter: hype cycles. These cycles—in which design and tech are both implicated and ensnared—create, out of thin air, the scarcity the system demands. With hype comes a cycle of desire and purchases. But if capitalism created true abundance, we wouldn’t need adverts to tell us we’re ugly, weak, or unproductive. Nor would we suddenly need AI assistance to write that much better, design that much faster, or read that much more insightfully.

Hype turns regular activities into goals constantly achieved then readjusted. Along with scarcity, it invites us to a better tomorrow that never quite ends up arriving. They’re the mirage and the stretch of desert that continually separates us from it.

II: Incrementalism

Scarcity also shows up in the incremental progress we make in design. We can’t reinvent the wheel every day, but we could at least think about different ways to use it. One way this is evident is in the industry’s lackadaisical approach to sustainability, which is the main reason I started this newsletter and why it focuses on cultural change.

As Future Observatory director Justin McGuirk says

The problem with so much ‘sustainable design’ is that it’s trapped in the existing paradigm and so struggles to move beyond the most narrow goals: reducing a bit of plastic here, improving a bit of recycling there and so on.

While we explore new territory through materials, we fail to see that materials are one of the weakest leverage points to act on—likely No. 10 (of 12) on Donella Meadows’s list of Places to Intervene in a System. Besides their low utility, new materials fail to inspire the way building a radically new cultural story would.

The preference to make minimal improvements shows a scarcity of ideas and is a specific example of how design reinforces the status quo it often claims to fight against.

III: Normality

Last time, I wrote about how dualism imposes normality on society. Design has helped enforce this normality through its global standardization of corporate aesthetics and, more recently, its copy-able mood board process and hyperfocus on doing things fast instead of doing them differently.

This combination makes it easy to go to opposite ends of the earth and get the same tourist experience. Or to various social platforms, even brand new ones, and encounter the same like-comment-subscribe structure. Or create “AI designs” that look a little too similar to the stock Apple Weather app. While this reduces friction, friction is often the whole point. The moments of friction—struggling to find your way around a city, build a new community, or design something—are when interesting ideas appear, and you find growth. Outsourcing friction turns us into walking Lay-Z-Boys.

Maybe I’m speaking for myself, but until COVID, it feels like this standardization was seen more positively. The world deserved good design, and it wasn’t uncommon for designers to be itching to ‘improve’ the ‘undesigned’ world. Now, it feels like ‘good design’ can actually create what it claims to abolish: mundanity and a lack of diversity. Or maybe the standardization dial got turned up to 11.

These outdated ideas hold us back from constructing new ones, and if design wants to be useful for more than economic growth, we need to lay them to rest. But that’s easier said than done.

For one, our definition of success is defined by what we consume. How much of that definition has been thought up in the boardrooms of multi-trillion-dollar companies rather than by close friends or great literature? For the design industry to stop supporting the unsustainability of the current system, we need to see with a beginner’s eye and find new references. If designers are really lateral thinkers, we need to apply that thinking to more than design systems and brand strategies.

Dreaming Big

By mid-way into my career, more than one boss had told me I needed to let go and experiment if I wanted to do more exciting work. In fear of going too far and getting rejected, I didn’t go far enough and made that reality. I think the design industry is in the same place now, where we’ve developed an aesthetic dream but lack the will to experiment and create a social dream—one that might deliver on the ‘change makers’ role we like to claim.

But this social dream can’t just appear from nothing. It needs the right conditions. Along with embracing diverse, radical, and meaningful ideas—the opposite of the scarcity-driven frameworks above—it requires a historical, systemic worldview; without this, we’re left to focus on what happened instead of why.

We see the events—Figma and Adobe scraping our work for AI training by default—without seeing through to the system’s underlying behavior—that the nature of capitalism is appropriation and enclosure. Likewise, we’re easily persuaded to focus on craft and beauty; these are key leverage points for design, no doubt, but when they lack a social identity, they turn into instrumentalism. With these blinders tightly fastened, we repress the deeper consequences of our work so we can collaborate with the industry’s biggest players, beautifying ideas that actively harm us.

In this paradigm, “designers are both exploited and exploiters,” says Ruben Pater.

We forego much of our power by not demanding more from ourselves, our clients, and the industry. We reduce ourselves to the whims of the market because we have to pay the bills, but that forfeiture keeps us from imagining better futures. It probably shouldn’t surprise you that there’s a precedence for this from early capitalism. In contrast to feudalism, riots in this period started to be about hunger rather than people’s quality of life. The level of inequality kept people ‘fighting for scraps’ instead of autonomy.

