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There’s some rad weird popup art space happening at the mall in May, I found it via ig and I’m kicking around trying to graft together a spatial version of my 2021 zine “Deccentering the user experience” but instead flipping it to focus on worldbuilding city structures. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years talking about the ways tech has repurposed our cities in a gold rush of algorithmic & UI harm, taking experiences that were once person-to-person and ruining them without any regard for the side effects.
Reinventing the lens of UX as “neighbor” experience & separately if given a canvas, how people would choose to be represented in their communities. (I’ve been in a Jane Jacobs brainspace this week, and I’m perpetually in a Graeberian state of utopia of rules / seeing like a state space…)
I don’t think of myself as an artist, because I feel like the title is loaded and represents a certain type of output. Weirdly, I also feel similarly about design, because it’s hard to explain what type of designer I am, relative to people’s ideas about what design is and what designers too. But I’ve started to lean more into thinking about the sorts of things that made me enjoy working on the web as a kid. The ability to rapidly make something out of nothing is appealing. More than that, it’s often the lack of structure and sloppiness that evolves from useless to something more useful that I really like. Iteration isn’t celebrated, because everybody wants stuff right now and we’ve made stuff so cheap to make that it’s harder to value things that take time.