I’m a designer, but writing is another important part of my practice. Most of what I’ve written focuses on making the case for a cohesive and generous philosophy for how we design technology: it must not only look good and feel good, it must also be good. Today, I’ll be focusing on the other side of how technology gets made. I want to talk about ways to find a clear path through how we use technology and what we expect from it.
This need seems urgent. It has been the central topic of many of my conversations with friends and professional acquaintances for the last year and a half. If you bundle those conversations together, the diagnosis is clear: there is so much convenience, but so little comfort. Everyone is tired. Our attention is over-extended, over-stimulated, and over-commodified, making us twitchy, unfocused, and, in a very crude sense, afraid.
