Desk accessories from Block

• Sketch Desk Tidy https://blockdesign.co.uk/products/sketch-desk-tidy?variant=39839314346193
• Letter rack https://blockdesign.co.uk/products/wire-letter-rack?variant=39839329616081
• Medium clipboard frame https://blockdesign.co.uk/products/clipboard-frame-medium

reply to dandennison84 at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/17921/#Comment_17921

I've written a bit before on The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten, the latter of which has been emerging since roughly 2013 in English language contexts. Some of it is similar to or extends @dandennison84's framing along with some additional history.

Because of the richness of prior annotation and note taking traditions, for those who might mean what we're jokingly calling ZK®, I typically refer to that practice specifically as a "Luhmann-esque zettelkasten", though it might be far more appropriate to name them a (Melvil) "Dewey Zettelkasten" because the underlying idea which makes Luhmann's specific zettelkasten unique is that he was numbering his ideas and filing them next to similar ideas. Luhmann was treating ideas on cards the way Dewey had treated and classified books about 76 years earlier. Luhmann fortunately didn't need to have a standardized set of numbers the way the Mundaneum had with the Universal Decimal Classification system, because his was personal/private and not shared.

To be clear, I'm presently unaware that Dewey had or kept any specific sort of note taking system, card-based or otherwise. I would suspect, given his context, that if we were to dig into that history, we would find something closer to a Locke-inspired indexed commonplace book, though he may have switched later in life as his Library Bureau came to greater prominence and dominance.

Some of the value of the Dewey-Luhmann note taking system stems from the same sorts of serendipity one discovers while flipping through ideas that one finds in searching for books on library shelves. You may find the specific book you were looking for, but you're also liable to find some interesting things to read on the shelves around that book or even on a shelf you pass on the way to find your book.

Perhaps naming it and referring to it as the Dewey-Luhmann note taking system or the Dewey-Luhmann Zettelkasten may help to better ground and/or demystify the specific practices? Co-crediting them for the root idea and an early actual practice, respectively, provides a better framing and understanding, especially for native English speakers who don't have the linguistic context for understanding Zettelkästen on its own. Such a moniker would help to better delineate the expected practices and shape of a note taking practice which could be differentiated from other very similar ones which provide somewhat different affordances.

Of course, as the history of naming scientific principles and mathematical theorems after people shows us, as soon as such a surname label might catch on, we'll assuredly discover someone earlier in the timeline who had mastered these principles long before (eg: the "Gessner Zettelkasten" anyone?) Caveat emptor.

https://teuxdeux.com/blog/swissmiss-tina-roth-eisenberg-interview

Tina Roth Eisenberg is a co-creator of TeuxDeux.

• Summary
  • Interesting built environment sustainable design
    • based on ancient Roman residential design technique
    • leveraging and adapting this ancient rain water harvesting to accomplish multiple functions in a modern context::
      • potable water
      • evaporative cooling
      • irrigation
      • sanitation
      • personal hygiene

Following a pattern seen in many modern wooden recipe card boxes to hold the current recipe one is working on, Jeff Sheldon has cut a long thin slot into his card holder to allow one to stand up today's card in the front as a means of displaying and featuring what needs to get done.

https://ugmonk.com/

Developed in a Kickstarter, ugmonk.com is where Jeff Sheldon now sells his Analog productivity system and refills as well as other related lifestyle brand products.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ugmonk/analog-the-simplest-productivity-system

Jeff Sheldon's Analog productivity system is a physical product consisting of a wooden tray, metal divider, 3 x 5" custom printed index cards (and refills), a felt carrier, and other accessories which functions as a minimalistic version of the old Memindex.

In other words, it risks undermining the intent of the API design.

Payment Information Centrality Revision Project "Ways to fund your education" (or similar) instead of "Minimize Financial Barriers". "Verified Sources" as a phrase is problematic for users. Desire is to provide assurance to users that there are individualized options yet still have those options located in a more streamlined, centrally located way.

