Herein, I will grace you with brevity, which loyal readers know is not my specialty.

Like every piece in my “how to” series, this one, also, was born because someone asked. In this case, a colleague preparing for a 12-hour flight to a conference in Singapore.

The “How To” Series

My credentials: as a dual national, I have taken at least one 9+ hour flight every year since childhood. What has changed as I have gotten older is not the distance (if anything, the flights keep getting longer). Rather, it is the precision of my preparation…

According to me, for a comfortable long haul flight you need:

1. A window seat.

   Enough said.

2. “Airplane Head Strap” aka a travel pillow that attaches to the seat headrest so your head cannot fall forward or to the side.

   Especially important if you are tall like me, I am 5’9. I have tried the blow-up things that go on the tray table. I am too tall. The neck pillows do not work because my neck is too long. This is the only way I have found to actually get comfortable.

   

3. A small foot hammock that loops over the tray table.

   Critical that the support runs width-wise so your feet do not collapse inward. It sounds superfluous. It is not. It keeps your legs moving, helps circulation, and I arrive more rested. It also lets me relax without bracing my core.

   

4. Ibuprofen.

   Ever since I flew to Melbourne with a layover in Sydney and sat in a middle seat and had pain all over my body, I’ve never traveled without it.

5. Whatever sleep support is appropriate for you.

   Melatonin, antihistamines, or prescribed. And if you’re ever in Germany, I cannot recommend more these German OTC sleeping aids (also antihistamines)

   

6. A refillable water bottle and electrolytes.

   I pour the tiny cups the flight attendant gives me into it and try my best to stay hydrated because flying is extremely dehydrating. Avoid alcohol. And consider avoiding coffee/tea b/c of cleanliness concerns of potable water tanks on board.

7. Two fully charged battery packs, plus all necessary cables.

   You do not know if your seat will have working chargers. So you need two. One to recharge your headphones during the flight and one for your phone. I bring Lightning for my AirPods and USB-C for my phone.

8. Two pairs of noise-canceling headphones.

   It sounds excessive. Somehow, I have ended up with multiple pairs of AirPods and I have never been sad that when one dies, I can switch to a fully charged pair and continue sleeping.

9. A Bluetooth adapter for the seatback screen, or an Octobuddy.

   So you can connect your own headphones OR attach your phone to the seat’s screen and watch your own programming.

10. An eye mask.

    I use the same one I sleep with at home but have a dedicated on that only goes on the plane.

    

11. Compression socks AND grippy socks

    Compression socks are not optional on long haul, you will arrive more rested and lower the risk of clot formation (not to scare you, but yeah, honestly something to avoid). Cabin pressure and prolonged sitting slow venous return, which means fluid pools in your lower legs.

    Pilates-style grips let you put your feet up on the seat without sliding. Some people wrap the seatbelt around their feet, but I find that it digs in to my shins and does not work for me.

12. K-95 Mask

    If the person next to you is coughing. If you are going somewhere important. It also creates privacy. Mask plus eye mask equals cocoon.

13. Scarf

    Add a thin or thick scarf (depending on the season) to create a small tent around yourself, or a blanket, or a scarf.

14. Lip balm, face mist, and sunscreen.

    You are sitting at a window. UV exposure at cruising altitude is real. Reapply sunscreen AND keep the shade down. Try not to constantly touch your face. A hydrating mist and lip balm are non-negotiable. Want to find a good sunscreen, check out my other how-to :

With that, may you arrive rested and hydrated. Happy travels!

As always,

Caseysimone

When I started my master’s program at the Technical University of Delft in 2020, I became so invested in my academic work that I made taking care of myself the last priority. That neglect had consequences for my physical health, consequences I’m still recovering from (e.g., a repetitive stress injury from computer overwork.)

Perhaps you’ll find the following bizarre, but I’m grateful for the physical fallout, because it meant that before I turned 30, I had to confront something that, now that I’m looking for it, I see many people avoid until their 40s, 50s, or even later.

Through that breakdown (which in many ways was the result of pain and disregard I inflicted on myself), I had to face the fact that my body has limits, and that those limits matter. If I wanted to build a sustainable intellectual life - first as a master’s student, now as a PhD student in mechanical engineering - I couldn’t keep treating my body like an afterthought. It wasn’t an obstacle to my ambitions. It was central to sustaining them.

And so, the engineer that I am, I understood that I had to design systems that would guarantee my physical body got my attention consistently and without exception.

