-
"Resources" are Wiki-style pages where I curate selected content from my journal and bookmarks by topic.
-
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 like a walk down memory lane – […]
-
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 Playbook was created with the […]
-
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 make things better for everybody! Somehow […]
-
Giving a damn about accessibility
accessibility.uxdesign.cc 
This "candid and practical handbook for designers", penned by (link: https://sheribyrnehaber.com/ text: 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. -
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 “prescriptive” approach to real-life complex […]
-
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 badly cracked screens. They fix […]
-
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 for an even more basic layer of minimal […]
-
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 all social platforms work like highly […]
-
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 about giving up, but about creating new […]
-
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 creation and consumption of digital media […]
-
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 non-use. Just as with the Amish, the Luddites are often misrepresented as outright anti-technology, though the true history of the movement and […]
-
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. -
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 feel like there’s no science to it […]
-
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 approach”. The topic fascinates me, both from […]
-
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 and component libraries for building a […]
-
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 broken-up double diamond and agile […]
-
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” and concludes:
Perhaps we […]
-
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 by which individuals and communities […]
-
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 they abuse their users to make things […]
-
A rare gem: an observational study validating the comprehensibility of five different forms of gender-neutral German text.
-
The Potentially Dangerous Non-Accessibility Of Cookie Notices
smashingmagazine.com 
Nobody likes cookie consent modals. But if you are not able to "design them away" by technical solutions, they should at least be fully accessible. -
I really enjoyed this take by Karolina Szczur, which is essentially about a focus on usability and user-centredness vs. the excessive overload that has creeped into the web over the decades.
The Calm Web is a reimagining of the online world that envisions an Internet that is better for […]
-
Contract Improvement Personas: the Drafters, Designers, Digitisers and Doers
improvingcontracts.com 
As the old saying goes: if the only tool you have is a hammer, it’s tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail; an age-old bias that also applies to the new world of contract improvement – both for those providing services (like me), as well as those needing their […]
-
Disrespectful thoughts about design: Social, political and environmental values in Finnish design, 1960–1980
aaltodoc.aalto.fi 
This dissertation by Kaisu Savola is as niche as it is fascinating (to me at least, having received my “designerly training” in the very institution that formalized the design profession in Finland):
In the field of design history, there is a shared understanding that the […]
-
The Performance Inequality Gap
infrequently.org 
This concept of a “Performance Inequality Gap” brings together so many of my perspectives – from #a11y to #nonuse to inequality as one of the main concerns of the sociologist:
As long as we continue to build only for wealthy users, the dream of a web for everyone will […]
esif.dev 
wired.com 
rauno.me 
aalto.fi 
nohandoff.org 
hbr.org 
capito.eu 
calibreapp.com 