These are the other pages that have similar content: https://www.waubonsee.edu/admissions/costs-and-payments/paying-tuition

https://www.waubonsee.edu/admissions/costs-and-payments/paying-tuition/payments-verified-sources

https://www.waubonsee.edu/admissions/costs-and-payments/paying-tuition/making-payments

https://www.waubonsee.edu/admissions/costs-and-payments/paying-tuition/payment-plans

https://www.waubonsee.edu/admissions/costs-and-payments/paying-tuition/tuition-refunds

https://www.waubonsee.edu/admissions/costs-and-payments/paying-tuition/tax-credits-education

Paging Christie DeCarolis...

https://web.archive.org/web/20230503103156/https://www.bluelabellabs.com/blog/deceptive-dark-patterns-stats/

Overview of darkpatterns in how brands treat people online. Vgl [[Digital Ethics Malpractices 20190529071619]] en [[Software transparantie over data opslag 20200109075817]]

What a cool documentation design; I love the all-in-one layout.

Very reminiscent of the old CoffeeScript docs, to me.

This has implications for instructional designers and is one of the main reasons why a teacher of record should participate in the design of a course to the fullest extent possible. It isn't just about "buy in". It's about authenticity, authority, and teacher agency.

Online design can easily enforce this perscriptive approach to "delivery" as opposed to teaching.

This could be trivially solved by extending the syntax to include some notation that has the semantics of a well-defined reference but the ergonomics of a quoted string. So if the notation used the sigil ~ (for example), then ~"Bob" could denote an implicitly defined entity that is, through some type-/class-specific mechanism associated with the string "Bob".

Muriel Cooper, the first design director of the MIT Press and a founding faculty member of MIT's Media Lab, designed the MIT Press colophon in 1965. The iconic colophon has been acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in 2023.

The commission had originally been offered to Paul Rand (o Eye Bee M logo fame) in 1962, but when he turned down the offer, he suggested they offer it to Cooper.

基本、體驗、魅力，問題是下一步。 有趣的是，產品的基本取決於social norm。

Emotion drives human choice.

tenere presente x diventare courses designer x INDIRE o colleges e aiutarsi con https://www.bcit.ca/learning-teaching-centre/resources/

https://booksbythefoot.com/

If you need please contact with us at this URL: https://vectorwiz.com/order/

<span style="color: red;">Design Consideration: Information Hierarchy of Contract Terms</span>

The order of the clauses in the contract are based on the new joiner's onboarding journey and the fact that research has highlighted that most people do not have the time to read every contract they are given. For example, the first section 'Getting Started' includes the information / clauses that are likely to be the most relevant in the new joiner's first few months. The last section of the contract includes in the information that are least likely to be 'used' from an operational perspective in a standard onboarding journey.

<span style="color: red;">Design Consideration: Text-only Details of Employment</span>

We recognise that sometimes for operational or other reasons that such an illustrated page might not be the best solution - they may be more time consuming to edit, or less straightforward to screen read, or highlight, copy and paste. We have created a simpler, unillustrated version of this page with all the Details of Employment in one table, which can be used where appropriate.

In the version of the contract the employee receives, it would only have one Details of Employment page, not both versions; please delete as appropriate.

You can find the templates for these Details of Employment pages here [link]

<span style="color: red;">Design Consideration: Illustrated Details of Employment</span>

As part of our considerations about usability and the information hierarchy of the contract, we have consolidated the most essential pieces of information for a prospective employee in one place, so that the key parameters of the contract are made clear at a glance. As this key page sets the tone of this employer-employee relationship, and probably will be referred to most frequently, we have worked with illustrator Terri Po to create a visually engaging template to convey a creative, friendly, exciting tone that reflects the spirit of being a part of Livable Planet. The text is separate from the illustrations to allow for HR to customise the details for each employee. We've been inspired by examples such as Tony Chocolonely's one-page illustrated contract.

<span style="color: green;">Legal Consideration: Details of Employment</span>

We have included a cover page with key employment details. This is for three reasons: 1. Usability for the company - keeping most of the factual information on the front cover means that it is quicker for the company to be able to tailor contracts for new joiners, and prevents legacy wording from previous contracts accidentially being included in other people's contracts. This page also creates a clean 'definitions' page, which means that instead of having to tailor wording throughout the contract, the contract can cross refer to 'the start date' etc, saving time and also reduces the risk of legacy text. 2. Usability for the new joiner - instead of having to scan-read a whole contract, the key information relating to their job can be found easily near the front of the document. 3. There are certain information that legally must be provided to the employee within certain time periods. Having the information in this format makes it less likely that such information won't be included. See our Reimaging Contract Terms table for further details.