It’s great that we have a seat at the table, but now we have to take a stand and ask ourselves if this is the table we want to be at. If we don’t, we’ll continue to enrich (and be enriched by) the corporations destroying the world. I don’t claim innocence about cashing their checks—most of us can’t. But I do think we, collectively, have to make a decision. The industry and the people who make it up must ask what’s driving design culture: profit or planet?

Practical Power

What could we do with radical change? Again, craft and beauty are major leverage points for design, so why not use these for social ends rather than capitalist ones?

For starters, I believe designers have the power to make community ownership attractive. We’re well-practiced at doing the opposite—creating exclusivity for luxury brands—so, in theory, all it takes is a flip in perspective to put the public good in the valuable, desired position. We could guide companies in strategy and identity to create more products that bring people together, with network effects of enjoyability, instead of forcing them to lead individualized lives.

Secondly is the idea of using advertising as a lever for social cohesion instead of individualism. How do we, as designers, thread this needle of spreading regenerative products and services without falling into the trap of consumerism and “throwaway culture”? What if advertising can link these things to a collective identity instead of individual identity and social acceptance? In this sense, we have to learn how to master our tools instead of being mastered by them. This “hacker ethic” develops personal agency.

Design is the transition space between stories. The coincidental part is that humanity is between stories right now, from separation to integration, which means design can play a much more useful role than simply increasing revenues.

According to physicist Fritjof Capra, “What is destroyed when a living organism is dissected is its pattern. The components are still there, but the configuration of relationships between them—the pattern—is destroyed, and thus the organism dies.” If that’s true, creating new patterns—i.e., new relationships—also creates new life.

What new ‘life forms’ would emerge if design patterns were focused not on progress and profit but on people and a thriving planet? I’m sure the answer would genuinely excite my aunt.

🍄 Growth Imperatives No. 8: Atomization

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 17:01:12 GMT

Artist: Jen Shear

Following last week's article about dualism, I thought it might be interesting to share some articles about how we separate—or "atomize"—the different parts of our daily lives and what effect that has on us. Hint: it's not a good one (but there is a way out).

This week

🤖 Atomization of Life
🍃 Atomization of Nature
🪓 OK, atomization isn't allll bad

🤖 Atomization of life

Are we over-reliant on efficiency? While atomized activities may allow us to concentrate and be productive, that same atomization can also create distance between us and the people in our lives, making us less happy, and, eventually, more polarized.

If we stress work/life balance, why does so much of life continue to feel like work? This article may have the answer 👇🏽

[A]tomization encourages us to reduce multivariate experiences, often the most important parts of life, to their single most obvious element:

Biking is about exercise, and scheduling with friends and planning a route and inflating your tires all get in the way of that.

Eating is about sustenance, and inviting friends and getting groceries and cooking all get in the way of that.

Relationships are about talking, and meeting up in person and leaving the house and scheduling are all inconveneiences.

Work is about checking off tasks, so spending time commuting to an office where you might goof off and socialize all get in the way of that.

Then when we feel lonely, painfully isolated by our atomized life, we schedule some atomized social time like going to a bar or coffee to see friends in between our lonely work and lonely dinner because we’ve removed most of the natural socializing elements from all of the other parts of life. Atomization turns an integrated day of socializing, eating, exercising, and working into discrete hurried chunks of trying to move from one thing to another, wondering why we never seem to have time for everything. [...]

The solution to the atomization curse that both gives us significantly more time back, and makes us much happier, is to seek to reintegrate these various foci of life as much as possible. How do you turn food back into a rich, multivariate experience with friends, fun, exploration, and relaxation? How do you blend socialization and exercise and community? How do you spend less time having shallower atomized relationships through a screen, and more time having rich in-person relationships where you get the full experience of other people? [...]

Instead of looking at some problem like “I don’t see enough friends,” or “I don’t work out enough,” or “I don’t have enough fun,” and then trying to find time to fit those priorities into, we should see how we can incorporate them into what we’re already doing. Could you make your workout less perfectly optimized so you can do it with friends? Can you loosen the reigns on your Super Duper Productive Routine to hang at a coffee shop with friends for a few hours a week? And for the love of God, can you please stop drinking fucking Huel or Soylent at your desk and talk to someone instead?

Read De-Atomization is the Secret to Happiness by Nat Eliason

🍃 Atomization of Nature

The grammar we use impacts how we see and interact with the world. Kimmerer here explores using the singular “ki”—a word based on the Potawatomi word for land—and the plural “kin,” an existing English word, to refer to the living beings surrounding us.

In contrast to the distance created by saying “it,” could these words help us to respect and connect with nature?

