Here are the operating instructions

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"The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life." - Ursula K. Le Guin

A notebook about how we work, learn, love and live.

As Maryanne Wolf says in Proust and the Squid, The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, reading enhances cognitive flexibility, creates new synaptic connections in the brain, can enhance the ability to understand others' perspectives and emotions, and fosters a more informed and open-minded perspective on the world.

Read.

Happy Friday

Learning, Design
How can we create things in the world without causing harm, and instead, create with healing in mind?

Assembling Tomorrow authors Carissa Carter and Scott Doorley. Photo by Patrick Beaudouin

"To be a maker today—to be human—is to collaborate with the world. It is to create and be created, to work and be worked on, to make and be made. To be human is to tinker, create, fix, care, and bring new things into the world. It is to design.

"However, even with the best intentions, we keep making things that don’t quite work and might wreak havoc. Why?

"We forget to include our weaknesses in our designs—not to exploit them but to respond to them. Things get messy when our capacity to create meets our limited capacity to understand our influence. Building a product is hard work, but tracking its results, ripples, and repercussions is another story. We end up with transportation that warms the planet, social media that frays our nerves, and AI that alters our relationships.

"This book is about broken things, the good intentions that designed them, and the great possibilities lingering amid their cracks. Intentions and consequences don’t always align as expected. Good is not always good, and bad is not all bad. Both are hard to predict and see. But if we pay close attention to how our designs may tear things apart and we create with healing in mind from the start, we can assemble a world worth making." — Carissa Carter and Scott Doorley

Book Excerpt: What Could Go Wrong?

Author Interview: Imagining Better Futures with ‘Assembling Tomorrow’

Civics, Social Intelligence
"Mutual learning is only possible when all participants are willing to be wrong…"

"Our fatal flaw may be the idea that an individual or institution can single-handedly penetrate new frontiers of possibility." - Nora Bateson Image via Team Human

"I think our notions of leadership are toxic to the ecology of communication and collaboration in a social system. How can there be real communication when there is deference to a leader? This imbalance creates a hold-back of contribution and interaction. Look now at the fascination with celebrity that has infected the globe. The imbalance in the possibility for communication when one individual is placed above others in this way effectively destroys the possibility of true cooperation and mutual learning.

"Mutual learning is only possible when all participants are willing to be wrong… willing to learn, to explore new ideas, to go off the map, out of the known, and together grope in the shadowy corners of new ideas, new plans, new territories. That cannot happen if one person is the know-it-all. Even if that person has perfect “leadership skills”—they still disrupt the ecology with individualism. “Leadership” often creates competition, ambition, greed and, on the flip side, fosters deference, hopelessness, apathy, and blame."

Article: It’s Time to Fix Our Toxic Notion of What Makes a Good Leader

Learning, Psychedelics
Margaret Mead thought we needed a deliberate process of cultural evolution. She thought psychedelics might help.

"In the summer of 1930, the anthropologist Margaret Mead and her second husband and fellow anthropologist, Reo Fortune, made their way to the Omaha Reservation in northeastern Nebraska. At age 28, Mead had already gained renown for her ethnographic study Coming of Age in Samoa. In Samoa, she had found a society whose looser sexual mores she came to view as a challenge to rigid Western norms. But in Nebraska she encountered a people that had already assimilated into Western civilization. In the decades after their catastrophic subjugation and confinement to the reservation, she discovered, many Omaha had embraced a new syncretic religion, the Native American Church, fusing elements of Christianity with native traditions, notably the ritual use of the hallucinogenic peyote cactus. Mead believed that by enabling the transcendence of familiar categories, the Omaha use of peyote was part of their attempt to forge a new culture in the wake of losing their own."

"In Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, the historian Benjamin Breen presents Mead’s work among the Omaha as the origin point of an idea that went on to shape a generation of intellectuals: 'That drugs' — and hallucinogens in particular — 'could be a tool for the creation of a new culture.' Mead’s main insight about the peyote cult, according to Breen, is that it was 'an innovative response to modernity rather than a remnant from a vanishing world.'

"This response, Mead concluded, held lessons for modern society as a whole. Like many anthropologists of her era, she feared that advanced technological civilization was laying waste to the cultural traditions and belief systems that allowed people to orient themselves in the world and find meaning in it. All modern people therefore faced some version of the dislocation undergone in a drastic form by peoples like the Omaha. Rather than nostalgia or a retreat from the modern world, Mead believed that what was needed was a deliberate process of cultural evolution — in which mind-altering substances might play a role." - Geoff Shullenberger

Book Review: Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science

Company, Product Design
"I thought I was just another designer of products. Turns out I am a product of design."

Fabricio Teixeira is a designer based in Brooklyn, NY. He’s a design partner at digital product agency Work & Co, and the founder of the design publications UX Collective and DOC, both of which are on my short list of always-reads. Recently, "after almost 20 years of doing the same thing over and over (i.e. designing digital products)", he said that "I needed to stop for a second and put down on paper what it is that I find compelling about our craft".