<span style="color: green;">Legal Consideration: Non-contractual Explanations</span>

It is important to distinguish what wording in the document is intended to be legally binding vs conversational / contextual. One way we have done this is to make it visually clear that all language in the purple boxes 'do not form part of the contract'.

<span style="color: red;">Design Consideration: Non-contractual Explanations</span>

To ensure that the contextual text was not interpreted as legally binding, it was important for the contextual text to be clearly distinguishable from the legal wording. This is done visually, through the bordered box and distinct typographical style. This text is also enclosed in angle brackets for accessibility reasons, such that users of the contract who may use screen readers or similar tools can identify the contextual text without relying on visual means.

<span style="color: red;">Design Consideration: Useful References</span>

As the employment contract can be used as a 'how to' manual, it can be useful to have references to communication channels / links included within the contract.

<span style="color: red;">Design Consideration: Linked Documents</span>

This contract references external resources, such as policy documents. These are visually distinguished in underlined blue text, and would be hyperlinked to external resources when the contract is read as a digital document.

How to use these annotations

Employment contracts, including this example, are ideally not be not one-size-fits-all, but designed to respond to a specific organisational, legal, and design context. We have created an annotated version of this example contract to explain our thought processes and reasons for why we have made the contract’s strategic decisions in this way.

We strongly recommend you read this version of the contract with annotations first, before using the contract as a starting point for your own, to understand the context of how that contract was shaped, and reflect on how these constraints or considerations may or may not apply to your own circumstances.

We have tagged these annotations under the key categories below:

• <span style="color: blue;">Policy Considerations: how we have considered the organisation’s policy, i.e. how its members decide to work together and run their organisation. </span>
• <span style="color: green;">Legal Considerations: how we have considered the legal frameworks in creating the contract, including how employment law, contract law, etc., has shaped how the contract works.</span>
• <span style="color: red;">Design Considerations: how we have considered communications design questions, including information hierarchy, user experience, and how to ensure the nature of the agreement is communicated clearly.</span>

We also invite you to look at our Reimagining Contract Terms table for our reflections on the typical terms that form an employment contract, and how they can be reimagined beyond their conventional approaches.

<span style="color: red;">Design Consideration: Contractually-defined Terms</span>

This helps with the interpretation of the contract, by distinguishing terms which are to be interpreted under their specific contractual definitions.

<span style="color: red;">Design Consideration: Personalised Details</span>

Liveable Planet is a mission-driven collective, and it is useful to emphasise the shared basis of rights, obligations and protocols of its members - by highlighting details that are unique to the employee, it not only makes it faster for HR to customise the template, but also highlights that the terms are shared across the community.

<span style="color: red;">Design Consideration: Invitations to Discuss</span>

We recognise that 'contract-ing' is part of a process of building a mutual relationship, and not just an unilateral imposition of legal terms. We highlight prompts for discussion to create the space for discussion over critical parts of this relationship.

<span style="color: red;">Design Consideration: Footer and Page Numbers</span>

While we expect the contract to be used primarily as a digital document, we have included this footer here to convenience should the contract be printed to ensure it is complete.

<span style="color: red;">Design Consideration: Personalisation</span>

The contract embodies the start of a working relationship between the employer and employee. It was important from a design perspective to personalise the contract from the very cover, to reflect the importance of this individualised process of relationship-building. We've been inspired by Lou Byng's work on Civic Square's employment contracts, which are visually personalised to each individual employee.

How to use these annotations

Employment contracts, including this example, are ideally not be not one-size-fits-all, but designed to respond to a specific organisational, legal, and design context. We have created an annotated version of this example contract to explain our thought processes and reasons for why we have made the contract’s strategic decisions in this way.

We strongly recommend you read this version of the contract with annotations first, before using the contract as a starting point for your own, to understand the context of how that contract was shaped, and reflect on how these constraints or considerations may or may not apply to your own circumstances.

