Hello,
We're still on a streamlined format this week. I hope you don't mind. Here's this week's digest:
I enjoyed this piece examining the evolution of the design thinking movement. While it's nice seeing big players like Stanford's d.school and IDEO take stock of criticism and reform their practices, I do see the same tendencies to appropriate from the social justice sector ("care"? Really?) repeating themselves, without placing as much attention on disrupting the power structures that generate inequities. Writes Rebecca Ackermann: "As long as it remains in the halls of consultancies and ivory-tower institutions, its practitioners may continue to struggle to decenter the already powerful and privileged."
While visiting Johannesburg's civic centre, I was surprised by the visceral disdain toward its brutalist architecture among the tour's participants. Brutalist buildings are here to stay, so it's helpful to get a reminder of how this style came about so that we can all appreciate it a little bit more.
Quartz has put out some stellar pieces around work culture lately, some of which touch on the themes I introduced in my end-of-year predictions and 2023 introductory newsletter. This interview with grief expert Breeshia Wade illuminates the experience of grieving at work in a whole new way: "We don’t live in a culture that has taught us how to navigate interpersonal grief. So it makes sense that we aren’t equipped to navigate grief within an institution. Ultimately, workplace culture is an extension of societal culture, which is made up of individuals. So if [we as] individuals are struggling to reconcile our relationship with grief, we set the standard, inevitably, that talking about loss is unacceptable."
This interview with journalist Johann Hari perfectly illustrates my point about ChatGPT as a distraction, and our need to maintain focus (see the first issue of 2023). He describes the mechanisms through which big tech steals our attention away from long-term personal and collective goals -- including addressing the climate crisis. This was probably my favourite read of the week. "We are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for a few more crumbs of attention from his table. We are the free citizens; we own our minds and we can take them back if we want to. I’d argue that, to deal with the climate crisis, we’re going to have to."
And also:
Against self-care
Rethinking impostor syndrome
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