Articles
A place for me to share articles and short stories I read and enjoyed
Designing Friction - Luna Maurer, Roel Wouters
"Instead of following design ethics that strive to eliminate friction, we suggest to not only allow, but embrace friction. To facilitate it: design [products with] digital technology in a way that makes space for our humanness. Here friction is a core ingredient."
When Objects Become Extensions of You - Michael J. Spivey at MIT Press
"If you have thousands of hours of practice with a musical instrument, when you play music with that object, it feels like an extension of your body — because it is. When you hold your smartphone in your hand, it’s not just the morphological computation happening at the surface of your skin that becomes part of who you are."
How Convenience Kills Curiosity - Joan Westenburg
"Convenience rewires the mind. It makes learning feel like confirmation. It reduces exploration to retrieval. You end up knowing more but noticing less."
"If your phone always gives you the answer, you stop asking better questions."
Molly Guard in Reverse - Unsung
"Anecdotally, this is named after Molly, an engineer’s daughter who was invited to a datacenter and promptly pressed a big red button, as one would.
Then she did it again later the same day."
Octopuses Punch Fish - Evan Bush
The full title is: Octopuses seen hunting together with fish in rare video — and punching fish that don't cooperate", and it's true! They punch fish!
"Give me English" - A short story by Ai Jiang
A dystopian where language becomes currency.
Fran Sans Essay - Emily Sneddon
An essay written about a font created from the displays on San Fancisco transit.