We have tagged these annotations under the key categories below:

• <span style="color: blue;">Policy Considerations: how we have considered the organisation’s policy, i.e. how its members decide to work together and run their organisation. </span>
• <span style="color: green;">Legal Considerations: how we have considered the legal frameworks in creating the contract, including how employment law, contract law, etc., has shaped how the contract works.</span>
• <span style="color: red;">Design Considerations: how we have considered communications design questions, including information hierarchy, user experience, and how to ensure the nature of the agreement is communicated clearly.</span>

We also invite you to look at our Reimagining Contract Terms table for our reflections on the typical terms that form an employment contract, and how they can be reimagined beyond their conventional approaches.

This is, in part, why the tools for thought space should be looking at intellectual history to see how people have worked in the past.

Rather than looking at how writers have previously worked and building something specific that supports those methods, they've taken a tool designed for something else and just thrown it into the mix. Perhaps useful creativity stems from it in a new and unique way, but most likely writers are going to continue their old methods.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Hypothesis</span> in Liquid Margins 38: The rise of ChatGPT and how to work with and around it : Hypothesis (<time class='dt-published'>02/09/2023 16:11:54</time>)</cite></small>

https://coolors.co/

Curriculum design, and its underlying pedagogies, is critically important to the creation of less oppressive, more open and democratic educational practice.

The tabs on the webpage are a somewhat random and unintuitive. There are multiple tabs that could mean the same thing and are not necessarily distinct. There are also two rows of drop down tabs, which takes away from the adaptability and missing a meaningful sequence.

As humans we're good at separating things based on categories. The Dewey Decimal System systematically separates mathematics and history into disparate locations, but your zettelkasten shouldn't force this by overthinking categories. Perhaps the overlap of math and history is exactly the interdisciplinary topic you're working toward? If this is the case, just put cards into the slip box closest to their nearest related intellectual neighbor—and by this I mean nearest related to you, not to Melvil Dewey or anyone else. Over time, through growth and branching, ideas will fill in the interstitial spaces and neighboring ideas will slowly percolate and intermix. Your interests will slowly emerge into various bunches of cards in your box. Things you may have thought were important can separate away and end up on sparse branches while other areas flourish.

If you make the (false) choice to separate math and history into different "sections" it will be much harder for them to grow and intertwine in an organic and truly disciplinary way. Universities have done this sort of separation for hundreds of years and as a result, their engineering faculty can be buildings or even entire campuses away from their medical faculty who now want to work together in new interdisciplinary ways. This creates a physical barrier to more efficient and productive innovation and creativity. It's your zettelkasten, so put those ideas right next to each other from the start so they can do the work of serendipity and surprise for you. Do not artificially separate your favorite ideas. Let them mix and mingle and see what comes out of them.

If you feel the need to categorize and separate them in such a surgical fashion, then let your index be the place where this happens. This is what indices are for! Put the locations into the index to create the semantic separation. Math related material gets indexed under "M" and history under "H". Now those ideas can be mixed up in your box, but they're still findable. DO NOT USE OR CONSIDER YOUR NUMBERS AS TOPICAL HEADINGS!!! Don't make the fatal mistake of thinking this. The numbers are just that, numbers. They are there solely for you to be able to easily find the geographic location of individual cards quickly or perhaps recreate an order if you remove and mix a bunch for fun or (heaven forfend) accidentally tip your box out onto the floor. Each part has of the system has its job: the numbers allow you to find things where you expect them to be and the index does the work of tracking and separating topics if you need that.

The broader zettelkasten, tools for thought, and creativity community does a terrible job of explaining the "why" portion of what is going on here with respect to Luhmann's set up. Your zettelkasten is a crucible of ideas placed in juxtaposition with each other. Traversing through them and allowing them to collide in interesting and random ways is part of what will create a pre-programmed serendipity, surprise, and combinatorial creativity for your ideas. They help you to become more fruitful, inventive, and creative.

Broadly the same thing is happening with respect to the structure of commonplace books. There one needs to do more work of randomly reading through and revisiting portions to cause the work or serendipity and admixture, but the end results are roughly the same. With the zettelkasten, it's a bit easier for your favorite ideas to accumulate into one place (or neighborhood) for easier growth because you can move them around and juxtapose them as you add them rather than traversing from page 57 in one notebook to page 532 in another.