The result is a digital online commonplace book of insights and learnings about design, the design process and creativity. Too much to be taken in all at once, I find it's a great resource to use like Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies card deck. Shuffle, choose, read and learn.

"Find the ideas that scare you. Invite them over. Give them a try. Even if they don’t work: you will be less scared to try them next time."

"Create space for the eyes to pause. Consuming visual information is a choreography of the eye. You can dictate that rhythm by inserting the right pauses and white space in your designs. The pixels you don’t use are as important as the ones you do."

"When you present your work, stop describing what’s on the screen. Talk about how that experience will help users. Talk about how it will help reach business goals. Talk about what inspired you to arrive at that solution. Talk about anything other than giving people the unrewarding 'real estate tour, where you describe exactly what they are already seeing on screen. Design the experience you want your audience to have."

Website: The Musings of a Designer on What He Loves About Design and What He's Learned Along the Way

Communication, Social Messaging
“Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do.”

"This postcard, produced for a nine-day nationwide protest in May 1988, was one of Gran Fury’s earliest designs. The nationally-based AIDS Coalition to Network, Organize, and Win called for the demonstrations, but left decisions about the focus of the protests to local AIDS groups. One of the events organized by ACT UP was a same-sex kiss-in, meant as a challenge to homophobia. Gran Fury made a number of different posters, postcards, and T-shirts to publicize the spring action, including this photograph of two females kissing. A year later, the same image would be paired with the text: 'Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do.'" - Christopher George

Article: Gran Fury

"Long before Facebook and Twitter made getting a message out to a mass audience as simple as a couple of clicks, the art/activist collective known as Gran Fury used a heady combination of bold graphic design, guerrilla dissemination tactics, and art institutional support to communicate the urgency of the AIDS epidemic in light of disastrous government and political inaction.

"Probably best known for the SILENCE = DEATH graphic that came to define the AIDS/HIV activist movement in the 1980s and early 1990s, Gran Fury was a group of artists and visual provocateurs affiliated with the New York City-based ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power)." - John d'Addario

Article: AIDS, Art and Activism: Remembering Gran Fury

Communication, Visual Identity
"The Balena library’s motto, 'Beyond pages', expresses our cultural heritage and knowledge that books carry, while also reflecting the extended functions of the library."

"Many people today are concerned about alienation, the tensions and anxiety that come with social polarisation. My thesis argues that the effects of immersive, paper-based reading on brain function, such as increased empathy, critical-analytical thinking and improved attention, can help us to live better together and bring disparate social groups closer together. These benefits could be enhanced through community building, for example by organising reading circles or community libraries open to all."

"...The visual identity is primarily based on typography. The use of black, curved headlines and old title pages inspired typography is evident in all design elements. This is complemented by the frames, which highlights the curved headlines. The serif typeface evokes works of fiction, but when used with strong colour gradients it still creates a fresh overall effect." - Zoltán Visnyai

Article: Balena Community Library Concept

Company, Product Design
A lightweight, towable camper modeled on a 1940 VW bus

Friends tell me that they love the freedom and flexibility that their towable travel trailers allow. But as Debbie is dead set against the idea of vacationing in a vehicle, I'm pretty sure that our driveway will remain trailer free. If she ever changes her mind this is where I'd look first. Made in Oregon, it's currently available for preorder in three size configurations.

Website: Type 2 Campers

One-liners

Abstract: Immigration benefits local economies, including wages.

Link: Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have created a new type of biodegradable plastic made from barley starch and sugarbeet waste that turns into compost when it ends up in nature.

Article: A new library in Manhattan comes with 12 floors of subsidized apartments. It’s a clever way to find community support for housing.

Article: The German Airforce Orchestra logo is simply genius.

Article: Successful city parks make diverse communities feel safe and welcome.

Playlist

"For 30 years the Grammy-winning Meshell Ndegeocello’s music has cast an unflinching gaze on love, race, sexuality and religion. Her new album out in August, No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin, zooms out to focus on the love of humanity as inspired by the writer and civil rights activist. Her performance includes three songs from that album, starting with “Travel,” which features Kenita Miller’s swirling whispers alongside Jake Sherman’s organ and Ndegeocello’s bass, which ushers us into her church service. “Thus Sayeth The Lorde,” references the writings of Audre Lorde: “If I did not define myself for myself, I’d be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” This conviction has been the binding agent of Ndegeocello’s career. Releasing her debut album at a time when many of the women who dominated Black music were singers who adopted an ultra-feminine aesthetic, as a bassist and vocalist she gallantly eschewed that standard for androgyny, fully embracing her queer, two-spirit identity." - Nikki Birch | June 18, 2024

Video: Meshell Ndegeocello: Tiny Desk Concert

Weekly Mixtape
Soul and jazz and pop and groove

Playlist: Travel

Image of the Week

Reader in the Sky, by David Byrne

Instagram: David Byrne

What's Love & Work?

Love & Work is the weekly newsletter by me, Mitch Anthony. I help people use their brand - their purpose, values, and stories - as a pedagogy and toolbox for transformation.

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