Since then, I’ve developed two such systems. Together, they’ve marked a shift in how I relate to myself, and the benefits have been many-fold:

1. I bought a midcentury vanity and promised myself I’d sit at it every morning and night, rain or shine, and give myself at least five minutes. By creating a space dedicated solely to my physical self, I ensured that part of me got daily attention. (The logic is the same as having a dedicated desk for work.)

2. I committed to moving my body with the specific aim of getting stronger, at least three times per week. And while I won’t go deep into that here, because this post is focused on skincare, I’ll just say: (a) strength training reflects the same shift: understanding my body as something I need to support and protect if I want to do this kind of knowledge work over the long haul, and (b) I’ve personally found a lot of value in Lagree and Barre.

This post is about the first system: skincare. (Though there is research that shows how strength training leads to better skin…) Because, at this point, I’ve been asked more times than I can count how I built my routine and what products I recommend. So I decided to put everything in one place.

This is my engineer’s guide to building a skincare starter pack, from first principles to product picks. Here’s how it’s structured:

• Five Minute Routine: A 5-minute routine for anyone getting started *I put it first because I have a sense you might not be interested in skin 101

• Skin 101: An overview of what skin is, and why skincare (possibly) matters **it’s pretty comprehensive, so definitely scroll past if you just want the routines

The Five Minute Routine

At its core, this routine is evidence-based in its ability to accomplish the following:

1. Cleans your skin effectively

A two-step cleanse (oil followed by gentle water-based cleanser) removes excess sebum, sunscreen, pollutants, and dead skin cells, clearing the way for other products to work and preventing clogged pores.

2. Keeps your skin hydrated

Hydrated skin functions better. It reduces inflammation, improves barrier integrity, supports immune regulation, and slows visible signs of aging like dullness or fine lines.

3. Protects against photoaging

UV radiation is the primary cause of visible aging. Daily use of broad-spectrum sunscreen is the single most effective intervention to prevent premature wrinkles, pigmentation, and structural degradation.

4. Supports long-term repair

Several ingredients can support your skin’s ability to repair itself and maintain structural integrity over time. Vitamin C (L-ascorbic acid + ferulic acid + vitamin E) helps protect against oxidative stress and supports collagen synthesis. Peptide-based serums (like those from Allies of Skin or Medik8) use signaling molecules (and sometimes growth factors) to improve elasticity and firmness. Niacinamide- and peptide-based formulas like Dieux Deliverance help reduce inflammation and reinforce the skin barrier. And topical vitamin A (like adapalene or tretinoin), used at night, increases cell turnover and stimulates collagen production, making it one of the most well-studied and effective compounds for improving skin texture, tone, and visible aging.

5. And is for the vibes

And then, there’s one step I include not because the data demands it, but because it changed how I felt about doing skincare: essence. It’s a watery layer applied after cleansing that helps prep your skin to absorb hydration more evenly. It’s fast, light, and makes everything else go on better. It’s not essential, but it made the whole thing feel like care.

numbuzin - No.3 Super Glowing Essence Toner - 200ml

Naturie - HATOMUGI Skin Conditioner (Random Version) - 500ml

MISSHA - Time Revolution The First Treatment Essence 5X - 150ml

Sulwhasoo - First Care Activating Serum VI - 60 ml

Vitamin C
A well-formulated vitamin C serum protects against oxidative stress, supports collagen production, and improves tone and texture over time. Best used in the morning, paired with sunscreen. Ideally, it has (L-ascorbic acid + ferulic acid + vitamin E). I have bought both the Timeless and Skincueticals with my own money.

Timeless - 20% Vitamin C + E Ferulic Acid Serum - 1 oz

SkinCeuticals - C E Ferulic® with 15% L-Ascorbic Acid - 1 oz

Barrier + Inflammation Support
With niacinamide, peptides, and cannabinoid extract, this is designed to reduce inflammation, calm redness, and support the skin’s barrier function. I have bought the Dieux Deliverance with my own money.

Dieux - Deliverance Antioxidant & Niacinamide Trinity Serum - 1 oz

Peptides + Growth Factors
These serums use signal peptides (and in some cases, growth factors) to support elasticity, skin density, and visible firmness. They’re typically well-tolerated options for improving structural resilience, e.g. collagen production. The Allies of Skin and Medik8 are on my wish list.