If you use your numbers as topical or category headings you'll artificially create dreadful neighborhoods for your ideas to live in. You want a diversity of ideas mixing together to create new ideas. To get a sense of this visually, play the game Parable of the Polygons in which one categorizes and separates (or doesn't) triangles and squares. The game created by Vi Hart and Nicky Case based on the research of Thomas Schelling provides a solid example of the sort of statistical mechanics going on with ideas in your zettelkasten when they're categorized rigidly. If you rigidly categorize ideas and separate them, you'll drastically minimize the chance of creating the sort of useful serendipity of intermixed and innovative ideas.

It's much harder to know what happens when you mix anthropology with complexity theory if they're in separate parts of your mental library, but if those are the things that get you going, then definitely put them right next to each other in your slip box. See what happens. If they're interesting and useful, they've got explicit numerical locators and are cross referenced in your index, so they're unlikely to get lost. Be experimental occasionally. Don't put that card on Henry David Thoreau in the section on writers, nature, or Concord, Massachusetts if those aren't interesting to you. Besides everyone has already done that. Instead put him next to your work on innovation and pencils because it's much easier to become a writer, philosopher, and intellectual when your family's successful pencil manufacturing business can pay for you to attend Harvard and your house is always full of writing instruments from a young age. Now you've got something interesting and creative. (And if you must, you can always link the card numerically to the other transcendentalists across the way.)

In case they didn't hear it in the back, I'll shout it again: ACTIVELY WORK AGAINST YOUR NATURAL URGE TO USE YOUR ZETTELKASTEN NUMBERS AS TOPICAL HEADINGS!!!

Larry makes a similar analogy (pass by value vs pass by reference) to my argument about why patches are actually better at the collaboration phase—pull requests are fragile links. Transmission of patch contents is robust; they're not references to external systems—a soft promise that you will service a request for the content when it comes. A patch is just the proposed change itself.

Reminder to revisit this to write a related essay

Wiki is better than email http://microformats.org/wiki/wiki-better-than-email

See also: https://www.gwern.net/Backstop#internet-community-design

Everything is foldable in IDEs so long as the IDEs make them foldable.

What about chained dotted access? foo.bar.baz is probably okay as bar.baz @ (the Foo) (or even @the Foo), but probably not if it takes the form bar.baz from the Foo. (It just doesn't look reasonable to me.)

Alternatively, what about @bar.baz for the Foo?

This is indeed very good (for the reasons stated here).

how important is the concrete syntax of their language in contrast to the abstract concepts behind them what I mean they say can someone somewhat awkward concrete syntax be an obstacle when it comes to the acceptance

This is the meeting where APIR plans to schedule Design Studies to present on the certificate moves.

CERT271 : Certificate in Design Strategy CERT432 : Certificate in Material Culture Studies

the attitude of software designers that gripped the early 2010s described succinctly

https://social.yesterweb.org/explore

A mastodon instance for the OG web and design folkx.

https://www.eyemagazine.com/blog/post/house-of-the-risograph

Research, by design, is a bottom-up process.

Connecting ideas across space and time when you don't know how they'll fully relate in advance is a tough design problem.

Outliner programs, first developed for computers in 1968, are great if you know the structure of a space in advance, but creating hierarchies by guessing about relationships in advance often turn out wrong or create other problems as one progresses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Margolin

Amazing to think how ubiquitous waiting rooms are and how we take them for granted

via https://github.com/shaunabanana/intrigue/blob/main/assets/screenshot.png

http://oldschool.scripting.com/KenSmith/2022/11/14/132535.html?title=designingABook

Definition of "antiviral design"

Later, Thompson says: "[Mastodon] was engineered specifically to create _friction — _to slow things down a bit. This is a big part of why it behaves so differently from mainstream social networks."

The intentional design decisions on Mastodon slow user activity.

From Wikipedia page on Icarus Paradox. Example of architectural design/technical debt leading to an "interest rate" that eventually collapsed the organization. How can one "pay down the principle" and not just the "compound interest"? What does that look like for this scenario? More invest in workforce retraining?

Humans are complex, adaptive systems. Machines have a long history of being complicated, efficient (but not robust) systems. Is there a way to bridge this gap? What does an antifragile system of machines look like? Supervised learning? How do we ensure we don't fall prey to the oracle problem?

