aron
@aronshelton
Designing and navigating various contextual arrangements with an enigmatic sense of hope. #wayfinder
aron
provocations and design
The fork on your plate isn’t inevitable—it’s propaganda. Its design has been polished by centuries of iteration, yes, but also by centuries of forgetting. We stopped asking why a fork looks the way it does because it became too familiar to question. It’s not a tool anymore; it’s a dogma.
But supernormal isn’t about inevitability. It’s about normalization. When something becomes so ubiquitous, so embedded in daily life, it disappears from view. That’s not just true for objects—it’s true for the systems we live by. Markets, money, time.
A Future In Sync and
People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.
Rebecca Solnit • Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
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.
Scaling Intimacy and
I always try to find the first-order terms or the second-order terms of everything. When I’m observing a system or a thing, I have a tangle of a web of ideas or knowledge in my mind. I’m trying to find, what is the thing that matters? What is the first-order component? How can I simplify it? How can I have a simplest thing that shows that thing,
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Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.
Part of the magic of an actual book is that the reader ends up understanding. It seeps in, the aha’s are found, not highlighted.
Seth Godin • The Cliffs Notes paradox
By handing the reins of discovery to the wisdom of instinct and following the path of maximal interestingness, we can find the kinds of unexpected discoveries that yield compression progress. This, though is the paradox of creativity: your work is done when it looks so simple that the consumer thinks they could’ve done it, which means they won’t appreciate how hard you worked.