Medik8 - Liquid Peptides Advanced MP - 1 oz

Allies of Skin - Multi Peptides & GF (Growth Factor) Advanced Lifting Serum - 1 oz

Embryolisse - Lait-Crème Concentré - 2.5 oz

Cetaphil - Hydrating Moisturizing Cream - 16 oz

numbuzin - No.4 Full-Nutrient Firming Cream - 2 oz

La Roche Posay - Cicaplast Baume B5 Soothing Multi Purpose Cream - 1.35 oz

NIVEA - UV Super Water Gel SPF50 PA+++ - 5 oz

Beauty of Joseon - Relief Sun : Rice + Probiotic SPF50+ PA++++ - 1.7 oz

Round Lab - Birch Juice Moisturizing Sun Cream SPF50+ PA++++ - 1.7 oz

Supergoop! - PLAY Everyday Lotion SPF 50 with Sunflower Extract - 5.5 oz

The evening routine is quite similar, but with a few key swaps. You’ll skip the sunscreen, double cleanse (because: sunscreen, sweat, grime), and add a new treatment that’s photosensitive, meaning it works best while your skin is out of the sun. Otherwise, same structure: cleanse, prep, treat, moisturize. Nothing complicated.

Consider doing your routine 30 to 45 minutes before bed so your products have time to absorb; otherwise, half your skincare ends up in your pillowcase.

Anua - Heartleaf Pore Control Cleansing Oil - 6.8 oz

Vanicream - Gentle Facial Cleanser for Sensitive Skin - 8 oz

Pro tip: You can layer your essence as many times as you want. This technique is sometimes called “flooding” - applying 5 to 12 layers (yes, really) to deeply hydrate the skin before locking it in with moisturizer. You can even mix and match different watery products. The goal is to hydrate your skin like a sponge; soft, full, and better able to hold on to everything that comes next.

Pro tip: There’s a lot of hype and incomplete information about retinoids online. Here’s what actually matters: both tretinoin and adapalene (Differin) are vitamin A derivatives, also known as retinoids. They work in slightly different ways, but both help with acne, increase cell turnover, and support collagen production over time.

Tretinoin is prescription-only; adapalene is available over the counter. But that doesn’t mean one is “better.” Adapalene works just as well over time for many people, with fewer side effects. And going for the strongest prescription isn’t always smart—higher doses of tretinoin can damage your skin barrier, which can lead to irritation, inflammation, and even accelerate signs of aging.

The best approach: use the strength you can tolerate consistently. If you can get a prescription, great. If not, over-the-counter adapalene is a perfectly solid place to start.

And while you are thinking about bed-rime, consider reading my other how-to post on all things bedding.

Skin 101

By now, you may have already chosen a product or settled into a five-minute routine, and that might be enough. But maybe you’re wondering: What exactly are these products doing? How do they work, and what systems are they acting on?

This next section is for the people who want the why. It’s a breakdown of how skin functions, how ingredients interact with different layers of skin, and how a well-designed routine supports biological processes, not just aesthetics.

When people find out I love skincare (maybe because my skin is that glowy, or maybe because I once tried to convince my doctoral advisor that a project on Korean skincare was academically valid), they usually respond in one of two ways.

1. The uninterested skeptic: This person sees skincare as shallow, vain, or purely aesthetic. And I get it. The skincare industry is saturated with overpromising products, confusing routines, and beauty standards I want no part of. If that’s where you’re coming from, I’m not here to convince you to do a full routine. I just ask one thing: wear sunscreen.

2. The unconvinced skeptic: This person isn’t opposed to skincare, but they want it to make sense. They want to know what the skin actually does, how skincare might support those functions, and what’s worth the effort.

1. The uninterested skeptic

This person sees skincare as nothing more than shallow vanity. And if that’s you, I can concede: you might be right.

Skincare has indeed been heavily marketed through (problematic) beauty standards, as such, it’s easy to dismiss it as performative or self-indulgent. Given you’re a skeptic, I’m not interested in ordaining you in the Cult of Skincare because in many ways, I share some philosophical concerns with the premise of this industry, which I am not going to navigate in their entirety here in this post, but I do implore you to take up one habit that I hope we can both agree has nothing to do with vanity: wear sunscreen.

Because vanity aside, skin cancer is real, and wearing sunscreen, hats, and sunglasses can prevent what is often a fast-moving and dangerous disease.

Given you might not read past this, here are a few basics about sun protection that seem not to be general knowledge, and I’d love for you not to get skin cancer:

You’re probably not using enough sunscreen.

The average adult needs about one to two fingers’ length of sunscreen for just their face. That’s way more than a quick dab. Stick sunscreens can help if you hate the feeling of cream on your hands, but know that it’s hard to get good coverage with a stick, so you’ll need to swipe many more times than feels intuitive.