Baskerville, R.L.; Land, F. (2004). "Socially Self-destructing Systems". The Social Study of Information and Communication Technology: Innovation, actors, contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 263–285

This is where it starts getting ridiculous.

First, rather than social.stephenfry.com, stephenfry.com should be sufficient. Look at email. I can set my MX records to point wherever I want. I don't actually have to have a server with A records to field the email traffic.

Secondly, the @stephen part is superfluous, too! This is something where Mastodon et al had years (decades!) of hindsight to take care of this, and they still messed it up.

Explaining that although Dragon Quest VI has many choices, almost none of the in-game choices affect the ending or the ultimate course of the main story.

On creating a game with player choice and input and a well-defined dramatic story.

This line from Yuji Horii, the producer of Dragon Quest VI, references the tension between creating a game which gives the player freedom of action and creating a game with a well-defined dramatic story.

Explore the Must-Have Things For Your New House before you move in.

I don't think they run risk of spiraling. Fav's are not shared back to the fav'rs audience, only visible as action by the OP, and in aggregate under the original message. So it doesn't serve as signal to a fav'rs own audience. Boosts don't allow remarks, just straight boosts (no 'quote-tweeting') limiting it to sharing only the original message, sharing it back to the booster's audience only. Otherwise there's only replies, which are always to the person replied to, favouring interaction. Most of all: no algo watching over what gains traction and pushing those higher up in all timelines: the timeline is strictly chronological. Meaning most of the time I do not see what people I follow boost or fav. Only in the moments I dip my toe in the river of messages do I see things pass by.

https://fieldnotesbrand.com/from-seed

Some interesting history of notebooks in America.

The mainstream is seen as the standard while the underground is seen as a copy or replica.

This might be said of art, design, or any pursuit. Any design might comprise hundreds of design decisions. The more there are, the more depth to the design, the more facets of the problem space it has examined, the more knowledge it may contain, the more potential to learn.

Crazy! This underscores how badly Mastodon—and ActivityPub, generally—need to be revved to enable network participation from low-cost (essentially free) static* sites.

* quasi-static, really—in the way that RSS-enabled blogs are generally considered static sites

This page has a neat effect, first apparent with this example, where a blur effect is used on most of the text in the code block, except for lines 11–13 which are shown in sharp focus. (You can mouse over the code block to eliminate the blur effect.)

.torchlight.has-focus-lines .line:not(.line-focus) {
        transition: filter 0.35s, opacity 0.35s;
        filter: blur(.095rem);
        opacity: .65;
}

Each line is dumped into a div and the line-focus class set on those which are supposed to be unblurred.

(For ordinary code blocks without any blur/focus effect, the has-focus-class line is simply not used.)

minor benefits, trivialities really. /s

.

Unnoticed design

The intention of design can go unnoticed, and people may not think of the factors and the expertise that went into making that conscious design choice.

In his section on "Arrangement of File", C. Wright Mills describes some of the evolution of his "file". Knowing that the form and function of one's notes may change over time (Luhmann's certainly changed over time too, a fact which is underlined by his having created a separate ZK II) one should take some comfort and solace that theirs certainly will as well.

The system designer might also consider the variety of shapes and forms to potentially create a better long term design of their (or others') system(s) for their ultimate needs and use cases. How can one avoid constant change, constant rearrangement, which takes work? How can one minimize the amount of work that goes into creating their system?

The individual knowledge worker or researcher should have some idea about the various user interfaces and potential arrangements that are available to them before choosing a tool or system for maintaining their work. What are the affordances they might be looking for? What will minimize their overall work, particularly on a lifetime project?

consider these, but not too early in your design process

Must-have filters for real estate listing sites

!- insight for : user interface design - 3 feet field of view is critical - 160 degrees - VR and AR is able to meet this requirement

https://lu.ma/e1jca29m

Priya Mohan: Design Thinking Strategies to solve complex problems in STEM

DICE Discover Ideate Create Evaluate

Mostly this was a tour through the DICE framing while using Obsidian for STEM.

I wonder if any of the zettelkasten fans might blow their slips up and decorate their walls with them? Zettelhaus anyone?