ill Designed Arguments

The only sure thing is our own self depricating humor. Fuck did I say humor I meant Critisim.

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VR Design

I got to play with a vive for the first time yersterday and it was everything I could have every hoped for and more. The interaction the detail the interface everything was incredible.

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Design Morality

What is design morality? I continually hear about design principles which seem to run amuck with self prophecying morality. But ethics I would argue are seperate from design. Something can be technically design sound but be morally wrong, whatever that means. Dark patterns are considered bad design, but they're not, are they. A design should only be measured by the metrics of its success. By the problem it is solving, if the problem is the company wants to make more money by keeking the customer on the page then the dark pattern solves that problem. Perhaps its a narrow sighted view and perhaps its more damaging in the long term but if it does succeed in its inital goal then that is good design.

There's always lots of talk about how design should be used to find the problem to dig deep and ask the real questions, to find the real answers and create innovative and new solutions. But thats not what happens most of the time is it. No instead you get yet another app.

The difference is that while the dark pattern may be morally wrong and poorly designed it is by some metric successful, otherwise it wouldn't be something that we talk about. I'm not advocating the use of dark patterns, its the hypocrisy of talking about opposing dark patterns when what you're designing is only a thinly veiled pixel of a difference.

Not only are strong and clear design priciples important but so are solid and logical design morals. Its not easy, I think most people avoid discussing morals because it exposes how far they've had to concede their own beliefs or how little they've considered the distinction. This makes it so important for open and clear dialouge about where your morals lie and where the morals of your company or your work lie. Because you the one that carries out your companies vision and so you should have say in your work and the morals in which you are doing your work.

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Log_9.19.2016

Comfort really is the death of work. Not even the comfort of not working but he creature comforts, the routine, the everyday exsistence that becomes average and normal.

Is it even possible to build the routine of work as I've planned? I must try as its far too late to give up on such a developed and long cherished idea. HA! the bane of my existence thought and not action. How many listless nights I have spent thinking. Even the endless imaginings and countless ideas have succumb to the creature of comfort.

The comfort of inaction; of so perfectly thought out plans that they will never be fullfilled. Or so late in finally coming to fruition that they are long past their expiration date.

But its fine I reason to myself as I wade through countless meanlingless tasks, convincing myself that I got something of worth done. While all the while the real work is never reached pushed back so far as to disrupt the pattern of my routine, of my carefully constructed routine...

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Log_8.29.2016

I just want to subsist. I've spent my whole life dreaming, chasing, yearning for a future for what I wanted, for what I was told to want, for a dream.

I don't think I want any of it anymore. Its all blurring, in a race to consume as much as I can I've become drunk. Stumbling forward towards something I've not thought about long enough to care for. The madness has fully set in and I wish now only to numb it, to run away and drown myself in the boredom of routine. To give up for some time in the monotony of normal daily life.

Is a fear of committment so bad?

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Its funny how no matter how much you convince yourself you don't care, some things just shake you up regardless of how distanced you try to be.

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The longer I live the more numb I choose to become. Its the only way I can live; the more I learn.

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Full—Filled Emptyness

What is to be completely consumed, to be kept up late for months. To have your head filled with its thoughts night after night. To lay down exhausted after creating, after checking, after pouring yourself into something. Is this why they compare an artistic endevear to a child? Is it because you pour yourself, all your care, love, obsession, passion and with those things all the side effects. All the neurosis, the over obsession to detail, the silly rules, the logic of the universe you've created for them.

And then one day, you sit back and realize you have an extra minute. And its not a minute you've stolen away, no its truly an extra minute. And you feel empty, you struggle because every other creation you've made has brought satisfaction a sense of completeness but not this emptyness.

But then you realize that the two are not mutually exclusive. You're missing that satisfaction, in fact its so complete you missed it. Its not some small bit of pride to show off to others, to show them you did this. No this is more, this a complete baring of your soul. This is a level of completion so far that its no longer you, its no longer something you've made, its something new.

Its journeyed with you for all those months as you've grown, as you've changed and developed so too has it alongside you. And now alongside that completion that soul exposing pride a new emotion creeps in; fear. This is completion you've never before experienced, your only minutes into learning how to cope with but now you have to deal with showing that completion. With giving it up to the world and being judged on that completion. Being judged on that fear, you've no longer control of it, its beyond you but it is you.

