.003 January Sensemake

“We are a landscape of all we have seen” — Isamu Noguchi

I read a while ago in Claire Cameron’s great newsletter from the great white north that creativity is both breathing in and out but I feel like all the stuff I breathe in doesn’t get to go back out that often so here’s a venting for them to return to the world.

This month I saved 6 pieces of non-fiction (blog, review/essay, article, tweet, creative non-fiction award winner, substack), 6 pieces of art (paintings, stained glass, conceptual, sketch, site), a short story, 3 resources (repos and methodology), and 2 magazines. For some reason, I don’t add books to this list but I should note: I’m reading Doppelganger by Naomi Klein and it’s touching everything. I also finished Wild Dark Shore and Beautyland and something I didn’t write down.

IIII IIII IIII III <— that many things (excluding books)

A year ago, Amelia Wattenberger gave a talk on designing Thinking Tools hosted by the lab group two floors below mine. The phrase stuck with me and is the central theme of my consumption this month. It can hold both the Why of design and the modes of relation that feel like the recurring meta-structure that stitches the universe into one story. I think I will reuse it as a theme a lot.

Her blog post, “Our Interfaces Have Lost Their Senses,” an invitation to bring multimodality and texture back to designed interactions, even and especially when they’re digital, is in the syllabus and kicked off the rest of it. Other design speculations like a Spencer Chang’s tweet about communion via digital features that highlight coexistence on the web (ex: scrabbly noises when cursors run into each other), peer-to-peer dialogues, mirror worlds/shards, novels as the better evaluations, AI for collective intelligence and the cultural shift that lead to thinking that way all touched each other.

From Thinking Tools comes modes of relation: thinking tools, novels as other people’s heads, peer-to-peer dialogue as care under capitalism, voyeuristic views, whisper networks and underclasses, self hosting, always trying to capture something in motion in something not in motion (because of course, how else could you hold it and work with it).

From thinking tools and modes of relation came why’s, mostly cribbed from Elif Batuman’s latest Substack “The ‘Craft Talk’ I Really Needed Right Now” based off her always wonderful reading of Russian writers. Reading this was the first time I considered that I may have something in common with Russian writers (ALERT: human head discovers the human condition). I guess I had assumed they were of this other world I’d never know but always respect and stay ignorant of but the way she wrote about the writing about Mayakovsky writing through despair at the reality of another poet of his generation dying then dying himself a few years later made me think of being a teenager. Specifically when I found out one of my favorite YA authors had died in a similar way, then another author I loved made a YouTube video about him and thanked him for everything that he had given both of us despite the last bit of it all already, shockingly, belonging to the past. In my sensemaking notes I wrote: Why’s -> through and against despair -> take rhythm seriously -> take your stakes seriously. These were some of Batuman’s final H3s.

Outlying themes that still existed include environmental grief, embodiment, separation, AI agents. Hm.

Visual notes were textured, dreamy, bold, young, cool, beauty, romantic. I would like to find more words than this because I’m worried I’ll repeat the same list next month but texture is really something cherished right now.

That’s the digest, you can see all the citations here.

Talk next month!

Ideas

watching other people’s loved one’s wave at them from a train platform

draw conversation dynamics in TD

rewrite visualization dance as a communion with the dead