aron
@aronshelton
Designing and navigating various contextual arrangements with an enigmatic sense of hope. #wayfinder
aron
The vast interconnection enabled by digital platforms has ended up creating more of a sense of sameness than diversity. Users are subtly guided toward the same subsets of topics, urged on by recommendations that are designed not to serve their interests but to create profitable attention fodder to sell to advertisers. Instagram doesn’t care that... See more
Welcome to Filterworld｜Dirt
Calm Tech and
We don't necessarily need to constantly interact with people “around” us on the web. The sensation of being in the quiet companionship of someone else, like reading next to them in a cafe, is what we're missing. The sense of ambiently sharing space – of being co-present – while engaged in other activities is a staple of shared public spaces that we're still figuring out how to design in the digital realm.
Our current “multiplayer” experiences draw too much attention to the multiplayer-ness. The other people around you demand attention. They move. They flash. They point to exactly what they're focused on, drawing you away from your own focal point. We are missing out on a fuzzier, softer sense of the shared web.
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.
The limitations and possibilities of using computational models, specifically AI, in environmental inquiry and the implications of a systems view of the environment.
Linkclose attention inevitably facilitates transformation. Tsing calls this “the arts of noticing”, tactics for thinking without either the abstraction produced by quantification or deeply held assumptions of progress. If we are “agnostic about where we are going, we might look for what has been ignored”
Expanding the Futures Cone’s Concept of the Futures and the Pasts ⊗ Reading as Counter-Practice ⊗ A Bot that Watched 70,000 Hours of Minecraft Videos
sentiers.media
American Architect Keller Easterling is well known for her book Extrastatecraft (2014), which looked at the power of infrastructural space and how this defines the operating system of the modern world. Her most recent text, Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World (2021) looks at the spaces between things, systems, and actors as an
... See moreJesse McKee • From Polycrisis to the Smart Commons
New Media is opinionated about the internet’s infinite scale . It chooses to reject or play with the internet’s scale, opting to be handmade, limited quantity, or geared towards small groups of people who actively choose to receive it. New Media is not something to be fished from a stream, but a sacred pilgrimage one may embark upon.