So what do you do, do you go back to obsessing over it, go back to all you know. Do you curl up and let it pass, recite the fear of litany in your bed as the world passes under you. Do you turn and face it, do you defend it as you've grown to love it. Do you call to the void hoping that some of it matters hoping that it fills the emtpyness for a minute. That it numbs you from the logic that none of it matters that its a zero sum game and all was lost before you even began.

i don't know what you do. But if that completion fails... If it dosen't even make some imperceptible difference. I don't know if I can repeat that. I don't know how many times I can throw my body against the wall. Thats why don't think about it I guess. If you don't think about it, if you keep yourself numb then whats to stop the battle.

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The Beautiful Monotony of a Routine

IT frees you. People are afraid of routine, right? Everyone I mention it too seems to view it as a bad thing which seems normal, right. I think its because we routine as losing, you're supposed to wake up one day in your 40's and realize over half your life is over and it just slipped away. A routine is settling its giving up your freedom. And I think in part theres truth to that but only because people associate routine with a place with the same. I don't think routine has to work like that.

I don't think routine has to be bolted down to a place a routine is a process its how you do things, so disassociate it from your home. Second I think that routines tend to accidentally form. You fall into them by accident and they end up not being great for you. The third issue is the association with the opposite of freedom.

I've decided that having a routine gives me freedom. The less I have to think about the details the more I can focus on everything else, important or otherwise.

The caveout to all this is that I am designing my routine. I think most people just happen upon a routine or they have an ill formed one. But I think that with conscious thought I can mould my routine to do exactly what I want and need it to do. The issue arising from that is that its difficult to conciously create habbits.

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Virtual Reality will change everything.

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I seek validation on a societal scale.

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Digital ARchitecture

If you've stepped in VR thusly it can be an amazing and overwhelming experience, one that leaves lingering thoughts of future potiental. And while currently the matrix, cyperspace, netscape and tron all dont exist they will. They will and so will many millions of VR spaces. Each room an infinte dreamland, much like current internet you will have to travel this space. Browsers help us speed from site to site and they have evolved to suit the needs of how we consume media.

The biggest indicator that the web is about to be usurped has actually been a recent web browser, Vivaldi. This is the most refined web browser I've seen thus far. Its creation the result of current and long thought about the constant use of the web in daily life. The most beautiful and elegant creations of a form usually come at the end, when the tools are most refined the creators most expererienced. And Vivaldi is the early death mews of the internet as we know it.

Every sci-fi flick and cyberpunk tale has its interpretation of this space this virtual reality landscape. And most of them are fantastical, thats why when I stepping into current systems I was so heartily dissapointed. But the focus at the moment is not on structure its on content. AS far as the sysstem is concerned any placeholder will work as long as we can get to the content. I'm sure that there are powers that be at work on the net but until then we can discuss some of its qualitites.

The first quality of VR is that it lacks qualitites. VR has the potential to not follow any of the rules, physics don't have to work properly, time and space are constructs to be moulded. 3 Dimensional space can exist in any way we can imagine. This is how most of our perceptions of cyberspace are based on. This world that to us meatspace adjusted humans is in a sense inconceviable. That being said the need of its use will define some of the spaces paramaters.

Even though this space can rip apart real spacial rules it does need to allow us movement through it. And because of its weird quasi physicality of the space (or at least until us monkeys can uncouple that correlation) we will have to move through it. This movement and how we go about it will have lots of consequences and applications through the rise of VR.

This so called Architectur of VR is a topic that greatly intruiges me. I keep asking myself what would a library or museum lookl in VR. I don't want to just view the things on a screen like I currently do. There will be instances when I will need instant info and when I do I'll just open up the browser that I can call at anytime and search it. Or more likely I'll ask my VR navi the question and they'll give me an answer. But what if I Want to get lost in research or wander in the largest storage of information to ever exist. What is that like, what is like to wander down infinite halls past millions of books, what is like to wander past dissected dinosaurs and every species of bird?

I want to know what the infinitum of human knowledge looks like.

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Consumption 0f Consumerism

Seeking fullfillment through constant consumption. Craft and consumerisms self cannibalisation have been floating around in my head space. In the senario in which I start to notice several things at the same time or this conflaration of things come together to form correlating strand of thoughts. I've struggled previously with fair use or copyright or whatever you want to call structural society enforcing rules on creation.

