2023 (p. 1/2)

Link-rot and Schrödinger's URL

As this website has matured over the years, I regularly encounter bookmarks or links to sites that no longer exist. Motivated by some recent input on the topic (Remy Sharp via Jeremy Keith, an IndieWebCamp session, Jeremy Cherfas), I took a moment to evaluate how I may want to deal with the “link-rot” problem on this website myself.
2023

VersaTiles

versatiles.org

VersaTiles, “a completely FLOSS stack for generating, distributing and using map tiles based on OpenStreetMap data, free of any commercial interests” looks like a promising contender to OpenMapTiles. Both are interesting alternatives to commercial […]
2023
A graffiti that says: "question everything!" with a second graffiti responding: "ok why?"

Question everything

2023

World Wide Waste

Gerry McGovern
"World Wide Waste"

Digital is physical. Digital is not green. Digital costs the Earth. Every time I download an email I contribute to global warming. Every time I tweet, do a search, check a webpage, I create pollution. Digital is physical. Those data centers are not in the Cloud. They’re on land in massive physical buildings packed full of computers hungry for energy. It seems invisible. It seems cheap and free. It’s not. Digital costs the Earth.
2023

Quote: "Stop calling people “content creators”

rubenerd.com

I feel this as well …and it irks me the same way as the term “user-generated content”. There is a massive difference in referring to “content” in a technical sense vs. reducing people to “content creators”. I wouldn’t even refer to a single piece of work by any creator as “content” unless talking about it in a purely technical sense. Otherwise, it’s a photograph, a film, an art piece, a text or the like.
2023

The Marshall McLuhan Speaks Special Collection

marshallmcluhanspeaks.com

This is a true gem, and the most direct way to get in touch with McLuhan’s groundbreaking work on new media and their effect on human behaviour …by watching and listening to the man himself:
The Marshall McLuhan Speaks Special Collection is a historical archive spanning three decades of McLuhan’s appearances on television. Taken together, it serves as a priceless resource for students, scholars and everyone interested in understanding the impact of new media in the 21st century.
2023

Educational Sensational Inspirational Foundational

esif.dev

Zach Leatherman solicited feedback from his audience and assembled this list of 42 “foundational web development blog posts” which is one of those resources that should be part of any curriculum on web design or web engineering. It’s almost […]
2023

Playbook for universal design – Universal design methods for more inclusive solutions

universaldesignguide.com

An interesting collection of workshop methods that add a layer of universal design and inclusion. Published by the Technical University of Denmark’s innovation hub “DTU Skylab”, it provides resources to pick from:
This Universal […]
#design-for-all
2023

European Accessibility Act: What you need to know

craigabbott.co.uk

The European Accessibility Act is new legislation which was brought in by the European Union (EU) in 2019 with the aim to make sure that products and services are more accessible. It goal is mainly to help people with disabilities, but it will […]
#design-for-all
2023

Giving a damn about accessibility

accessibility.uxdesign.cc

This "candid and practical handbook for designers", penned by Sheri Byrne-Haber is a refreshingly broad and actionable take on advocating for the accessibility mindset for practitioners in digital design, with valuable impulses for managers as well.
#design-for-all
2023

Death to the double diamond

tangentdesign.substack.com

Having just recently emerged from (yet another) “messy” design process myself, this thought-provoking critique of the “double diamond” process model strikes a chord with me:
The double diamond process offers a […]
#design
2023

God Did the World a Favor by Destroying Twitter

wired.com

How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a tough question for the billionaires. Happy people, the kind who eat sandwiches together, are boring. They don’t buy much. Their smartphones are six versions behind and have […]
2023

Just normal web things.

heather-buchel.com

When advocating for web accessibility, the formal requirements of the WCAG and other frameworks often take center stage. In “Just normal web things” by Heather Buchel, she (while acknowledging the overlap with formal a11y requirements) advocates […]
#design-for-all
2023

The internet is for 12-year-olds

maxread.substack.com

This is both a seemingly bold thesis and a surprisingly accurate description of what appears to be going on in large parts of the internet:
Because the audience online so wildly over-samples 12-year-olds relative to the population, and because […]
2023

Opportunity

adactio.com

This short text follows up on “Splitting the web” from a few days ago. Jeremy Keith connects it to a bunch of recent texts and presentations that and highlights how not choosing the mainstream path of “enshittification” is not so much […]
2023

Splitting the Web

ploum.net

While I greatly appreciate the way Lionel Dricot describes the split between the “commercial, monopolies-riddled, media-adored web”, driven by bloat and monetization, and the “tech-savvy web”, as a way to describe the more consicous […]
2023

I’m a Luddite (and So Can You!)

thenib.com

The Luddite movement (named after their fictional leader “Ned Ludd”) often pops up in the context of discussions about intentional technology . Just as with the Amish, the Luddites are often misrepresented as outright anti-technology, though the […]
2023

Internet cafes introduced Uganda to the internet

restofworld.org

A collection of journalistic stories, this article and the ones on the same topic presented on the same page below, presents **a rich ethnography on the rise, fall, and future of internet cafes** in Uganda, Nepal, Nigeria, Mexico, Argentina, and Hong Kong.
2023

Invisible Details of Interaction Design

rauno.me

Nothing beats a thorough examination of a niche topic. Such I found in this article by Rauno Freiberg, which dissects the metaphors of interaction design in search for the small and often implicitly applied details they consist of:
Design can […]
2023

Emīlija Veselova: ‘We should consider nature as stakeholder in design process’

aalto.fi

In June, I remotely attended the PhD defence of Emīlija Veselova at the Aalto University Department of Design, where she presented her research about nature as a stakeholder in design processes, more specifically the “more-than-human design […]
2023

Helsinki Design System

hds.hel.fi

The Helsinki Design System is a good example of a design system at scale, that is built not only around a consistent, but an accessible brand as well:
The central digital experience resource of Helsinki Design Language. Guidelines, design assets […]
#design-for-all
2023

No Handoff: close the gap between product and engineering

nohandoff.org

Always curious about improving design processes to put user needs over a rigid process – and even more so if the alternatives are prototype-centred – the “No Handoff” method presented by Shamsi Brinn is an interesting amalgamation of a […]
#design
2023

Future-first design thinking

wholegraindigital.com

“Future-first design thinking” by Marketa Benisek looks at contemporary approaches for the consideration of nature in design, from creating non-human personas, through Cathedral Thinking, to adopting a “sustainability-first mindset” […]
2023

The Era of Antisocial Social Media

hbr.org

The core thesis of this article is that young people have started to move away from the big social media, withdrawing into more private spaces for their digital social interactions. It’s a handy categorization of non- (or not-yet-?) mainstream practices […]
2023

Tiktok’s enshittification

pluralistic.net

Cory Doctorow’s text is much more about illustrating and discussing the concept of “enshittification” than about TikTok specifically. It’s worth a read:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then […]
2023