Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design

We fail to take tech seriously when we do not grasp its full impact on humans

Designing for Uncertainty - AT Protocol

Ethan Marcotte, who first coined the phrase Responsive Design, joins to discuss how to operate in a world defined by uncertainty.

Design Must Learn to Decompose

A meditation on the quiet death of digital things.

issues

If the information and communications technology (ICT) industry was purposefully following a harmful agenda, these would probably be their design principles:

Say precisely what you mean.

The words designers use when they know what they’re looking at.

Design Justice

An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival.

Design Justice

An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival.

Calm Technology

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

The golden mean of design and engineering - The Intercom Blog

For great products to be built, both design and engineering need to be in balance. If you have a super strong engineering team but a weak or underserved design team, you will struggle.

Appropriate Technology

In 1973 the term Appropriate Technology appeared, in the book Small is Beautiful by Buddhist economist Ernst Schumacher 1. He first used intermediate technology, to describe technology designed with special consideration to the environmental, ethical, cultural, social, political, and economic aspects of the community it is intended for. The term changed to Appropriate Technology (AT) and became a movement encompassing technological choice and application that is about ’enoughness’, robustness and sustainable living. Although many associated projects involve the introduction of technology to developing countries, it is practised in a variety of contexts.

Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need

An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological su

Read the Principles — Design Justice Network

Design mediates so much of our realities and has tremendous impact on our lives, yet very few of us participate in design processes. In particular, the people who are most adversely affected by design decisions — about visual culture, new technologies, the planning of our communities, or the structure of our political and economic systems — tend to have the least influence on those decisions and how they are made.

Care at the Edge of Automation – Topos Institute

Technologies don’t just solve problems, they change us. We invent technologies, and they invent us in turn, shaping our lives and worlds. This is the phenomenon that Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, in Understanding Computers and Cognition (1986), called “ontological design.” It matters now more than ever—along with a second lesson they saw clearly. Technological research is always guided (and sometimes misguided) by deep ontological assumptions about, e.g., the nature of cognition, agency, and communication. If we are to create technologies that truly serve human flourishing and care, we must bring these hidden assumptions into the open and question them at their roots.

By Humans, For Humans – Mindful Design

Now, more than ever, we need to consider the real, human impact of the work we do. This is a fundamental principle of Mindful Design.