Archive

On Endings

My intent with this newsletter was to keep it limited to 12 editions. These will now be archived on my website and the mailing list deleted. The internet/metaverse has given us many good things. But it’s very bad at endings and there is nothing sadder than seeing something limp on.

So the year closes exactly as it began, with another lockdown. Society hasn’t collapsed and economies haven’t been reset. Yet I believe there is a smudged outline, a collective mood, that things have to change. We, collectively as a species have to change. Strategic design is about how to chart a course through uncertainty and to find solutions to the knotty problems we face. A lot of the heavy lifting day-to-day is around mediation and the building of trust and empathy. Problem-solving can only really be meaningfully achieved when those elements are present.

I built a new website

Over the years years I’ve been building websites to showcase my work. Squarespace was my go to web builder because it was simple to knock something fairly decent without any coding. The downside to Squarespace is that under the hood is a heap of strung out lines of codes that hogs bandwidth and memory. In essence it lacks elegance.

Last year over lockdown I learnt some rudimentary coding and levelled up by building a website using Hugo to replace Squarespace. My aim was to create a more responsive website that was efficient, light, and nice to look.

Change, habits, and routine

The autumn season feels more concrete now with reds and yellow leaf coverage popping out. If I was to summarise this past month for me it would be about change! Two cases of covid in my household threw my writing schedule out of kilter with some red-eye inducing early starts and long hours commuting by car. My daily routines have suffered and it has been really hard to get back into the groove of writing.

I realised that this newsletter can be hard to pin down. It zigs from cities, low carbon transportation, to systems, and to nature as a means of inspiration. Trying to wrangle these big themes into some sort of meaningful shape is tough. Tough in the sense that I’m constantly asking whether these topics hang together in a meaningful and engaging way? I’m reminded of the famous interview David Bowie gave about pushing to the edges of your comfort zone.

When I write, there’s a faint outline of a theme based on notes I’ve harvested. I will churn through several drafts until something takes shape. Sometimes I might see something that validates what I’ve been writing about, and does so crisply and succinctly. To that end, Dan Hill shared Brian Eno’s thoughts on what he believes are the foundations for a smart city.

Designing services that are lighter and closer together

Image: Adreas Levers - FlickR (Creative Commons)

Hello Normaliser,

After weeks of endless rain, I am writing this month’s newsletter in the sun. As a reminder as we spin into the second half of 2021, this newsletter will end in December. The writing system I’ve developed is more complicated than it needs to be. Each new post is sent as a Buttondown newsletter and a version for archive on my website. Behind the Hypernormal curtain, I’ve created a Rube Goldberg construction with each post hand-coded in Hugo.

Hello Normaliser,

After weeks of endless rain, I am writing this month's newsletter in the sun. As a reminder as we spin into the second half of 2021, this newsletter will end in December. The writing system I've developed is more complicated than it needs to be. Each new post is sent as a Buttondown newsletter and a version for archive on my website. Behind the Hypernormal curtain, I've created a Rube Goldberg construction with each post hand-coded in Hugo.

Writing a newsletter once a month seems to be the right cadence for me and my limited skills at coding. I need a firm finishing line to help me write consistently and I don't want to get newsletter burn-out. Five more editions and poof it will be gone and my promise to you, your signup details deleted.

How the heck have we crested into the second half of the year? Over lockdown, I’ve had some days that feel compressed, and other days that seem endless. I’m starting to think that my mind misses the change of scenery when commuting to the office. But then I remember I save 3 hours daily by not commuting

I had the thought that moving out of London would make me more tuned into the changing of the seasons. I could not be more wrong. The month of May was the wettest on record. So far, June has seen glorious uninterrupted sunshine and cold rain.

A large part of my garden is shaded by tree cover and that seems to have the effect of limiting the amount of water my garden needs when it is hot. The patch of land next to my house is not so lucky and it has gone from lush green to a tinder-dry yellow in the space of a fortnight.

Sky bridges to nowhere; why we need more subcultural infrastructures; and new operating systems for placemaking

A bee hive update. Since last month there has been little progress on my hive being inhabited. The previous owners left an operating manual and from what is written down, the hive seems to be in the right spot - sunny with a clear flight path for the bees. Sadly, the window for colonizing the space is closing with many bees having found alternative accommodation before the summer. It just goes to show that creating conditions for placemaking is just as hard, if not harder, for wildlife as it is for us humans.

Green shoots and blossom are bloomin’ like crazy in my neck of the woods. It was a week before Christmas that my family and I moved into the new home. The trees were denuded and the garden was a mud bath. This month it is a welcome relief to see the garden start to come to life. As the days have got longer and warmer I stumbled on an item the previous owners had left behind. An empty beehive. This tipped me into a YouTube loop of figuring out how to start it up. Turns out you need some bee ‘lure’ to get the scout bees interested. The bee equivalent of a high rating on AirBNB apparently.

The plan is that by having a working hive, the garden will be healthier and create a regenerative habitat for the bees. It turns out that getting bees to come to my yard is pretty hard and I’ve had zero luck so far so I’m playing the long game.

Music Culture & Spotify

Creating new futures from chaos - lessons from Fukushima; the rise of small distributed platforms; and is designing for the individual part of the problem?

Spring is in the air and whisper it there is a feeling of hope that things are changing for the better.

I wonder how we will look back at the great pause 2020/21? One of the niggling thoughts I have had since the start of the year is whether things will be genuinely different or will we snap back to how things were?

Designing for a future that's a bit broken; what can we learn from indigenous technology; and the ambient sound of the future

Intro

This 2nd edition has been fuelled by strong coffee and thin winter sun. February was all about snow in the UK. We had a big dollop of the good stuff that took me back to being a kid. My kids were overjoyed at making their first-ever snowman after being on this planet for 10 and 13 years. It's impossible to predict if it will be their last.

Google really wants to build a city of the future; why 80's pop group Aha were strategic designers; and the challenge of a solution looking for a problem

Hello reader. Yes, you! Slushy and cold footed Tom here!

This 1st edition is brought to you on a wet and cold lockdown January day. The light dusting of snow this morning has turned to a cold mizzle. This is 1 of 12 issues I've promised to publish in 2021 on a rag-tag range of topics that are loosely connected to the idea of design making space to change things.

This might be also the most convoluted way for me to bookmark things that interest me and maybe you.