For thousands of years, products were hand-crafted from natural materials. Entire epochs were named after developments in material science: first stone, then bronze, then iron.

The Industrial Revolution scaled everything up; it led to more widespread production of existing materials (such as steel), and accelerated the development of new materials (such as plastics).

Scarcity during the world wars drove a lot of exploration for new materials, such as plywood, aluminium and fiberglass. Post-war modernist designers like Charles and Ray Eames began exploring how these new materials could be used to develop well-designed yet affordable products, and by the 1950s, plastic was being lauded as “The Wonder Material”: it was cheap to manufacture, didn’t rust or corrode, and could take on any form a designer could think of. People were covering their furniture in it, replacing their floors with it, even throwing out their ceramic crockery for it.

For product designers, it was like they’d been given a magic wand. Almost anything they could imagine was suddenly not just possible, it was cheap and convenient. There was an explosion of creativity in industrial design, and entirely new industries were born. Fledgling fast-food startups like McDonald’s used it for cheap, disposable packaging. Barbie was born. Tupperware became a thing.

But then time passed, as it tends to do. The plastic started to crack. It yellowed in the sun. It scratched and melted easily. It… didn’t rust or corrode. Over time The Wonder Material lost its shine, and we learned it had strengths and weaknesses like any other material.

Today, there are some applications (e.g. medical) for which plastic is absolutely the best option, but for the most part it’s the cheap, convenient option (if you ignore the environmental concerns). And that’s great: there are many important products (e.g. clothing) that would be a lot scarcer and more expensive if it weren’t for plastic. But if it’s lasting quality we want, we tend to reach for the “natural” materials… wool, wood, metal. The things that feel good in our hands, that feel authentic, that age gracefully, developing a patina over time.

So why am I thinking about plastic?

There’s a lot of talk about AI as a new technology, but I wonder should we really be thinking of it as a new material? Like plastic, it can feel like a magic wand: anything we can imagine is not just possible, it’s cheap & convenient (if you ignore the environmental concerns). But like plastic it’s brittle, artificial, and doesn’t age well, and the more we use it in a product or process, the more those properties will be evident. The higher the synthetic/organic ratio, the lower the perceived quality is going to be.

It’s clear we’re in the “covering furniture in plastic” phase of AI right now, but maybe if we treat it more like a material and less like a magic wand we can avoid some of the sins of the past.

The modernist designers explored the strengths and weaknesses of the new materials of their day, and showed how — with some thoughtfulness — they could be used for good to improve regular people’s lives in meaningful ways. As the product designers of today, it’s our turn to do the same.

(Maple syrup is optional.)

So, basically Latin for “Come at me bro”.

We’ve always been a cocky bunch.

Digital gardens are websites that treat content like a constantly-expanding network of knowledge, rather than a chronological list of logs. They have more in common with Wikipedia than HuffPost.

The problem with blogs

A blog structure places the highest emphasis on ‘what’s new’… but what’s new has had the least scrutiny and little authority. It also creates a pressure to publish something—anything—whether you have anything worth saying or not. It prioritises novelty over quality.

Every new post on a blog implicitly devalues other content on the blog, the same way today’s newspaper makes yesterday’s irrelevant. This is what’s new. That stuff is old.

The benefits of gardens

With digital gardens, every new piece of content in the network has the potential to add depth and context to every other part. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

By placing emphasis on ‘what’s updated’, digital gardens value more battle-hardened content that’s earned its authority through innumerable updates and iterations.

Paradoxically, content seems to become significantly easier to produce, freed from the burden of “completeness”, or even coherence. In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirkey tells the story of how the first approach to Wikipedia — hiring experts in various fields to write about their area of expertise — failed because going from a blank page to a ‘definitive article’ was too great a hurdle. Once they switched the model to anyone being able to add something, the experts suddenly got very active in correcting, improving and building on what was there. It’s far easier to correct something that’s wrong, than to create something from thin air.

It may become harder to consume, but the structure encourages editing and retrospective organisation, and threading thoughts together into a more accessible narrative is much easier when the thoughts are already written down somewhere.

Gardens are also a far better metaphor for websites. They’re continuously evolving and require constant care & attention. You can’t experience a garden exactly as it was last year, only a rough approximation of it. If you want to remember it as it is now, take a photo or video.

Further reading

Subheading

This is a paragraph with bold text and italic text, plus a link to another post. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you; if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.

This is a quote.

By somebody

And this is a bigger pull-quote, for when a line deserves to slow the reader down.

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Lists

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1. A numbered list item
2. Another numbered list item
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the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. […] Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction needed.