Hey guys,
It’s me, Ammar. I write about The Ordinary in the age of computers and mass media.
The dream of computing was to become a “bicycle for the mind”, a tool to help us see the mundane world around us more vividly.
But the computing nightmare has pulled us further into our delusions, away from the vivid color of life.
This newsletter is not an episode out of Black Mirror. I’m much more hopeful about how we write the rest of this story.
Interested? Here are a few posts to get you started:
Finding a Discipline that Works for You
Visualizing a Hierarchy of Needs
The Format
A very ordinary quote
A roundup of very ordinary reads
A brief and very ordinary note
A very ordinary visual
Motivation
From Super Normal by Jasper Morrison & Naoto Fukasawa:
Design makes things seem special, and who wants normal if they can have special? And that’s the problem. What has grown naturally and unselfconsciously over the years cannot easily be replaced.
Not that old things shouldn’t be replaced or that new things are bad, just that things which are designed to attract attention are usually unsatisfactory.
There are better ways to design than putting a big effort into making something look special. Special is generally less useful than normal, and less rewarding in the long term.
Ammar