We have a special grammar for personhood. We would never say of our late neighbor, “It is buried in Oakwood Cemetery.” Such language would be deeply disrespectful and would rob him of his humanity. We use instead a special grammar for humans: we distinguish them with the use of he or she, a grammar of personhood for both living and dead Homo sapiens. Yet we say of the oriole warbling comfort to mourners from the treetops or the oak tree herself beneath whom we stand, “It lives in Oakwood Cemetery.” In the English language, a human alone has distinction while all other living beings are lumped with the nonliving “its.” [...]

The language that my grandfather was forbidden to speak is composed primarily of verbs, ways to describe the vital beingness of the world. Both nouns and verbs come in two forms, the animate and the inanimate. You hear a blue jay with a different verb than you hear an airplane, distinguishing that which possesses the quality of life from that which is merely an object. Birds, bugs, and berries are spoken of with the same respectful grammar as humans are, as if we were all members of the same family. [...]

The language we speak is an affront to the ears of the colonist in every way, because it is a language that challenges the fundamental tenets of Western thinking—that humans alone are possessed of rights and all the rest of the living world exists for human use. Those whom my ancestors called relatives were renamed natural resources. In contrast to verb-based Potawatomi, the English language is made up primarily of nouns, somehow appropriate for a culture so obsessed with things. [...]

Replacing the aboriginal idea of land as a revered living being with the colonial understanding of land as a warehouse of natural resources was essential to Manifest Destiny, so languages that told a different story were an enemy. Indigenous languages and thought were as much an impediment to land-taking as were the vast herds of buffalo, and so were likewise targeted for extermination. [...]

English encodes human exceptionalism, which privileges the needs and wants of humans above all others and understands us as detached from the commonwealth of life. But I wonder if it was always that way. I can’t help but think that the land spoke clearly to early Anglo-Saxons, just as it did to the Potawatomi. Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful book Landmarks, about land and language, documents myriad place names of great particularity that illuminate an ancient Anglo-Saxon intimacy with the land and her beings. It is said that we are known by the company we keep, and I wonder if English sharpened its verbal ax and lost the companionship of oaks and primroses when it began to keep company with capitalism. [...]

Inspired by the grammar of animacy in Potawatomi that feels so right and true, I’ve been searching for a new expression that could be slipped into the English language in place of it when we are speaking of living beings. [...]

The grammar of animacy is an antidote to arrogance; it reminds us that we are not alone. [...]

Another student, Amanda, adds, “Having this word makes me regard the trees more as individuals. Before, I would just call them all ‘oak’ as if they were a species and not individuals. That’s how we learn it in dendrology, but using ki makes me think of them each, as not just ‘oak,’ but as that particular oak, the one with the broken branch and the brown leaves.”

Read Speaking of Nature by Robin Kimmerer

🪓 Atomization isn't allll bad

Maybe there are some cases where we should embrace atomization...?

Based on Apple's 'anti-creative' Crush ad from last month, L. M. Sacasas looks between the lines at the implications of all that creative destruction. Ultimately he leaves us with two paths forward, but I'll let you read the article to find out what those are. 😉

The ad conveyed the company’s incipient ideology with exquisite clarity: like the ring of Sauron, the iPad here appears as the one device to rule them all, chiefly by overthrowing and displacing them. Are you worried that digital devices will obsolesce the rich and multifaceted array of analog tools and instruments? Apple wants you to know that, yes, this is what it is aiming at. Are you concerned about the flattening of human experience under digital conditions? Boy does Apple have just the visual metaphor to confirm your suspicions. [...]

[Albert] Borgmann, who passed away just over a year ago, was a German-American philosopher of technology. [...]

Borgmann identified what he called the device paradigm. The logic of the device paradigm is pretty straightforward. It describes the tendency to hide the complex machinery of a technology below a slick, commodious surface that makes the output of a device available to the user with minimal effort. The goods a device offers its users are “rendered instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, and easy.” “A commodity is truly available,” Borgmann writes, “when it can be enjoyed as a mere end, unencumbered by means.” Apple products have long been leading exemplars of the device paradigm.

But this is only part of the picture. Borgmann opposed devices to what he called focal things. Focal things demand something of us. They require a measure of care, practice, and engagement that devices do not. Our use of them induces our focus, which they invite by design. “The experience of a [focal] thing,” Borgmann also notes, “is always and also a bodily and social engagement with the thing’s world.” There are, in other words, embodied and communal dimensions to the use of a focal thing. They involve our bodies, and they involve us in relationships to a degree that devices do not. [...]

in relation to devices we tend to be relegated to the status of user, who may more often than not be the one being used. But no one would describe a musician as a user. Yes, they use the instrument, but their richness of the relationship between the musician and their instrument demands a different term, one that signals the degree to which a skill is cultivated in relation to the focal thing. We speak of musicians, not users of musical instruments because the musician is characterized by a set of skills they have cultivated in order to make something with the instrument. [...]