The straight jacket designer side of me goes of course copyright should be protected. The brand is sacred, long live the brand. And anything that inferes with the brand should be struck down as unholy and a heretic. This is the society in me, the mild upbringing, the one taught to not question because there are none.

Another part of me says fuck that, it says fuck that in a very logical fashion. Anything that gets put in front of my face I should have a say in. Nothing is sacred least of all advertising from god playing corporations wanting to such the life out my existence because that makes it easier for them to sell to me. Here escape your dreary life! look capitalizism is great! you have 50 choices for toothpaste isn't your life greate! FUCK THAT FUCK The goddamn fucking noise that is advertising fuck anyone who stops you and says buy this! as they show you sexist ads or pull your emtions with puppies or polar bears. Stop in the street and fucking rip out there throats.

You owe them nothing.

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Modernity

ITs funny how the word modern is a dated word. The difference between definition and context. The definition of the word Modern is new, current, soemthing that is relevant or stylistically trend. That means that the definition is context driven. The word modern is used the same in the 60's as it is today. Which starts to beg the question "when is modern no longer modern". The moment its spoken or written as the title of a book. Looking back the word modern is laughable yet we say that looks so modern. When in reality we don't fucking know what we're saying, we're coping out and using a sufficently generic word when many others would better suffice if we gave it two seconds thought. Modern as a movement as a philosopy is a whole different story. A story for another night.

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My life is all noise... I think I need to work on that.

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Sometimes I think its sad that I'll never be like Rothko

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Imagine that we simply decide that we’re going to approach virtual reality as an experimental ground for consensus political decision-making, new democracy, liquid democracy, and all of these other systems. Every VR system that gets created—all of these virtual environments—the default assumption that people will want to make is that you’ve got a bunch of authors at the center of the system that create a world for other people to pay to enjoy. That political assumption will automatically assert itself because people will treat virtual reality like the web. But there is no reason that Facebook couldn’t have been a user-owned cooperative, and that Facebook users vote for their representatives, and those representatives govern Facebook on their behalf. Facebook could have been built as an electoral democracy; instead it was built as a corporate feudalism. Virtual reality could be built as electoral democracies; it could be built as literal democracies; it could be built as corporate feudalisms; you could implement almost any political system for governing the environments that we’re almost certainly going to be using a huge chunk of our working lives for the next 20 years. In 5 years, when we have this conversation, I would strongly expect us to be wearing stereo goggles on both ends. As common as Skype is now, VR is going to be in 5 or 10 years. I think we’ve got an opportunity to say that these systems will be user-governed and community-owned because otherwise you’re going to have corporations literally building your realities for you, to a degree that we can currently only dream of. They’re already doing it, and if we give virtual reality to them, they’re going to do it even more. Oculus is owned by Facebook. ‘Welcome to Facebook Land!’ If that becomes the ubiquitous technology… [if] everybody who’s using virtual reality is using Facebook’s Oculus and that’s the only offer in town—if that becomes the standard hardware platform—I really think that we are putting the future of the human race’s cognitive liberty in jeopardy. I don’t want us to be rats in a virtual maze that observes everything that we do and manipulates our behavior to make us buy more. I mean, we’re evolved creatures. We’ve only had language for—I don’t know—a few million years. We’ve only had tools for half a million years. We’ve had fire for half a million years. Actually, we’ve had tools longer. But fire is half a million years. Agriculture is ten or twenty thousand years. We’re still filled with exploitable reflexes that are artifacts of our primate evolution. And if you push those buttons, you get pathological behaviors out of us. We’ve created a system where we’re evolving our own predators in the form of corporations which watch our behavior, throw it through statistical analysis, identify the weak points that evolution has [left] us, and then stab them to make us buy things. Virtual reality is going to be an astonishingly powerful toolkit for that kind of work, and if we don’t take control of the governance of those systems, they’re going to be used as weapons against us by marketers and worse.

—Vinay Gupta

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Each object, each letter, each form, each sound, each color should have a function. Also, the artist should have a functional role in society ... a letter should support the function of reading, nothing else. It should have a clear and functional form, and not be elegant, not be feminine. It's beauty is in its function, and nothing mysterious should be sought behind or beyond it.

—Schuitema, Paul. 1961. Neue Typografie um 1930. In Neue Grafik.