We should be happy at how much we have to read. Reading should make one better. Yet writing on the web tends to take the form of surface-level explorations of the world, in that it concerns itself with the immediately factual. A play-by-play description; a trip report; a contrast and compare - these are the most common forms of writing. Writing doesn't even go by 'writing' on the web. It goes by 'content, an ugly word. It suggests a meaningless delivery packaged to fit within a pre-existing frame.
Writing about technology suffers the most. It is design advice based on simplistic laws or principles. It is assessments of technology based on practical application. It is snippets of quotes from blindsided experts.
None of this is good enough. The bulk of writing - be it news, reviews, or advice - doesn't attempt to apply concepts from elsewhere to help us us understand technologies and being as historical, as situated, as designed, as part of a framework that can be better understood with any number of conceptual lenses. Most of all, it doesn't explain how we can leverage these lenses to design and build technologies that change what we want to change.
Here's an article: on how Google Docs is used by activists. It's an article with good 'content'. You should read it. Honestly. Its primary point is that Google Docs is easy to use; therefore, it's used by activists. That's interesting and informative.
But it doesn't discuss meaning: meaning for designers, meaning for the users, meaning for the reader. To do this you need conceptual lenses.
Johan Redstrom and Heather Wiltse would call Google Docs fluid a assemblage - a symbolic material that is assembled on an as-needed basis. What does it mean that these dynamic assemblages are becoming a go-to resources for activists? How does the structure and meaning change based on the unique qualities (e.g. openness) of the medium? How is it coded or afforded for certain activities but not others?
The philosopher Peter-Paul Verbeek talks about multistability - the way that humans co-opt technology for our own use. Is that what is happening with Google Docs, and if so how does the medium disempower and empower this? What does it mean that this technology is not being used as intended?
These are the types of questions this newsletter will to wrestle with. It aims to flip the discussion table over to uncover the concepts beneath. All the stuff academics are talking about; all the stuff people have been thinking about for years, but aren't applying to our lived technological world.
Ben Kraal recently started a newsletter called '1992'. Its aim is to examine academic papers from 1992 with the intention of applying them to UX practices today because there is so much we can learn from that which has already been written. This newsletter will do something similar, but will take a wider stance -- wider in terms of sources and wider in terms of application.
Key topics this newsletter will deal with include:
Materialism
Systems thinking
The 4Es of cognition (Embedded, Extended, Enacted, and Embodied)
Design thinking
Ethics
Quantification and qualification
Design and User Research
Futurism
Semiotics
Ecological perception
(Post) Phenomenology
Modernism, post-modernism
If you don't know what these concepts are, I will define them as part of my efforts to display how they have enormous impacts on how we design and use technology, and indeed how we assemble into and through technology.
See you soon.