Issue 17: Related/Unrelated

Related/Unrelated is a feature — the link-heavy guts of my “slow trend” report — that I now write for paid subscribers only. I am deeply grateful to you all — and to those who joined me here most recently. I am grateful for your support. 

Read: Who is “allowed” to be creative within the professional context (of employment)? This question haunted me, as it has all my womanly working life while reading Louis Menand’s recent review of Samuel W. Franklin’s new book, The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History (Chicago) in the New Yorker. It turns out that creativity, as a distinctly recent American social value, emerged in the post-war workplace, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has sat in (or presided over!) a soul-draining post-it-or-Miro-board-driven “ideation” session in the office.

// Would we behave differently if our apps did? Liz Gorney’s Swiping, Prompts, and The Ick: Has design changed how we date forever? delves into the role of design in the “absolute shitshow” (I echo her words!) that is digitally-assisted dating in this particular moment. While this lightly amusing and richly-illustrated piece points to some of the specific, swipe-y design elements that impact our use of “the apps,” Gorney nevertheless missed the potential for deeper design analysis. I’m thinking about the work that comes out of Stanford’s Behavior Design Lab, for example, a hotbed for digital addiction. (See the Fogg Behavioral Model for details.)