Not all sunscreen smells or feels like sunscreen.

Especially those from Korea and Japan. If you’ve avoided sunscreen because you hate the smell, the texture, or the way it lingers on your hands, there are better options now. I might make a whole post titled Sunscreen for People Who Hate Sunscreen, but for now: look for gel or watery formulas from Asian brands. They feel like moisturizers, or even nothing, not gloopy paste.

Not all sunglasses protect your eyes.

If your sunglasses don’t have proper UV protection (and many of the “dupes” on Amazon don’t), you’re just wearing tinted plastic. That can actually increase your risk of sun damage to the retina, which leads to long-term vision problems. Skip the dupes and save up for designer glasses or something from a licensed seller like Ray-Ban, Sunglass Hut, or even a good drugstore brand with verified UV filtering.

Hats are your friend.

Baseball caps are not your friend (unless you’re just protecting your scalp, which is especially important if you’re bald or have a shaved head), they leave your whole face exposed from the sides. Opt instead for wide-brim hats/visors, sun-protective bucket hats (SPF fabric or extra wide brim), or straw hats/sombreros.

2. The Skeptic Who’s Open to Being Convinced

Your skin isn’t decoration. It’s your body’s largest organ, and it performs vital physiological functions every single day. Skin is an organ with structural, chemical, and regulatory functions. It provides mechanical protection, regulates temperature and fluid loss, initiates immune response, and enables healing. It also plays a role in sensory perception and, in some cases, pharmacological absorption.

So yes, your skin is a big deal with a high array of core physiological responsibilities which have implications for how we think about skincare: not as an aesthetic luxury, but as a daily maintenance practice for a material system that does measurable, continuous work.

Across time and cultures, skin has been treated as a site of medical and therapeutic intervention. Transdermal delivery methods like nicotine patches, hormonal creams, magnesium sprays, and corticosteroid ointments work precisely because the skin is porous and responsive. More holistic approaches (such as massage, sauna, or traditional bathing practices like the hammam, or traditional Korean/Japanese/Russian/etc. spas) have also long recognized the skin as a point of interaction with systemic health. These methods improve circulation, encourage fluid movement, and support relaxation and immune function.

The point is not that skincare is new or modern, it’s that the skin has always been understood, implicitly or explicitly, as a system worth maintaining.

First, what is skin?

Skin has three structurally and functionally distinct layers: the epidermis, dermis, and hypodermis. Each layer responds to different classes of intervention. Most cosmetic and therapeutic routines target the epidermis; a smaller set of interventions affect the dermis. The hypodermis is largely beyond the reach of daily topical care.

Understanding the different layers of your skin helps clarify what you can realistically expect from skincare products and treatments, and what’s mostly marketing fluff. Skincare is not magic, but it is effective when you know what systems you’re working with.

Epidermis: Barrier integrity, water retention, pigment production, localized immune surveillance

The epidermis is the outermost layer of skin, and the one most directly affected by daily skincare. It plays a critical role in keeping pathogens and irritants out, retaining moisture, regulating pigment, and initiating immune responses. Most over-the-counter skincare products (cleansers, moisturizers, exfoliants, sunscreen) work at this level.

The epidermis contains three key cell types:

1. Keratinocytes: produce keratin, a structural protein that maintains the barrier

2. Melanocytes: produce melanin, which protects against UV damage and determines pigmentation

3. Langerhans cells: coordinate immune surveillance and inflammation

As seen above, the epidermis contains five sub-layers:

1. Stratum corneum: dead keratinocytes (corneocytes) embedded in lipids; the layer you touch and see. This is where moisturizers reduce water loss, exfoliants remove buildup, and sunscreen sits to block UV.

2. Stratum lucidum: present only on palms and soles; not relevant to facial skincare.

3. Stratum granulosum: where keratinocytes start producing lipids that form the barrier, moisturizers support this process indirectly.

4. Stratum spinosum: provides mechanical cohesion through cell junctions. Healthy communication here is essential for barrier stability.

5. Stratum basale: contains the stem cells that replenish the epidermis and melanocytes that regulate pigment. Retinoids, niacinamide, and azelaic acid can influence this layer through signaling pathways over time.

