Oxyllects #2
When the world saw too many morons, we needed oxymorons. Likewise for the intellect—we need oxyllects. For the world around us and inside us—where momentum is more important than structure.
The backstory
(Since this is only the second issue in this series, I repeat the backstory here for some context.)
Ever since I started working in technology, I was reading or watching content of my career interests—user experience, marketing, pitching, product management, SaaS and startups, content strategy, Product Hunt in the year 2014, international conferences, community projects and volunteering, and a lot more.
In the lot more, it was architecture and urban design, sustainable cities projects such as by SPACE10, SideWalkLabs, CityLabs, civic design projects such as by Code of America, Helsinki as City As A Service (2019), Frame Publishers, and a few newsletters and publications by founders and technology leaders, funds, and more.
Every time, I was trying to make sense of the information and the knowledge collectively—not thinking that learning to make tea in Vienna, or to trek in New Zealand, or to set up campaigns in Marketo could be co-related.
—The way you describe a B2B dashboard has definitely something to do with how you will describe your dental visit for an extraction.
—The way you experience season’s first rain cannot be too different from how you might prepare for your first call with a new B2B prospect.
There is a connection and most of us either miss out on strengthening this connection or do not keep their canvas broad enough to see these together. In this series, I plan to share what I see for my own self—one post a month.
(The backstory will not be a part of the future issues.)
It is like a first time trip to your dream city in the pre-Internet era. This is not about technology or art or food or the trek, or libraries. You never know where you find that technology park too. This is for everything life around us, in some way, where small is also big.
Think of the people who care for you, and the ones you care for, and think of all of them while reading this post—will something in this post resonate with them? If yes, share it with them.
Read it with zero expectations—it helps us stay calm and in the moment.
Breathing with the Forest
We belong to the biosphere—this statement in a Emergence Magazine post acts as a digital detoxicant for me. “Breathing with the Forest is an experience of deep continuity and reciprocity with a Capinuri tree (Maquira coriacea) in the Colombian Amazon rainforest.”—by Marshmallow Laser Feast.
Placeholders of life
Not everything in our minds make permanent sense. We allow a few thoughts to reside as if these are the placeholders—to be replaced by something real in the future.
Anu Atluru helps us understand these placeholders of life, closely.
Placeholders of exploration
Placeholders of convenience
Placeholders of avoidance
Good enough—tea or taps, or a software?
Goodenoughness is like your neighborhood—quite subjective on how you see the boundaries. We hate our banks’ websites but these are good enough to help us see or make transactions. We love our luxury cars but often feel tired while waiting at a fuel station. Goodenoughness is important—watch this video to understand it.
Tech: Instant
Instant—a modern Firebase.
Giving your frontend a real-time database. (Try it.)
Life: The design failure
What is design. If kids cannot play safely in the streets, is it a policy failure or a design failure?
Even war is a design failure in many ways—when we think of complex systems that may have led to the war whether these are in the historical context, politics, internal administration, international relations, segmentation of societies and humankind—these point to a breakdown in the communication systems somewhere and which is not disconnected from how those broken systems were designed and how these could have designed.
It sounds ridiculous when teams talk about adopting design thinking. Is the absence of design thinking even possible?
For example in a fine dining restaurant kitchen, do the chefs and the staff talk about butter thinking, or dough thinking, or olives thinking?
In tech—we have been quite ordinary in our understanding of design. See one of my posts that I wrote earlier this year—thanks to a project by Kevin Richard.
Tech: What the heck's goin' on in tech?
Tom Kerwin in partnership with John Cutler and the Cynefin Company, have together a survey that makes you think how do you feel about working in tech right now. This is unlike any of the industry surveys you might have come across before. See and join the conversation.
City: Swimmers commute between Asia and Europe daily—A Thrillist story
The pandemic have redefined the demerits (and sometimes the privileges too) of daily commute to work. The stories of Mumbai trains, and of people cycling to their work in Netherlands and Denmark show the either extreme of daily commute.
