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.
Science makes models of things so we can understand how they work. Art makes models of things so we can understand how we work. - "What Art Does" by Brian Eno and Bette A
“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.“ - Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Tro
... See moreNot all questions seek answers, some seek journeys.
An attention ecology goes against the idea of an attention economy, in which one’s attention is directly monetized and pitted against other things that are also meant to co-opt your attention.
Within the architecture of a project, whether it’s a printed piece or a website or something else, we’re always trying to deeply consider how one’s atte
... See moreHyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions — by their very existence as ideas — function causally to bring about their own reality.
Cultivating Hyperstitions
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.
This is the first and most important test of alternative values. Can you take your own exit, and stay on the road. If the answer is no, there's no there there.
Reggie James • SAVE THE INTERNET
I'm so thankful that I'm an addict and that I'm an alcoholic, because I have these people. And without that addiction and alcoholism and without coming to the point where I could admit that, I don't know that I would have ever had a bond with such an amazing group of people as this. And it's awesome because it's not just here. It's not just in the
... See more
“We only count what we know to count, and that's strongly determined by where we stand and who we are.
I often hear people say that qualitative research isn't generalizable, by which they mean that they use "sample" that do not have the features necessary to make valid inferences about a known population.
Forget for a minute that most survey samples aren't truly random, that confidence intervals are often not included, and so on.
We're all operating with the kind of bias that makes it hard to find hay in the haystack. We're biased towards things that are already legible to us. Statistical methods make a virtue of that.
Qualitative research helps us to de-center our concepts, to expand our understanding of the frameworks and schema that operate in lesser examined corners of life.
Even numbers aren't simply a sequence of digits, but a continuum of rationality and irrationality, with the latter making up the grand majority.
Going Further is about changing your stance in ways that challenge our sense of what counts.”
Adam Talkington
Head of Ethnography at Further&Further