("JP")

“Taking a fresh look at the simplest forms leads to considering fundamental concepts; and reassessing basic concepts of forms opens up the road to reconsider other views.”

–Éva Forgács’ “The Bauhaus Paradox: Creativity, Freedom and the Long-Lasting Legacy of Bauhaus in Hungary” (2020)

But most of what we have around us is “junkspace” – bad buildings that are ugly, poorly designed, and unpleasant to be in, composed of cheap toxic materials that make people and the planet sick, and built by unskilled workers that are exploited, enslaved and endangered on the job. Starchitect Rem Koolhaas coined the term “junkspace” in 2001 in his ... See more

In the midst of the unfolding crisis with work – a fundamentally spiritual problem – it seems to me that we desperately need new cultural metaphors to describe labour. What, actually, is this thing called “work”? Why do we do it? What does it afford us? What can’t it afford us?

For now, I find solace in the metaphor of work as trace. In a world whe... See more

Kernel’s open source curriculum is an incredible resource for anyone interested in how designing digital spaces will change with the introduction of decentralized data storage and economics. From studying money through the lens of linguistics and culture to understanding, truly, how trust is constructed in complex systems, it’s the most sincere, ph... See more

Innovating within an existing platform is always a challenge, because as media theorist Marshall McLuhan argued decades ago, ‘the medium is the message’. TikTok and Twitter/X have short-form content built into the design of the platform, which prevents depth. As I explore in The Bigger Picture, this also leads to what philosopher C. Thi Nguyen call... See more

And worst of all, we’ve lost sight of the most salient part about computers: their malleability. We’ve acquiesced the creation of our virtual worlds, where we now spend most of our time, to the select few who can spend the millions to hire enough software engineers. So many of the photons that hit our eyes come from purely fungible pixels, yet for ... See more