Frank Chimero · the Good Room

Brand and product designer Frank Chimero noted in a 2018 talk at the Substans Conference in Bergen, Norway, that “if we’re setting out to change the character of technology in our lives, we’d be wise to learn from the character of places.”*

You could say that our current technological arrangement has spread out too far, and it is starting to look and feel wrong. Fortunately, we can treat this over-expansion just like everything else I’ve mentioned. We can draw a line, and create a point of reassembly for what we’ve made. We can think about how to shift, move, and resize the pieces so ... See more

In Paul Graham’s famous essay Cities and Ambition, there’s this idea that some cities are centers for some type of ambition, and when you come to one of those cities, you can feel the message the city is sending to you. For example, the message that you can feel in New York is “You should be richer,” while Berkeley’s is “You should live better,” Pa... See more

We often think making things for the web is a process of simplifying—the hub, the dashboard, the control panel are all dreams of technology that coalesces, but things have a tendency to diverge into a multiplicity of options. We pile on more tools and technology, each one increasingly nuanced and minor in its critical differences. Clearly, converge... See more

A quick example from my life: Twitter didn’t replace Facebook. The iPad didn’t replace my phone. My phone didn’t replace my TV. Now, I watch YouTube on my iPad, toss the video up to my TV, while checking Twitter and Facebook on my phone. It’s a little constellation of technology. But I keep asking myself: how many more things can I juggle? And for ... See more