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Intent and results

While this month may seem a little scattered in topics, we’ve loosely tied them together with the idea of what happens when you try to engineer or design control. What kinds of things can emerge from that (like creating two gendered basketball rule sets), how do things evolve as communities rebel against the rules enforced (even in playful ways as speedrunners exploit game glitches).

As designers, we do our best to draw a path in our work to follow, but the reality is that things happen that we can’t expect, and people approach our work in ways we never anticipated. Engineering control is ultimately futile (and a sinister goal as the book Stolen Focus reveals); collaborative community always ends up changing what was initially designed, making something different and often better.

When control is out of control

Everyday is science fiction

3 minutes

A short thought about inverted computer culture. When is the last time you sat down in front of your computer, or phone, to concentrate on a specific idea. To me, even logging in to my work computer can seem aimless. I rarely know what I need to do when I wake up. My phone just magically appears in my hand, and suddenly I'm reading news, switching to my work computer and continuing reading slack and emails. Lately, I've tried to delay screen time when I wake up, and it does feel nice to just stay inside my head for a few more moments. Its easy to forget our human selves when we are tethered to our devices.

Does spirituality have what it takes to change design for the better?

17 minutes

A beautiful essay on design and spirituality. This essay speaks of the role of design in building communities, through looking at design projects intended to revive faith and spirituality.

Who really broke the discourse?

16 minutes

An insightful article about social media, moderation and virtual communities. The article dives into internet history, looking at how discourse was controlled through the different internet eras, from hosting a bulletin board, to forum moderation, to social media community guidelines.

The art of hosting good online conversations

10 minutes

A 1998 article about how to host good online conversations.

Hollow Knight's Most Broken Charm, Explained (And How One Great Hopper Changed Everything)

15 minutes

A fun look into Team Cherry's attempt to patch a seemingly harmless charm, and the community of speedrunners that refused to give up on it.

Six on six basketball

40 minutes

A variant for basketball designed to create a whole different set of rules for girls. This needlessly gendered game variant is less common today, but strong communities built around this game still exist.

Accessibility highlights

Hijacking Screenreaders with CSS

This is from a talk given at Axe Con 2023 and dives into how screen readers work, and how we can explain some of their quirks.

A Reference to Creating Inclusive Websites

This long form page contains lots of little technical design details you might be wondering about a11y

Books

Superhumanity: Design of the Self

A collection of short essays on the ways we choose or are forced to design and invent ourselves.

yellow book with a small title in black. White arcs are randomly placed near the bottom of the cover.

Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again

Stolen Focus is part personal experience, part interviews with scientists on the topic of why we have so much trouble focusing these days, and what's causing it. While the book looks at more than just one cause, we include it here for the portion of the book that address how social media companies engineering to gain control over our attention for their benefit has wrecked havoc on our ability to be present elsewhere in our lives. Hari also takes an interesting step further by looking at what might a healthier relationship with social media look like, and how might we design that.

A black cover with the title in white characters. A colourful circle is centered in the middle of the cover.
A portrait of Charlotte

5 things worth sharing with Charlotte Pedersen

A question worth asking

What will people do with this?

A book worth reading

Daring Greatly - Brené Brown

A recipe worth trying

No-knead focaccia

A quote worth repeating

“Our need to tell doesn’t equal their need to know.” (Credit to @peripherlvision for sharing this.)

A newsletter worth subscribing to

https://workingincontent.com/

Events

Axe Con 2023

Free recordings

The yearly a11y conference by Deque. I recommend watching both "A11y to burnout pipeline" and "Don’t let a11y become DEI". I enjoyed thinking about the challenges of working on a11y on top of our own work.

Beyond Tellerand 2023

Free recordings

Beyond Tellerand is an event about design, Web and technology. Some recordings are now available on Youtube. I recommend watching Sophie Koonin's talk about personal websites.

Neat things

A cool decorative typeface by studio Marlon Ilg

The bad thing

A beautiful comic about the consequence of our actions

15 Niches to Pursue in Graphic Design

A dive into the various niches of our profession, with links to designers and resources for that niche.

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