Latest post: Hello hello

There’s a lot going on. Events, crises, tools, frameworks opinions, wonderful people, wonderful projects, newsletters and oh my god it never ends. I remember hearing that a copy of the New York Times had more information in a single edition than the common working class person of some not too distant generation had access to in their entire life. Lol, newspapers. Quaint.

We’ve moved well beyond human-scale flows of information. Most of us are still swimming against the current, fighting an un-winnable battle for a mastery of all the things happening around us. Frankly, I don’t see myself stopping. I’ll continue struggling and failing to keep up (and so will most of you), and I’m ok with that. I’m not going to catch it all, but I’m not going to give up either.

Knowing that, as writers, or publishers or whatever you call yourself, I think we have a responsibility to start making our work more humane. A good place to start is with the environments we choose to build and publish our work in.

The quality of buildings [or websites, or apps] depends entirely on the ability to support life, especially it’s inner, and emotional respects, to allow human existence to have depth of meaning, to give people the fullest ability to express and exhaust the potentialities of which they are capable. — C. Alexander, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth

JQTRDE will largely be about developing those sorts of environments. Places to slow down, places to focus, places that leave you feeling a little more rooted. For the next few months, I’ll be focusing on the architectural aspects of building better environments, starting with a few pieces on Christopher Alexander, Walter Segal, and a bit of Object-oriented CSS.