Interventions that influence the epidermis:

• Cleansers: remove sebum, pollutants, and microorganisms without disrupting barrier lipids

• Moisturizers: support the lipid matrix and reduce transepidermal water loss (TEWL)

• Humectants (e.g., glycerin, hyaluronic acid): attract water into the stratum corneum

• Exfoliants (e.g., AHAs, BHAs): increase cell turnover, smooth texture, unclog pores

• Melanin-regulating agents (e.g., niacinamide, azelaic acid, hydroquinone): reduce hyperpigmentation by affecting melanocyte activity

• Broad-spectrum sunscreen: prevents DNA mutations and pigmentary changes triggered by UV radiation

Dermis: Tensile strength, elasticity, vascular exchange, inflammatory response, wound repair

The dermis is the layer beneath the epidermis. It provides your skin with its mechanical strength, flexibility, and ability to repair itself after injury. While it’s less accessible to surface treatments, it plays a critical role in maintaining skin function and integrity over time.

The dermis contains:

• Fibroblasts, which synthesize structural proteins like collagen and elastin

• Extracellular matrix components, such as glycosaminoglycans and proteoglycans, which retain moisture and support tissue structure

• Capillaries, which deliver oxygen and nutrients

• Sensory neurons, which relay information about pressure and temperature

• Immune cells, including mast cells and macrophages, which regulate inflammatory response

Damage or degradation in the dermis (whether from ultraviolet radiation, mechanical stress, or age-related changes) can lead to decreased elasticity, delayed wound healing, and visible scarring.

Interventions that influence the dermis (directly or indirectly):

• Topical retinoids (e.g., tretinoin, adapalene): stimulate fibroblast activity and increase production of collagen types I and III

• L-ascorbic acid (vitamin C): supports collagen cross-linking and reduces reactive oxygen species

• Microneedling: induces controlled dermal injury to trigger neocollagenesis

• Medium-depth chemical peels: penetrate to the upper dermis and promote structural remodeling

• Laser therapies (e.g., fractional non-ablative): initiate dermal regeneration without removing the epidermis

• Red light therapy (low-level light therapy): may increase mitochondrial activity in dermal fibroblasts, enhancing tissue repair under certain conditions

• Peptides (e.g., matrikines): under investigation for their role in dermal signaling and collagen regulation; some evidence but limited consensus.

Changes in the dermis occur gradually and require consistent intervention. Improvements in tensile strength, wound repair, and scarring outcomes are among the most measurable benefits.

Hypodermis: Thermal insulation, energy storage, mechanical cushioning, fluid regulation

The hypodermis, also called subcutaneous tissue, is the innermost layer of the skin. It primarily consists of:

• Adipose tissue, composed of adipocytes that store triglycerides

• Loose connective tissue, which provides mechanical support and elasticity

• Lymphatic vessels, which drain interstitial fluid and support immune function

• Larger blood vessels, which supply the dermis and regulate thermal exchange

This layer cushions internal structures, provides energy storage, and helps regulate body temperature. It also contributes to facial and body contour through its distribution and volume.

The hypodermis is not meaningfully influenced by daily topical skincare. Changes here are more often driven by systemic inputs (e.g., metabolic health, hydration, muscle tone) or professional interventions.

Interventions associated with the hypodermis:

• Facial massage and manual lymphatic drainage: may temporarily reduce fluid retention in superficial lymphatic pathways

• Radiofrequency-based devices: use thermal energy to stimulate subcutaneous collagen contraction and lipolysis (in clinical settings, *** I am very wary of this tech)

• Injectable fillers (e.g., hyaluronic acid-based): restore volume loss due to adipose atrophy

• Strength training and thermal therapies (e.g., sauna use): improve circulation and may indirectly support lymphatic and vascular function

Daily routines focused on barrier support will not reach this layer, but understanding its role is useful when considering broader skin health, particularly as it relates to volume loss, circulatory health, and temperature regulation.

Second, Why You Might Care (Or Not)

So now you know: skin is a high-functioning organ. It regulates heat and water loss, initiates immune responses, repairs itself under stress, and filters environmental inputs. It’s structured. It’s responsive. And it’s doing all of this continuously.

But whether or not that convinces you to do skincare is another question.

Because the truth is: unless you have a specific skin condition or you’re actively preventing sun damage, most of the effects of skincare are localized and, if we’re being honest, mostly cosmetic.

Realistically, you can understand everything you now understand about skin and still choose to walk around with dry lips and tight cheeks and be perfectly fine. You could just meditate instead. In fact, meditating with chapped lips might do more for your holistic wellbeing than skincare; for according to the research, meditation is kind of a miracle, and bluntly, the same can not be said for skincare.

