aron
@aronshelton
aron
@aronshelton

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.
Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.
provocations and Animating Questions
How are we to prepare the young, whom we already scarcely know, for a future we cannot imagine, from a past that has been swept away?
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.
Yuk Hui, a contemporary philosopher from Hong Kong, writes on the potential for digital networks to develop new kinds of urban solidarities. He writes , “for such concrete solidarity to emerge, we need a techno-diversity which develops alternative technologies such as new social networks, collaborative tools, and infrastructures of digital
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