Beautiful shadows have beautiful colors and your lifestyle won’t save the world

Only a few years ago, I was still working at the nerve center of the neoliberal post-capitalist economy, a.k.a. professional services. I worked on so many, varied, interesting projects there. Many I found and still find meaningful. But with others, I discovered that I didn't support them at all. Usually a few days or weeks after the kickoff. Too late to get out and let the team down. I mean, you can do that once, and from then on it's like wearing a big red sign saying you're not reliable and team leads should avoid staffing you.

That's why I liked the wave of discourse on ethics that came as a reaction (I assume) to all the crap UX people were put up with by growth-at-all-costs companies. If I can just think about projects better, I can convince the rest of the team of my bright thoughts and make sure we don't have a negative impact on the environment or on other people!

I was pretty wrong there, because I can only remember very few situations where me and my team could really change something without breaching contracts. But I was also wrong on a systemic level, showed a book I recently read. But before I start rewriting my latest blog post, I'd like to invite you to just read that.

Okay, enjoy the last bit of summer! Or winter, for those on the other side.

From my blog

Your lifestyle won’t save the world | Koos Looijesteijn

What’s wrong with mindfulness? Why do companies make everything worse? And why do we still work for them? I’ve got answers!

Beautiful shadows have beautiful colors | Koos Looijesteijn

Let's make user interfaces truly colorful!

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Bookmarks

Ad tech people more obtrusive than previously believed

For years I’ve told people it was all a coincidence, but it turns out Facebook was probably listening via our device’s microphones after all.

In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone’s Microphone to Serve Ads for Stuff You Mention

One of Facebook's alleged marketing partners explained how it listens to users' smartphone microphones and advertises to them accordingly.

How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification

Cory Doctorow via Denis:

Tech workers have historically been in short supply, which gave us power, and our bosses knew it.

To get us to work crazy hours, they came up with a trick. They appealed to our love of technology, and told us that we were heroes of a digital revolution, who would “organize the world’s information and make it useful,” who would “bring the world closer together.”

717 Gigapixel photo of a painting

The distance between two pixels is 5 micrometres, which means that one pixel is smaller than a human red blood cell.

Ultra high resolution photo

The Rijksmuseum published the largest and most detailed ever photograph of The Night Watch on its website, making it possible to zoom in on individual brushstrokes and even particles of pigment in the painting.

Web design engineering is a thing now

I've got a degree in Industrial Design Engineering. Perhaps that's why I've always felt a bit uncomfortable with the low expectations software development teams have from designers.

But here’s Matthias Ott, showing how web design engineering is necessary for design not to get stuck in Figma's solution paradigms that are at least a decade old:

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