Read The Stuff of (a Well-Lived) Life by L. M. Sacasas

The 400-year-old mentality that still influences design

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 16:00:48 GMT

Hat: Unknown; Background: Aerial View of Light Craft Industry in Kuwait's hinterland. Image courtesy of Yousef Awaad Hussein, Saphiya Abu Al-Maati, Asaiel Al Saeed, Aseel AlYaqoub in collaboration with Atlas of Places for Future Observatory Journal.

Capitalism is stronger than ever, but its public image is imploding under its own weight.

How can that be?

While capitalism might seem more and more exacerbated, critiques of it have also reached a fever pitch. In the design industry, a bastion of capitalism, this critique has regained popularity in the past 5-6 years, with books chronicling how our industry aids and abets capitalism’s ills—among these, CAPS LOCK, Designs for the Pluriverse, Design after Capitalism, What is Post-Branding?, What Design Can't Do, and more. Before these, critiques like Victor Papanek’s now half-century-old Design for the Real World and 1995’s The Green Imperative were also popular.

Outside of the design industry, critiques have also been voiced for decades. Centuries, even. Ok—truthfully, since the inception of the capitalist system. Until the arrival of public services demanded by socialist movements in the late 1800s, capitalism had been a scourge for everyone except the capitalist class, and with that scourge came revolts, revolutions, literature, and calls for a new system. The idea that capitalism improves social welfare is actually (surprise, surprise) an appropriation of gains won by opponents of capitalism.

Shifting discourse

The evident effects of the climate crisis seem to be changing the discourse. We all see increased temperatures, wildfires, floods, droughts, and hurricanes. While capitalism has always survived because it externalized the harms it created, it’s evident that those harms were only ever externalized on paper; the climate doesn’t care about the stock market, GDP, or other economic fantasies humans make up.

The confluence of these increasingly unpredictable weather patterns and a more politically conscious youth, who are not as tied to the current system, could potentially create significant change quickly. The Boomer generation’s luck of the draw, which landed them in the golden age of capitalism, heavily influenced how their politics changed over time; the older they got, the more possessions they had, and the more conservative they became.

The same can’t be said about the following generations. What is there left to conserve when we can’t afford houses, children, or, in many cases, basic economic stability? Faith in a political system is earned, and the current system has earned nothing for Gen Alpha, Gen Z, most Millennials, and some Gen X’ers.

But this estrangement from capitalism is accompanied, perhaps more subtly, by the skepticism of the dualist* mindset with which it’s deeply entwined. Science, which has long been a field of setting boundaries on what is (or isn’t) legitimate, is starting to understand ideas that animist cultures have known for centuries. Everyday people are noticing how many of the normative stories—around everything from gender, health, happiness, and success—we’ve been fed over the years are just that: stories. In recent years, there’s even greater enthusiasm around esoteric practices like astrology, tarot, and paganism, maybe due to the falling popularity of monotheistic religions.

To understand why capitalism is dying and how this affects society and design, we must put a magnifying glass on dualism.

* This mindset is also known as mechanistic thinking, Cartesianism, rationalism, or Separationism. It’s the mindset made famous by the Enlightenment.

The Ministry of Truth

Dualism is the standard attitude of most Western cultures, which uses science and reason as the basis for decisions. While that sounds great in theory, the process of making it the standard has been, for many, more akin to the coercion and doublespeak of George Orwell’s 1984.

I want to talk about a few aspects of this mindset, how we’ve internalized them to the point that they’re invisible, and what effect that has on design.

War is peace (Separation)

Separation—of divine and earthly, mind and body, men and women, able and disabled people—serves to consolidate power and dispel resistance. Separation gives leverage to the powerful. It causes infighting. It obscures connections. The place of privilege that humanity, the mind, men, or the able hold in society are used as self-justification for that same privilege; without creating separation, there is no privilege and, therefore, no dominance.

This separation relies on an emotional numbness from ourselves, others, and nature. Within this paradigm, emotions are a liability, busy and individualistic workers are ideal, and our disassociation from nature allows us to exploit it. Capitalism couldn’t survive without these numbing agents, and as a bulwark, it ensures numbness is the number one product.

This numbness often seeps into design in insidious ways—especially when paired with technology, its partner in crime—creating a dealer-user relationship instead of one that creates agency. It makes us see design as an instrumentalist profession whose primary focus is on how impactful we make a project or what our technique was rather than assessing the harm (or benefit) the project might cause. Our hyper-specific, differentiated—in other words, marketable—design practices reinforce the individualization that separation encourages; the more we compete, the less we collaborate, and the less power we have.

