aron
@aronshelton
Designing and navigating various contextual arrangements with an enigmatic sense of hope. #wayfinder
aron
Storytelling and Media Studies
I think maps and recipes are often good comparative structures.
A good map highlights where you’d want to go. You’ve seen the image of the peak of a trail and along the way it might highlight things worth seeing. Thus, it invites the hiker towards the destination. Simultaneously, it’s not as they say the “territory” itself. While some of us do enjoy just browsing Google Maps for fun, it’s not a replacement for the journey. Surprise is still necessary for a good and enjoyable hike.
A bad map doesn’t drag you in to explore it. It can also be too dense.
A great recipe shows you the food which is the end of your planned narrative. The ingredients are partly visible in it and the journey takes you through the process. A poor recipe is unable to foreshadow what you might eat and leaves out gaps in preparation such that the logic or plot of the preparation leaves you frustrated or lost (resulting in an undercooked mess).
Sometimes, a recipe might show you something that’s unattainable for an average cook, in the same way that a map might deceptively lure you into a direction with information and visuals that don’t match reality.
So, great (direct or indirect) foreshadowing and non-linear storytelling relies on:
Setting a novel, realistic, and clear future event
which from the setup of ingredients available at the start
leaves a viewer surprised in how the start gets to the unique end.
“I found a piece you wrote in the footnote of a book that I admire.” In other words, it took effort for us to find each other. And much like an inefficient light bulb gives off heat, folk search algorithms have the byproduct of context.
In the end, maybe that’s the only definition of authenticity that doesn’t fall apart under close inspection: not a... See more
In the end, maybe that’s the only definition of authenticity that doesn’t fall apart under close inspection: not a... See more
Elan Ullendorff • Folk search engines
The designers of complex adaptive systems are not strictly designing systems themselves. They are hinting those systems towards anticipated outcomes, from an array of existing interrelated systems. These are designers that do not understand themselves to be in the center of the system. Rather, they understand themselves to be participants, shaping
... See moreKevin Slavin • Design as Participation
provocations and Wordplay
the legitimacy and accessibility of our future cities can’t be built by a monologue of exit discourse, because this leads to erasure (and the continuation) of historical resource discrepancies, power imbalances, and worlds ultimately built on fantasy. The challenge for DAOs today is to break this deadlock, embrace scaling, and find ways to start
... See moreJesse McKee • From Polycrisis to the Smart Commons
I post this quote from Peter Block's book "Community" every year. It doesn't get much attention because it's not built for social media: it's thick.
But there really isn't a better explanation of the "why" behind the work I do, and its encouragement for communities to move away from blame, apathy, and entitlement and towards possibility,
... See moreWe can build software to eat the world, or software to feed it. And if we are going to feed it, it will require a different approach to design, one which optimizes for a different type of growth, and one that draws upon—and rewards—the humility of the designers who participate within it.
Kevin Slavin • Design as Participation
In order to imagine where the future is headed, let’s first lay out the three main steps of connection building to examine how the physical and digital worlds fare at each:
- Discovery : you find someone you want to meet, or that person finds you
- Connection : some initial contact is established
- Connection strengthening : further interactions