urban design resources

MAX SIEDENTOPF

Where have all the websites gone?

Quit Your Job

“You have to let your life go fallow sometimes, like a crop rotation giving the land time to bring forth new fertility.”

A peasant woodland | A Working Library

Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500

Design ain’t a democracy

Google - The Web Can Do What!?

Globe Explorer

A better way to index and digest information?

A history of moquette | London Transport Museum

Career Advice

“...simply observe the older people working there. They are the future you.”

Invisible Details of Interaction Design

A nice write-up on interaction/motion design thinking.

A Deep Dive Into SVG Path Commands

An interactive guide to understanding SVG paths and path commands.

Ambient Co-presence

What if our experiences on the web were akin to those in physical public spaces?

The Social Life of Forests

“Such reciprocity does not necessitate universal harmony, but it does undermine the dogma of individualism and temper the view of competition as the primary engine of evolution.”

Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger

I’m less interested in the content and more in the presentation. How could we have this sort of experience on a Kobo?

Climate change: Mapping in 3D where the earth will become uninhabitable

An even better piece of visual, data, storytelling.

Whole Earth Index

“Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1970 and 2002.”

Historical Trails

“…very few interfaces do a brilliant job of the third need: showing me where I've been and how I got here… Patterns like breadcrumbs help us navigate through website or wiki with lots of subpages, but those don't scale well beyond ~7 steps.”

Craft

“The constant tension of shipping faster versus shipping better. Falling into a cycle of "Ship, then iterate" is a trap. It ends up being more shiterate. Things happen and that "fast-follow" V1.1 release or V2.0 you had imagined probably won't.”

Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster

“We live in a mega-scale corporate capitalist economy, and in such a setting technology is never used to save time. It’s used to speed up production and consumption in order to expand the system. The basic rule is this: technology doesn't make our lives easier. It makes them faster and more crammed with stuff...Believing that AI will save time is like being a person in the late 1800s seeing their first car and thinking “oh how easy it’ll be to get to the meadow now!” People back then didn’t imagine that by the 1960s we’d be stuck in traffic jams for hours in mega-cities. Now apply this to AI.”

Don’t waste food

A masterclass in visual storytelling.

A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft

“Software engineers, as a species, love automation. Inevitably, the best of them build tools that make other kinds of work obsolete. This very instinct explained why we were so well taken care of: code had immense leverage. One piece of software could affect the work of millions of people. Naturally, this sometimes displaced programmers themselves.”

a portrait of Tenochtitlan