Freedom is slavery (Productivity)

A second element of dualism is the glorification of productivity.

During the 15-16th centuries, as capitalism developed as an economic system, a shift occurred in how the body was viewed: from something that had innate worth to something that only had worth if it was producing something (generally, for capitalist ends). This transition, previously forced on nature, played out in various ways.

Women began to be valued only inside the house, and even then, only concerning how well they obeyed their husbands in cooking, cleaning, and birthing children. 16-17th century women were forced out of social, political, and work life. On the threat of sexual assault or death, many times, their only option was to be wholly subordinate to their husbands and/or hide themselves from public view. As Silvia Federici explains in Caliban and the Witch,

One of the main rights that women lost was the right to conduct economic activities alone, as femme soles. In France, they lost the right to make contracts or to represent themselves in court, being declared legal ‘imbeciles.’ ... In the Mediterranean countries women were expelled not only from many waged jobs but also from the streets, where an unaccompanied woman risked being subjected to ridicule or sexual assault. In England, too, (‘a women’s paradise’ in the eyes of some Italian visitors), the presence of women in public began to be frowned upon. English women were discouraged from sitting in front of their homes or staying near their windows.

In the 19th century, mentally ill and disabled people were jailed or euthanized because, through their idleness and ‘irrationality,’ they undermined the ‘reason’ and productivity that the theory of Enlightenment promoted. Later, psychiatry and psychology emerged out of a desire to push these people back into the workforce so they could continue producing instead of being condemned to outright segregation or death.

By the early 20th century, eugenics took hold among prominent politicians like Winston Churchill, who said that the “unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded classes, coupled with a steady restriction among the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitutes a race danger.”

Rather than a simple output metric, productivity was—and in many cases, still is—tied to morality and social worth. The upper class, aided by the religious ideals of Protestantism, washed their hands of the oppression inherent in continually increasing productivity by convincing the masses that productivity is a virtue, not an imposition. Any deviation from this virtue was an excuse to be ostracized.

It’s not a stretch to see how this continues to impact us today. Disconnected from any true sense of communal support, designers often shun solidarity for efficiency and refuse to question the role of work in our lives.

On one hand, this is, again, because busy, individualistic workers don’t have the time or wherewithal to think about systemic effects—all that matters is doing better, faster. On the other hand, it’s because the capitalist paycheck hypnotizes us: the design industry has a strong through-line of promoting ‘consumption for happiness’ and even ‘consumption for distraction’—only when demand for consumption fades do we realize or critique our involvement or responsibility in the boom-bust cycle.

Ignorance is strength (Normality)

The last idea that took hold in this same period was ‘normality.’

Science was twisted to legitimize this social rule, which was then applied wholesale to body types, skin color, facial features, cognitive abilities, marriage status, social class, and more. Phrenology mainstreamed normality among the public and explicitly reinforced, through biased statistics, the already implicitly accepted idea of white, middle/upper class, cognitively able people as superior to all other races, classes, and cognitive abilities. In this way, science was an alibi for domination.

Capitalism during this time affected health physically through poorer working and living conditions, heavy pollution, and lost hands or fingers, but also in structural and conceptual ways. The rhythmic pace of the factories set the pace for working, and thus for ‘normality,’ while, at the same time, a population expansion reduced the social leverage of individual workers. People were forced into the box or left behind, and the conception of the body shifted from a dynamic organism to a machine that was either working or broken.

Normality applied to those outside of Europe as much as those within it, and with that distinction, the binary was created between the ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized.’ Ironically, although the pejorative of ‘savage’ or ‘uncultured’ was (and sometimes is) lobbed at Indigenous people, it was (and still is) those same people who, through their resources, cultural ideas, and forced labor, funded Europe’s—and later, America's—rise to power, its concept of liberty, and overgrown standard of living.

Many habits we take for granted in modern times started with the need to separate reason from body, holiness from filth, and civilized from uncivilized. Again, from Silvia Federici:

Many practices began to appear in daily life to signal the deep transformations occurring in this domain: the use of cutlery, the development of shame with respect to nakedness, the advent of ‘manners’ that attempted to regulate how one laughed, walked, sneezed, how one should behave at the table, and to what extent one could sing, joke, play.

How much of our desire for ‘good design’ comes from the idea that lousy design is ‘uncivilized’ or that the uncivilized can become at least a little ‘civilized’ or ‘normal’ by adopting good design? The idea of ‘good design’ comes from an era that praised the universalist, totalizing design theory (and aesthetic) of modernism, which, despite all the beautiful lines it produced, was, at its base, a paternalistic attempt to say, ’This is the way.’

