Learning To Appreciate - And See Beauty In - The Mundane

March Curated Ingest

Hey team,

Lighter edition this month - the entire month of March has been filled with essays and midterms unfortunately 😕. I somewhat recently found an Instagram account called mundaaang_mag colorfully edited photography of suburban still life scenes. I’ve appreciated their eye and it’s made me think about being more present in design and the beauty of my immediate environment. (I know that sounds fluffy - trust the process.) RETURNING TO THE ROOTS WITH THIS LINK DUMP - but starting off with some of my personal photos that fit this theme first:

Northern Oregon Coast Sunset

Burgerville Booth

Nighttime Intersection in Suburbia

Vista House Scene

Senior School Photo

The Mundane

• The Responsible Object, a History of Design Ideology for the Future is a collection of pieces on all sorts of design. A particular one that resonates with this edition is “A Political Education, the Historical Legacy of the German Bauhaus and the Moscow VKhUTEMAS.” I hadn’t heard of the VKhUTEMAS before reading this essay, but I enjoyed learning how the different political environment impacted their approach when compared to that of the Bauhaus. There are lots of great political design pieces in this one!

• Women of the Bauhaus - thanks Julia!

• The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant is fun short story (I won’t spoil it too much) that hits on the themes regarding the temporality of life and purpose. I think it relates to this topic more broadly. Nick Bostrom, the author (creator? and head of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford) has a short Moral at the end where he literally relates this story to health-tech. Pretty ~wild~ Swedish brain in this one. While I don’t necessarily agree, it was a thinker!

• The Mirror Stage, the Imaginary, and Social Media through Lacan explained. Basically about how your desires interact with social media and your general projections.

• Bringing up Simon Sarris again via a thread he made about beautiful design in public (starts before this tweet). When I learned about the Wuppertail train I was amazed it was made in 1902 and still remains largely the same today, it’s pretty stunning honestly and makes me sad we don’t have more beautiful and functional forms of public transit today considering this is MORE THAN 100 YEARS OLD:

  Simon Sarris @simonsarris

  What I find fascinating about the Wuppertal train in 1902 is not the new technology, but that every other thing in the video is beautiful. The buildings of course, but also the sky platforms with their curved window panes and spiral stairs.

  

• Something Will Happen, You’ll See by Christos Ikonomou. A collection of short stories set in the Greek Austerity Crisis I read for class my first-year fall. They are all pretty tragic, but reflecting on the ones we read today they help contextualize my thoughts.

• SO many street photographers fit into this, but a personal favorite is Joe Greer. This is a video analysis on William Eggleston - an older American photographer who primarily operated in The South.

• Nowness… makes some really bounday pushing content, love or hate typa thing. Some highlights

Legitimacy

Last edition’s conversation around Squad Wealth revolved around blockchains, which are really about authenticity —> legitimacy. Found a few sources that relate to that this month!

• The Most Important Scare Resource is Legitimacy - the CCCP comes up, albeit a different one than the one you’re probably thinking about…!

• A big brain I admire (Samo Burja) is writing a series of blogs about Intellectual Legitimacy.

Misc.:

• My good friend Aarushi’s new Substack! One of the smartest people I know definitely check it out 🥰!

• Tech Action NYC - brought to you by NYC DSA.

• Public Domain - Design in the 21st Century. A graduate thesis that I found compelling in my initial engagement with the paper.

• A designer’s personal portfolio I really enjoyed experiencing.

• The 2010s Have Broken Our Sense of Time - commodification of culture to the extreme:

  “The 2000s were a bad decade, full of terrorism, financial ruin, and war. The 2010s were different, somehow more disorienting, full of molten anxiety, racism, and moral horror shows. Maybe this is a reason for the disorientation: Life had run on a certain rhythm of time and logic, and then at a hundred different entry points, that rhythm and that logic shifted a little, sped up, slowed down, or disappeared, until you could barely remember what time it was.”