Documenting damage and resistance. Unflooding the zone.
To build gentler technology, practice trauma-informed design
Understanding trauma helps craft gentler user experiences.
Dangerzone
Take potentially dangerous PDFs, office documents, or images and convert them to a safe PDF.
Not everything is ‘trauma’. Language needs to mean something | Aeon Essays
From a broken life to a broken nail, ‘trauma’ has been bleached by overuse. But it names something real – and must be reclaimed
Repair Wars: Cory Doctorow on the State of Right to Repair - Make:
They’ve stacked the decks against servicing your own purchases; The community is now resisting — and winning.
Damaged Earth Catalog
We are humans and might as well get used to it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross profits obscure actual loss. In response to this dilemma and to these losses a realm of intimate, community power is developing—power of communities to conduct their own education, find their own inspiration, shape their own environment, and share their knowledge with others. Practices that aid this process are sought and promoted by the DAMAGED EARTH CATALOG.
Open by Design: ROOST's Approach to Safety Tool Development
Tear Down Walls, and Build Bridges
A libre networking project that's designed to bridge protocol spaces together announced its progress and intentions, and Mastodon users freaked out.
Repair Culture: Learning to Fix Instead of Replace – Wayfinders Now – Living small to gain abundance.
Repair culture is the growing mindset of choosing to fix what’s broken instead of immediately replacing it. It challenges a habit that has become almost automatic in modern life: when something stops working, we discard it. A new phone, a new appliance, a new chair, a new everything. Repair culture asks a quieter question: What […]
Stripe Press — Maintenance
An in-depth exploration of maintenance, and a powerful argument for its civilizational importance.
Issue Cards | Service Design Tools
Support the conversation around complex matters by breaking down the subject into physical cards.
supernote-cli: pen, paper, and a pipe
A recent NYT piece argued we need a mental fitness revolution to combat the cognitive decay caused by algorithmic feeds and generative AI. It's an efficient one-two punch. If you're not brainrotting on short form video content, you're outsourcing all of your thinking to an LLM. The result is a kind of cognitive strip-mining. What's left requires active defense. For me, one way of defending that capacity for deep work is with a pen on e-ink. Whether it's annotating a paper or starting a sketch from scratch, I'm intentionally making room for focused thought. My army of clawed Claudes and Codexes will just have to wait.
The De|Center | Justice, Human Rights, and Tech
The De|Center is the home of the Design from the Margins methodology. We do deep work with decentered communities to make concrete changes to technology tools that address systemic injustice and advance human rights.
Why ‘Flooding the Zone’ Works for Trump - Dame Magazine
Trump’s allies openly described a strategy to overwhelm the press with simultaneous crises. The structure of modern journalism makes it work
Louis Rossmann