These Design Readings will make Your World more Meaningful

We’re bookworms, and have shared some our favourite books about information visualization. Reading shapes our thinking and influences why Mentionmapp is what you see today, and how it’ll evolve tomorrow.

Thinking about visually navigating the Twitterverse of connections and conversations has been like balancing on a high-wire. On one hand there’s the data and on the other hand, there’s our design choices. We embrace the many constraints that go into bootstrapping a business. Having constraints inform and guide our decisions with everything we do with Mentionmapp never feels out of the ordinary.

Our mind-set is curiosity forged with a love of design. Everyday is one of turning theory into practice. Keeping people at the heart of design can and will make the world more meaningful. Here’s a selection of design readings that are top shelf on our bookcase.

Glimmer (Warren Berger) Despite having worked with designers and engineers needing to learn the workings of CAD/CAM software 10 years before Berger’s book was published, this one counts as the first design book I purchased. The ideas still resonate today like “ask stupid questions,” “make hope visible,” and “embrace constraints.”

Design and Truth (Robert Grudin), instantly jumped off the shelf the moment I read “poor design tells a lie, a lie usually related… to the getting or abusing of power.” Diving into this narrative that combines a meaningful consideration of the relationship between aesthetics and authority might add some sparks to your next team stand-up.

Well Designed (Jon Koklo) is not hard to spot on the bookshelf. That aside, I appreciate Koklo’s experience and keeping the conversation a human-centric one.

Projective Ecologies (Chris Reed & Nina-Marie Lister) is a great multidisciplinary collection of essays. This makes the list because thinking about our design relationships with the natural world matters more than simply designing more stuff. It’s introduced as an opportunity to understand ecology “as a medium of thought, exchange, and representation.”

Emotionally Durable Design (Jonathan Chapman). Speaking of stuff, Chapman’s book is meaningful because it serves to counter the “throwaway” mindset that’s creating a planet being crushed by extreme duress. It’s a thoughtful and hopeful dialogue that highlights the great opportunity we have to redefine our material relationships.

Wabi-Sabi (Leonard Koren) The metaphor is at the core of how we understand and relate to our world. This used book store gem, speaks volumes when offering the box (rectilinear, precise, contained) as a metaphor for modernism, and the bowl a metaphor (free shape, open at the top) for Wabi-sabi. The key to Wabi-sabi is seeing “a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.”

We’ll leave you with simplicity of words and complexity of thought

From time to time
The clouds give rest
To the moon beholders..

-Matsuo Basho

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From the pen of John (cofounder).

We hope you’ll visit Mentionmapp and explore the Twitterverse soon!

Two Words You’ll Want to Care About

The siren like technocratic-utopians are becoming tough to tune out. Stories of the future play like an endless loop of The Jetsons. There’s the image of coolness and convenience, but it’s really all about control and winning. If technology owns us, the technologists win.

For the many it’ll be living in a cave and rubbing a couple good sticks together, while the few will live like the Jetsons. Refusing a tomorrow that’s bound in isolationism and dystopianism, there has to be an act of mass humanism. Being more human starts with being skeptical of what they’re selling us, and not taking every new product release as an epiphany.

We’re curious, we believe in what’s possible, and we’re confident in human potential finding solutions to human problems. In the spirit of optimistic humanism we’re focusing on two key words that are the core of our conversations. Genuineness and stewardship.

Genuineness is defined as: “free from pretense, affectation, or hypocrisy; sincere: a genuine person.”

Wrapped in a guise of connectedness and convenience the web of personalization is technology that’s effectively erasing genuineness. For instance the unwitting communication with chatbots is disingenuous. The lack of transparency and choice of interactions (cold lines of code versus flesh and flowing blood) is a technical erosion of humanity. With more ways to talk more with people than ever before we should be interacting with more genuine humanness, not less.

Stewardship is defined as: “the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care: stewardship of natural resources.”

The last wave of industrialists operated like a plague of locusts. They collectively laid waste to our waters, our soils, and the air we breathe to assure their 1% status. The stewardship of our natural resources is a huge concern, but it’s degradation has gone hand in hand with a decline in the value of intellectual stewardship.

Neil Postman wrote in 1985, “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.” ― Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

The only difference between Postman’s yesterday and our today, is the global scale of amusement.

Intellectual stewardship isn’t about being pretentious. Because, if looking out the window of curiosity and keeping a door open for doubt are slammed shut, we’re screwed. There’s nothing noble or cool about the imposition of stupidity.

Being connected to unprecedented amounts of information should be translating into a richness of individual knowledge. The opportunity to raise the collective intellect is massive. There little reason that we can’t have more genuine people exchanging real ideas. Choosing fractionally less amusement and embracing marginally more curiosity, could be like standing on the plains watching the wild horses run instead of believing in a mythical world of Unicorns.

From the pen of John (cofounder).

We hope you’ll visit Mentionmapp and explore the Twitterverse soon!