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This is a must-read essay by Dan Hill, introducing Adaptive Design: Insanely great, or just good enough? Originally published in Core77 in 2004, it’s a critique of the unadaptable, glued-closed Apple iPod and its non-user-replaceable battery.

Hill quotes Brian Eno:

An important aspect of design is the degree to which the object involves you in its

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Vernacular design is a reminder that beauty and functionality in design are not the sole purview of trained experts. It underscores the potential of non-professionals to create things with both practicality and aesthetics. By valuing the wisdom inherent in these traditional designs, we not only celebrate the creativity of non-experts but also... See more

Synthesis as art:

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And since technology is not value neutral, to be a technologist is to be inherently opinionated about how the world ought to be. Each act of creation is a statement about one particular means to an end being the best possible means. As Saffron Huang writes, “[b]ringing something into existence is in fact endorsing that thing itself. As we hurtle... See more

Financial systems are a continuous attempt to reshuffle assets towards the people who can manage them best or who are most tolerant of whatever their particular risk/reward payoff functions are, and that means constantly examining flows in order to determine their present value, and speculating about how that present value might change, or might be... See more

What are the major challenges we face?

Let’s go for global warming, peak oil and ubiquitous computing.

Ubiquitous computing?

Totally ubiquitous computing. One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally

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