I’m not much of a podcaster, but I can see how Callin could add a missing social element to the podcast experience. It’s a Twitter-like platform to help discover new shows, host (live) shows and engage with the host and other listeners.

On the rare occasions I do client work these days, I usually present my work in short screencasts rather than elaborate meetings. Claap aims to make this easier and more interactive: you create asynchronous videos (explaining design drafts, for example) that you can share with colleagues and clients. They can then highlight and comment on parts of the screencast or respond to polls about preferred options.

This novel approach to making reading easier/faster has made the rounds on the internet recently. It’s fun to play around with it – use the converter to experiment. As usual, the internet has deemed it a hot new thing and I’m sure there’ll be several apps copying the idea soon. But as you can read in the statement by founder Renato Casutt on the homepage, the research into whether it actually makes any difference is mixed so far.

It’s so satisfying when you finally remember a word that’s been on the tip of your tongue, right? This little tool can help with that: add part of the word, its length or even part of its meaning, and it’ll spit out a list of possible matches.

Consumed →

Exploring our culture of exploitation

A hugely interesting title that takes us through the hideously complex world of fashion and sustainability, laying bare its colonial roots and how we can uproot a system that continues to oppress. “Consumed asks us to look at how and why we buy what we buy, how it’s created, who it benefits, and how we can solve the problems created by a wasteful system. ... Consumed will teach you how to be a citizen and not a consumer.”

Designerly ways of knowing →

How to think about design

A cute little book about better ways to think about (and do) design, by one of my favourite design critics and researchers, Danah Abdulla. “If you take away the post-its, the A3 papers and the markers, can designers think? ... [This] iterative list is not meant to be a definitive how to guide, but to spark conversations, to prompt critical thinking and to help designers reconfigure their discipline.” Friends of DD enjoy a 20% discount. Become a Friend to access specials like this.

The belief in an individualistic, self-reliant society is one of North America’s biggest exports: from career success to living healthily, everything is possible if you just try hard enough. Tara McMullin goes back to President Hoover’s notion of ‘rugged individualism’ to highlight the shortcomings of a philosophy based on a very narrow slice of the population. “What could happen if we replaced the philosophy of rugged individualism with a philosophy of rugged cooperation? What if we swapped out the scripts we’ve learned in an individualist culture with the curiosity and care of a collaborative culture? And how would your business or career shift if you approached it not as your best way to climb to the top in a flawed system but as a laboratory for experimenting with ruggedly cooperative systems?”

A great little piece that shows how much of our engineering and design thinking is hardwired to accommodate the way fossil fuels generate power. The age of electrification offers so many opportunities to rewrite these rules. “Fossil fuels are volatile, awkward, and leaky. Engines are bulky, balky, and have lots of moving parts. Accommodating all that in something like a car requires zillions of design compromises, many of which we’ve been making for so long that we’ve long since forgotten that they are compromises at all.”

A lovely longread offering rare peek inside the world of vending machines and their operators. These machines are so omnipresent, especially in places like Japan, that we rarely think about the logistics and innovation involved behind the scenes that keep them serving us. “He was drawn to vending because he liked the idea of earning money while he slept, ate, studied, interviewed for other jobs, and in general applied his energies elsewhere. Ignoring for a moment the fierce battle for plots, the maintenance stresses, the logistical feats required to keep far-flung machines stocked and clean, at the core of any vendor’s ambition there is often a dream of becoming rich while doing better things. This dream is not always achievable. The second-, third-, fourth- and fifth-hand machines being sold online are a testament to the many dabblers who plunge in only to beat an eventual retreat.”