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Reminders that design, even with the best intentions, does not always make the world better.

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Who Are We Without Our Jobs?
Who Are We Without Our Jobs?

The repetitive phases of cooking leave plenty of mental space for reflection, and as I chopped and minced and sliced I thought about the rhythms of cooking, one of which involves destroying the order of the things we bring from nature into our kitchens, only to then create from them a new order. We butcher, grind, chop, grate, mince, and liquefy raw ingredients, breaking down formerly living things so that we might recombine them in new, more cultivated forms. When you think about it, this is the same rhythm, once removed, that governs all eating in nature, which invariably entails the destruction of certain living things, by chewing and then digestion, in order to sustain other living things. In The Hungry Soul Leon Kass calls this the great paradox of eating: 'that to preserve their life and form living things necessarily destroy life and form.' If there is any shame in that destruction, only we humans seem to feel it, and then only on occasion. But cooking doesn't only distance us from our destructiveness, turning the pile of blood and guts into a savory salami, it also symbolically redeems it, making good our karmic debts: Look what good, what beauty, can come of this! Putting a great dish on the table is our way of celebrating the wonders of form we humans can create from this matter—this quantity of sacrificed life—just before the body takes its first destructive bite.

| Michael Pollan, from The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

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Our modern obsession with personal branding and self-commodification wants us to flatten ourselves into something someone else can understand in five seconds, but that’s just not how people are, and it seems cruel to deem anyone so simple, least of all ourselves.

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Breaking the idea of design being a solely additive process to everyday life. Thinking of design as a subtractive process instead.

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