the human premium

Wabi-sabi is the antidote to all things symmetrical, mass-produced, or generated by AI. It has been crafted by humans and oxygen and seasons and the cycles of life.

Ideas are expansive, elastic things, and many are big enough that they’ll seek multiple outlets.

Wabi-sabi is the antidote to all things symmetrical, mass-produced, or generated by AI. It has been crafted by humans and oxygen and seasons and the cycles of life.

transitioning to a creativity-first mindset requires much more than just designing better tools. It requires us to shift to a new paradigm that celebrates and nurtures the chaotic, unpredictable, often unquantifiable nature of creativity.

talking about A.I. and surrounded by amiable chitchat, I wondered whether, someday soon, conversations with human beings would be deemed lacking if they didn’t exhibit chatbot-like speed and responsiveness. Maybe there are some circles, in tech or elsewhere, where the quality of “the median conversation you can have with a person” is already

Vernacular architecture also tends to be more human-scale as a direct result of how it was built. Such places are therefore often more suited to social integration and to community, to healthier and happier lifestyles, and all the other benefits of human-scale design.

Transactional conversation—speaking, and being spoken to, like a bot—can be efficient, maybe even nice, depending on the context and on your disposition. But it can also feel condescending, flattening, manipulative, and generic—like being treated as an N.P.C.

In contrast, the improvisational spirit lives inside that gap, and it can be surprisingly full of ingenuity and joy even when the situation is dire. As something we share with our nonhuman brethren, the capacity to form new responses is how you know you’re alive, today, here. So when my mum says, “whatever happens, happens,” what I hear is not