In Designs for the Pluriverse, Arturo Escobar notes that

it is practically impossible to demarcate a single, stable real. To be able to do so, one has to parcel out entire domains of the meshwork as inanimate; … indeed, moderns imagine the world as an inanimate surface to be occupied; for many relational cultures, on the contrary, humans and other beings inhabit a world that is alive.

This ‘single, stable real,’ this standardization, tends to replace vernacular culture with frictionless efficiency—the cultural equivalent of clear-cutting a forest and planting a monocrop. It’s time to stop imagining that modernism holds all the answers, just as a plantation doesn’t hold biodiversity.

New truths

How does this all tie back to my statement at the top of this post claiming that capitalism’s ‘public image is imploding under its own weight’?

Believe it or not, we’re in a moment similar to the 1400s, when the Black Death wiped a large portion of the population off the European territory. That pandemic made mortality an omnipresent issue in daily life, which caused people to understand life is about more than social hierarchies and changed everything from work ethic to sexual attitudes. “For a broad section of the western European peasantry,” says Federici, it was “a period of unprecedented power.”

While power dynamics haven’t shifted to the same degree, I think something similar has happened with COVID. In the few years since, exploitation and corporate profits have reached new heights, but at the same time, our muscle for questioning and desire for change have gotten stronger. We’re looking for new ways to relate with each other, our technology, our work, our pleasure, and ourselves.

A relational mindset is gestating and, in small ways, starting to erode the dualist, separation-dependent mindset. The design industry would be wise to follow this pattern. By flipping the ideas outlined above, we can lead the design industry to a more fulfilling place—aligning our work with the value of relationships instead of capital.

What if we based our truth on collectivity and sensitivity instead of separation and numbness?

On sense-making and solidarity with people instead of profit and efficiency for corporations?

On a diversity of cultural ideas instead of a homogenization of them?

🍄 Growth Imperatives No. 7: Tech Divisions

Lukas Yonis Abubeker — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 16:00:51 GMT

This week is all about division in tech: between values and actions, between ideas of its social role, and the gulf it creates between reality and entertainment. I think it's an interesting grouping of articles that illustrates of how drastically tech culture is shifting politically.

Enjoy!

This week

🗜️ Is it time to move slow and fix things?
🔮 Is tech for escaping or enchanting?
👀 Should we not be entertained?

🗜️ Is it time to move slow and fix things?

Among other things, compulsive action allows the tech industry to ignore society and follow its wild fantasies—which are increasingly fascist. This article helps lay out why moving fast and breaking things naturally leads to breaking people, norms, and society.

The new technocrats are ostentatious in their use of language that appeals to Enlightenment values—reason, progress, freedom—but in fact they are leading an antidemocratic, illiberal movement. Many of them profess unconditional support for free speech, but are vindictive toward those who say things that do not flatter them. They tend to hold eccentric beliefs: that technological progress of any kind is unreservedly and inherently good; that you should always build it, simply because you can; that frictionless information flow is the highest value regardless of the information’s quality; that privacy is an archaic concept; that we should welcome the day when machine intelligence surpasses our own. [...]

Comparisons between Silicon Valley and Wall Street or Washington, D.C., are commonplace, and you can see why—all are power centers, and all are magnets for people whose ambition too often outstrips their humanity. But Silicon Valley’s influence easily exceeds that of Wall Street and Washington. It is reengineering society more profoundly than any other power center in any other era since perhaps the days of the New Deal. [...]

Even the most deleterious companies have built some wonderful tools. But these tools, at scale, are also systems of manipulation and control. They promise community but sow division; claim to champion truth but spread lies; wrap themselves in concepts such as empowerment and liberty but surveil us relentlessly. The values that win out tend to be the ones that rob us of agency and keep us addicted to our feeds. [...]

None of this happens without the underlying technocratic philosophy of inevitability—that is, the idea that if you can build something new, you must. “In a properly functioning world, I think this should be a project of governments,” Altman told my colleague Ross Andersen last year, referring to OpenAI’s attempts to develop artificial general intelligence. But Altman was going to keep building it himself anyway. Or, as Zuckerberg put it to The New Yorker many years ago: “Isn’t it, like, inevitable that there would be a huge social network of people? … If we didn’t do this someone else would have done it.” [...]

The American poet Ezra Pound’s modernist slogan “Make it new” easily could have doubled as a mantra for the technocrats. A parallel movement was that of the Italian futurists, led by figures such as the poet F. T. Marinetti, who used maxims like “March, don’t molder” and “Creation, not contemplation.”The ethos for technocrats and futurists alike was action for its own sake. “We are not satisfied to roam in a garden closed in by dark cypresses, bending over ruins and mossy antiques,” Marinetti said in a 1929 speech. “We believe that Italy’s only worthy tradition is never to have had a tradition.” Prominent futurists took their zeal for technology, action, and speed and eventually transformed it into fascism. [...]