And then there is a group who commute to their work by swimming. “For some of those in the group—they have been doing it since 1973—and this commute has become a part of their very identity.” (Story)
Fine Lines (story)
Wounded Healers
An emergent, healing-centered, multimedia community storytelling project (link).
Tech: AArtificial IIntelligence
AI can weigh, compare, and analyze, but it can’t fathom what novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald so aptly described as first-rate intelligence—“the ability to hold two opposing truths in one’s mind and still retain the ability to function.”
AI has no concept of truth and thus can’t hold opposing views of it. "Like us humans, it can pretend to know (hallucinate), but it can’t lie intentionally. It is either here or there, but never, like Schrödinger’s cat, two things simultaneously."
By House of Beautiful Business
Tech: Autocomplete for canvas
You might have used autocomplete for text, in text editors or even in design tools. How about autocomplete for canvas—for shapes?
We: Italian Tradition of ‘La Passeggiata’
My first memory of walking in the city is in the year 1980 when I was four. After our evening mean, that walk served as a self-therapy of a four years old kid who was trying to make sense of the city—the beautiful trees on either side of the road, cool breeze, clean and traffic-free wide road, the screeches of squirrels, the night blooming jasmine (cestrum nocturnum), and the smell of footpath paint sometimes.
There are thousands of stories of walking in the city, and this LifeHacker story is about a small town in Italy.
If you love reading about walk in the city experiences and stories, you must love this mini project by Patricia Hurducas. I joined their project for an episode and I shared my experiences of walking in Chandigarh—here is that conversation.
We: BbinAir
The moment of moment in the moment (credits).
World: Nights on earth
A beautifully designed, customizable and free astro-calendar to help you plan your stargazing, made by Phil Mosby.
Iceland is one-of-its kind
According to a Frame Publishers story, The Mountain Bath and Retreat in Thjorsardalur Valley is set to open in June 2026, with the 'most environmentally friendly architecture in the country'. (Link)
Food: Seed Sovereignty
Kai Njeri, a Regenerative Systems Thinker and their group are working on an extraordinary mission to bring seed sovereignty—traditionally seed sovereignty is about the right of the farmer to grow, save, exchange and sell their own seeds. (Story)
“The good patent gives the world something it did not truly have before, whereas the bad patent has the effect of trying to take away from the world something which it effectively already had.”—American patent lawyer, Giles Sutherland Rich
Something for theatre lovers—in a tweet
Time: The Correct Time—720 broken clocks each showing every minute of the day
Barbara Koenen collected 720 broken clocks in their project The Correct Time to show all possible time in a day. The Design Museum of Chicago had an exhibition to showcase the collection—the project and its goals. Watch the story below.
Planet: Living with water—not fighting it
Floods are a bad news everywhere and these are often the result of the massive climate shift caused by a complex mesh of reasons and follies. The town planners and the policy makers can sense it as an opportunity to design our life with water.
Wetlands are natural buffers against sea-level rise, and the plants that thrive in these environments, such as reeds, bamboo and rattan, can be harvested and used by architects and designers.
Forests: Our language for forests
How does the language we use impact how can we imagine our relationship with nature? How can we design new words that can make invisible collective experiences visible?
“We would need new kinds of words and language to connect history and future between forest owners and Finnish society, and to support ecosystems as whole, beyond the property limits.”— Project interviewee, Head of Forest Planning and Management at The Finnish Forest Administration, Forestry Ltd (Story)
Ironically
Art: The Weather Project
Olafur Eliasson created “The Weather Project” for the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London—a semi-circular screen, a ceiling of mirrors, and artificial mist to create the illusion of a sun. By walking to the far end of the hall, visitors could see how the sun was constructed, and the reverse of the mirror structure was visible from the top floor of the museum. (The Project).
We: To honor
How a man honors his aunt—a tweet.
I hope you have enjoyed it. If you did, let your contacts and friends too enjoy it—forward it to them.
PS: This will be a paid subscription after a couple of issues.
Thank you.
This resonates, I call it intentional community and gesture to the rhizomatic vibes that were fashionable with the intellegentsia in the early 2000s when the internet was not quite so sinister feeling yet.