Reading List: Week 1, February 2022

Think of the machines, then, as beasts. It’s not a new comparison, just the inversion of an old one. Rene Descartes compared the cries of a wounded dog to the sound of a malfunctioning machine; he called animals bêtes-machine.

Artificial Animals
[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”QZ2EQuPpQJs” photographer=”Philipp Pilz”]

As organizations, product complexity, and new feature launches have accelerated, so has the difficulty of maintaining cohesion and consistency. Digital designers need to adopt a systems mindset, finding ways to build scalable solutions to product problems.

Software Is Automating Design. What Does That Mean For Designers?
[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”LPWl2pEVGKc” photographer=”Balázs Kétyi”]

People make sacrifices to fit into what they are told will make them a “good person, “ and not all of those sacrifices are worth it, because they sometimes ask you to harm yourself more than you are helping someone else.

You Are Not a “Good Person”
[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”1TWMxTq_BR4″ photographer=”Raphael Renter”]

If our fear of the chaos raging around us leads us to put our trust in machines so that we don’t have to trust one another, we relinquish the reciprocity that lets us advance our shared humanity, and those bleak assumptions about humans being immutably selfish turn into self-fulfilling prophecy.

Morals in the Machine
[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”OgvqXGL7XO4″ photographer=”Hal Gatewood”]