The evolution of futurism into fascism wasn’t inevitable—many of Pound’s friends grew to fear him, or thought he had lost his mind—but it does show how, during a time of social unrest, a cultural movement based on the radical rejection of tradition and history, and tinged with aggrievement, can become a political ideology. [...]

In October, the venture capitalist and technocrat Marc Andreessen published on his firm’s website a stream-of-consciousness document he called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a 5,000-word ideological cocktail that eerily recalls, and specifically credits, Italian futurists such as Marinetti. [...]

“Our enemy,” Andreessen writes, is “the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable—playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.” The irony is that this description very closely fits Andreessen and other Silicon Valley elites. The world that they have brought into being over the past two decades is unquestionably a world of reckless social engineering, without consequence for its architects, who foist their own abstract theories and luxury beliefs on all of us. [...]

No more “build it because we can.” No more algorithmic feedbags. No more infrastructure designed to make the people less powerful and the powerful more controlling. Every day we vote with our attention; it is precious, and desperately wanted by those who will use it against us for their own profit and political goals. Don’t let them.

Read → The Rise of Techno-authoritarianism by Adrienne LaFrance

🔮 Is tech for escaping or enchanting?

As illustrated here, there's a growing divide between two cultural camps: one using technology as a way to mask the world (e.g., Vision Pro), and the other using technology to reconnect with it (e.g., Light Phone, Daylight).

It feels like we're at an important point in tech development where the mainstream tech culture is floundering in its search for the next big thing while a new wave of 'alt-tech' elegantly does the minimum necessary instead of the maximum possible.

In his 2000 critique of sociobiology, Life is a Miracle, Berry wrote, “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” [...]

In The Enchantment of Modern Life, political theorist Jane Bennett argued that “the contemporary world retains the power to enchant humans and that humans can cultivate themselves so as to experience more of that effect.” “To be enchanted,” she wrote, “is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and everyday.” [...]

The allure of digital technologies such as Vision Pro can be usefully framed, in part, as the pursuit of an alternative (re-)enchantment: virtual projections overlapping and obscuring our shared world, summoned and manipulated by gesture, sight, and speech as if the user were a wizard in a world responsive their command. It presents as magical.

But what if, as Bennett suggests, the world is already enchanted and the real alchemy that summons the miracle of being is that fusion of time and care that we call attention?

When I learn to live as a machine—by choice or otherwise—I become increasingly incapable of attending to the world. This might be because I am simply moving through life at a pace that prevents me from properly attending to the world. Or because I am striving for efficiency or productivity in realms of experience where those aims are, in fact, counter-productive. Perhaps it’s because I’m unable to resist the temptation to always be elsewhere than where I stand. Maybe it’s because I’ve placed $3500 goggles on my face. “A headset is a pair of spectacles, but a headset is also a blindfold,” as Ian Bogost recently put it. I think Berry would say that these can all be ways of conforming to life as a machine rather than as a creature.

Read → Vision Con by L. M. Sacasas

👀 Should we not be entertained?

What's the effect of immersive media—whether VR, the metaverse, or social media—on how we experience the real world? The line is being blurred between entertainment and information, citizenry and audience. Which is good if you profit from those inventions, but bad if you're a user of them...like the vast majority of us are.

In 1992, Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel Snow Crash imagined a form of virtual entertainment so immersive that it would allow people, essentially, to live within it. He named it the metaverse.

In the years since, the metaverse has leaped from science fiction and into our lives. Microsoft, Alibaba, and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, have all made significant investments in virtual and augmented reality. Their approaches vary, but their goal is the same: to transform entertainment from something we choose, channel by channel or stream by stream or feed by feed, into something we inhabit. In the metaverse, the promise goes, we will finally be able to do what science fiction foretold: live within our illusions. [...]

Dwell in this environment long enough, and it becomes difficult to process the facts of the world through anything except entertainment. We’ve become so accustomed to its heightened atmosphere that the plain old real version of things starts to seem dull by comparison. A weather app recently sent me a push notification offering to tell me about “interesting storms.” I didn’t know I needed my storms to be interesting. Or consider an email I received from TurboTax. It informed me, cheerily, that “we’ve pulled together this year’s best tax moments and created your own personalized tax story.” Here was the entertainment imperative at its most absurd: Even my Form 1040 comes with a highlight reel.

