I’ve decided to post my recent grad school paper in chunks since it is much longer than an average blog post. Below is the introduction. … Introduction Design is many things, but if we reflect on design as a trade or practice or vocation for a short time one might envision the people working as…
Diary
The Designer as Moral Compass: Minimalism, Animism, and Quaker Plaining
“Rodchenko names a new kind of emotionally affective object: the comradely object of socialist modernity. Unlike the commodities he encounters on his visit to capitalist Paris, which elicit a possessive relation that makes the objects into “slaves,” things made in the socialist East will actively promote egalitarian socialist culture. They will replace the pleasure of…
Use-Value Score Calculator: Notes On A Recent Grad School Project
I recently turned in two projects for a grad school class called Emerging Media, which is a graduate seminar that focuses on emerging technological advancements as they relate to the Communication Design industry and design-related fields. Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the “emerging technologies” the instructor introduced the class to was generative AI and for…
Becoming Black: Reflections on the “W” Word, Supersessionism, and the Theological Origins of White Supremacy
“The choice, as James Cone insists, is that God must be Black; without that commitment, the universal story is not possible, because Whiteness fails to express solidarity with all – and God’s Blackness is about solidarity. For Cone, ‘The blackness of God means that God has made the oppressed condition, God’s own condition.’ Whiteness, instead,…
The Judgement and Salvation of the Lone Star Tick: Mammals, Meat, and Non-Human Prophets
“The central theme in the prophecy of Joel, one of the 12 minor prophets (dōdekaprophēton), is that the Day of the Lord (yōm ădȏnay) is at hand (chs. 2–3). […] Joel utilizes the concept contextually for his contemporaries, using the locust swarms to point to the Day of the Lord as a day of both…
The Pluribus Problem: On Freedom, Face Scans, Anti-Circumvention Laws, and Persuasive Love vs. Imposed Morality
“This creates the series of questions Pluribus forces us to confront in every episode: Is our freedom—our autonomy—really too high a price to pay in exchange for global happiness and organized, respectful survival on our planet? If we accept the implied thesis that a free human will inevitably destroy the planet and themselves, is the alternative…
The Ordinary Texture of Existence: Reflections on ASMR and The Consummatory Satisfaction of Felt Quality
“Whisper whisper whisper.” –Anonymous ASMRtist old pond– frog jumps in. Plop! –Matsuo Bashô “In Whitehead’s analysis of an occasion of experience, the “category of transmutation” (PR 63) describes how the felt qualities of past events are fused into a new event with the consummatory satisfaction of an emergent pervasive aesthetic quality. […] Whitehead’s “satisfaction” is identified…
Erosion of Process Directly Erodes Comprehension: Reflections on AI, Skeuomorphism, and the Creative Process
“Be “dialectical” just for one minute: imagine a world where there is no point in teaching people things, the process of education is replaced by The Answer (no shade to Allen Iverson). You just… ask for the answers without regard to the process of making answers. Come on. Aren’t you imagining… Hell? Do we just…
Each Occasion is Concerned With The Universe: Virtuous Oscilation, Whitehead, and Quaker Concernedness
“Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral region which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension.” –Whitehead, Process and Reality “An exemplar can exemplify only some of its properties. It brings those properties to the fore by marginalizing, downplaying, or ignoring other…
The Man Who Wasn’t Funny: Bergson and the “Just Joking” Defense
“Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment,…