aron
@aronshelton
Designing and navigating various contextual arrangements with an enigmatic sense of hope. #wayfinder
aron
Strange Loops
mirror.xyz
The landscape of information online is time-independent yet observer-relative. My interaction with content is shaped by my unique digital context – my online habits, frequented sites, and chosen links. This reminds me, in an unscientific manner, of Einstein’s relativity, where time and space are relative to the observer's position. The meaning and significance of online information change based on the viewer and their vantage point. No wonder the internet feels like a vast, contentious discussion space, with everything existing in all states and variances simultaneously. In real life, things change over time, but perhaps in the physics of the internet, it's all about the relational dynamics of data, defined by its current network of relationships and connections.
When I post online, I add basic metrics to track views. But I never know the contexts or the viewers. Suddenly, this information exists in multiple states of interpretation and misunderstanding, yet in a seemingly timeless way. It appears in various timelines and communities, creating different contexts and associations by proximity alone. This makes me think of information entanglement, where separate pieces of content, or even fragments, once removed from their original context, become intrinsically linked in the minds of others, existing all at once in myriad forms. The data becomes the medium. Like a quantum particle, understood only in layman's terms, it exists in multiple states of interpretation, misunderstanding, and relevance simultaneously, collapsing into a specific state only upon interaction (viewing, sharing, commenting, etc.).
“I’m not one of those people with their heads in the clouds; I’m one of those whose entire body has been consumed by the clouds.” — Antero Alli
There will always be designers to design the Hummers and the bumper stickers, and there will always be designers to make websites to propagate the warnings and promises of David Foster Wallace. But a new generation of designers has emerged, concerned with designing strategies to subvert this “natural default-setting” in which each person... See more
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
Joey DeBruin • The digital flip
Non-Financial Use Cases for Tokens w/David Phelps | S3 E2
youtube.comTokenomics and
No matter how many people come over for dinner, you’re only going to be able to engage with a few.
And no matter how big the crowd in the arena, the musicians can only see the faces of a few hundred.
An investor can only be engaged and smart about a very small number of companies.
And it doesn’t matter how many students are in the class, the teacher
... See moreSeth Godin • The natural size
Scaling Intimacy and
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.