Such examples may seem trivial, harmless—brands being brands. But each invitation to be entertained reinforces an impulse: to seek diversion whenever possible, to avoid tedium at all costs, to privilege the dramatized version of events over the actual one. To live in the metaverse is to expect that life should play out as it does on our screens. And the stakes are anything but trivial. In the metaverse, it is not shocking but entirely fitting that a game-show host and Twitter personality would become president of the United States. [...]

“Opinion: January 6 Hearings Could Be a Real-Life Summer Blockbuster,” read a CNN headline in May—the unstated corollary being that if the hearings failed at the box office, they would fail at their purpose. (“Lol no one is watching this,” the account of the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee tweeted as the hearings were airing, attempting to suggest such a failure.)

The hearings did not fail, though; on the contrary, the first one was watched by some 20 million people—ratings similar to those earned by a Sunday Night Football broadcast. And the success came in part because the January 6 committee so ably turned its findings into compelling TV. The committee summoned well-spoken and, in many cases, telegenic witnesses. It made a point of transforming that day’s chaos into a comprehensive plot. Its production was so successful that The New York Times included the hearings on its list of 2022’s best TV shows.

The committee understood that for people to care about January 6—for people to take an interest in the greatest coup attempt in American history—the violence and treason had to be translated into that universal American language: a good show. [...]

In late 2022, The New York Times revealed that George Santos, a newly elected Republican representative from Long Island, had invented or wildly inflated not just his résumé (a familiar political sin) but his entire biography. Santos had, in essence, run as a fictional character and won. His lies and obfuscations—about his education, his employment history, his charitable work, even his religion—were shocking in their brazenness. They were also met, by many, with a collective shrug. “Everyone fabricates their résumé,” one of his constituents told the Times. Another vowed her continued support: “He was never untruthful with me,” she said. Their reactions are reminiscent of the Obama voter who explained to Politico, in 2016, why he would be switching his allegiances: “At least Trump is fun to watch.”

These are Postman’s fears in action. They are also Hannah Arendt’s. Studying societies held in the sway of totalitarian dictators—the very real dystopias of the mid-20th century—Arendt concluded that the ideal subjects of such rule are not the committed believers in the cause. They are instead the people who come to believe in everything and nothing at all: people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.

A republic requires citizens; entertainment requires only an audience. In 2020, a former health official worried aloud that “viewers will get tired of another season of coronavirus.” The concern, it turned out, was warranted: Americans have struggled to make sense of a pandemic that refuses to conform to a tidy narrative structure—digestible plots, cathartic conclusions.

Read → We've Lost the Plot by Megan Garber

Otherwise

Pragmatic to a fault

Unlikely bedfellows

Teaching an old dog old tricks

Solidarity in motion

Political Organizations

Worker Organizations

Creative Organizations

Books

Podcasts

Putting the social back in media

🍄 How can people take a more active role in media?

🔮 Visions

👀 Finds we made along the way

Thinking beyond the 20th century’s reductive design methods

Unknown knowns

Play logic

Many worlds

Shades of grey

Unpacking AI's lofty promises and lowly returns

Is uncertainty such a bad thing?

🔮 Visions

A new metric for design beyond ‘growth’

Rising undercurrents

Degrowth and design

What is degrowth?

Transition from techno-optimism to socio-optimism

Embracing complexity instead of simplicity

Progress and the standard of living

Power, Politics, and Climate Change

Culture is key to climate action

🔮 Visions

Friction is a reminder

Imperfectly perfect design

Is flawlessness falling out of fashion?

🏗️ Reconstructions

Crossing design’s climate skill chasm

Bridges to cross

Well-being

Sufficiency

Systemic thinking

Designers, choose your player: AI or Earth

🙅🏽‍♂️ AI is incompatible with environmentalism

🏗️ Reconstructions

Does ‘climate branding’ miss the bigger picture of systems change?

Offsets

Impact VCs

Sustainable Materials

Next Level

What makes a friend?

👯 Embracing Sub-Optimal Relationships

🏗️ Reconstructions

Do we really need to learn about the climate crisis? We’re just designers, after all.

Loci of resistance

Within design

Without design

Finding a new frame

Reciprocal change

🍄 Growth Imperatives No. 10: Origins

👽 Would being aliens' descendants make us more life-centered?

🏗️ Reconstructions

How can design be "inspired by nature" without greenwashing?

‘Forward’ is backward

‘Backward’ is forward

Slow information

Resilience

Returning to the well

🍄 Growth Imperatives No. 9: Convenience

This week

🏁 What's a destination without a journey?

🐌 Do we need to de-ease life?

⛓️ Who does my convenience affect?

What’s driving design culture?

I: Hype

II: Incrementalism

III: Normality

Dreaming Big

Practical Power

🍄 Growth Imperatives No. 8: Atomization

This week