("JP")

Value, in an economic sense, is theoretically created by new things based on new ideas. But when the material basis for these new things is missing or actively deteriorating and profits must be made, what is there to be done? Retreat to the immaterial and work with what already exists: meaning.

Meaning is always readily available to be repeated,... See more

Perhaps the key to finding the illegible margin is captured in Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Amos Tversky’s quip: “the secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

Because you’re looking for something which is hard to see, you have to have some sort of “tinkering budget”... See more

Why are rising labor costs expressed as less detail/ornamentation? Some kinds of activities — performing a string quartet is the canonical example — just intrinsically require a certain amount of labor. No amount of economic growth will alter the fact that it takes four musicians about 15 minutes each to play Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge. But why does... See more

“How might we use design to connect people to their local ecologies?”

The catch is that it’s incredibly difficult to assign comparative value to those things to which we are emotionally connected. What monetary value would you assign to your closest friend? The question feels absurd because you cannot put a value on something you are unwilling to part with. The things we are unwilling to part with are often those... See more

"When death finds you, may it find you alive."

-African proverb