So next, it’s in your court:

• Do you want to engage with your skin as a site of maintenance and attention?

• And are you okay with the fact that the most reliable benefit might just be spending a little bit of time with yourself, every morning and every night?

Some people, like myself, find these skincare rituals grounding. Some find them vain or unnecessary.

You get to decide (as long as you’re wearing sunscreen!)

With that, apply SPF, and happy skincare!

As always,

Caseysimone

And then there are the people who refuse to use them … and that’s a whole drama in and of itself. “Oh god, I would never,” they say. “Woah! I never expected you to,” others gasp. Which is to say: everyone (understandably) is negotiating their position in relation to these systems. (This tech, is, after all, not a speculative fiction hovering proverbially around the corner, no, its here and its revolutionary right now becuase its right at your fingertips and it can do so much, much more than it promises even, in a way, you, the user are revealing what it can do.) And that negotiation has become social, rhetorical, even existential. For example, some people I’ve talked to people describe their experience with LLMs in language that is frankly, spiritual; it’s as if they’ve discovered a new dimension of the meaning of everything through a machine. And, maybe they have. (Maybe I have too. I am seduced by its hallucinatory insertions, as it were, I see them as provocations to my thinking, to my writing … or am I just kidding myself?)

So using chat in ways that were extensions of existing accessibility workarounds for my hypermobile joints which can make typing taxing (voice-to-text then text editor), has become something alive for me. Something I use every day beyond accessibility (or, possibly it has shown me how far my desire for accessibility extended that I hadn’t otherwise imagined possible). Something I recently realized I’m at the beginning of a lifelong relationship with. (And frankly, it’s that same aliveness I see even in the folks who naysay it. And for what it’s worth, I admire their stamina. It’s just that I didn’t get a MySpace in 2004, and I am forever regretful I didn’t jump on the train. And so: here I am, jumping on this LLM train.)

In any case, this realization surfaced during a text exchange with a friend when we were sharing our roses, thorns, and buds for that week, and my bud was:

Which, I suppose, is exactly what I’m documenting here.

As I mentioned in the first post in what I am feeling is bound to become a series, The Friction Myth, I’ve been critical of this tech by watching my students use it, watching my colleagues frame dissertations around it, watching myself fall deeper into its provocations and how they feel both generative and aggrevatory to my thinking and process.

I’ve been studying buildings since undergrad. What drew me to them wasn’t their static form, but their capacity to facilitate … to host, shape, and respond to the experience of the inhabitants. Through serendipity I have written about before, I stumbled across the term “ubiquitous computing” and came to understand that what I was really interested in wasn’t architecture in the traditional sense, but in the computational layer that might allow built environments to behave more like systems. The imaginaries that excited me had always been the ones in which buildings did something: sensed, computed, adapted. I left design strategy consulting and got a master’s at the Technical University Delft and completed my thesis on UbiComp/ambient intelligence. Now, my doctoral research is in cyber-physical systems for future manufacturing. This has been my arc.

And what I now know is that many of the most iconic speculative visions of smart environments (the responsive building, the sentient home) were, at their core, predicated on a kind of ‘intelligence’ we didn’t yet have. The idea that a space could understand you, parse intent, hold context, reason semantically was always somewhat fictional. Until now. Because what LLMs make possible is exactly that: the underlying functionality we always assumed these environments would eventually include. And yet, instead of being embedded in space, they’re trapped in the narrowest possible format: a chat interface.

What (perhaps) might surprise you is that I didn’t start using LLMs because they aligned with my research. I started using them because I wasn’t going to miss MySpace twice. I saw my students using them. I don’t believe in abstinence-only education. I felt a professional responsibility to stay in relationship with these tools. But the more I’ve used them, the more I’ve realized: this is the missing layer. This is the ambient, generative, context-sensitive infrastructure that smart environments were always gesturing toward. And we’ve built it. It’s here. But we’re still talking to it through a chat box.

Right now, the dominant way people interact with LLMs is through chat. Text in, text out. The most widespread use case is built on a service metaphor — a help desk that gives you answers. And when we imagine what might come next, we reach for science fiction: the fully ambient, emotionally attuned assistants like Samantha (Her) or J.A.R.V.I.S. (Iron Man).

Given my background in ubiquitous computing and ambient cyber-physical systems, you might expect me to cheer on that trajectory — to argue that LLMs should be moving toward full ambience. The thing is, I don’t think that’s where the real design opportunity lies, at least not right now. That leap toward ambience skips over a critical space we haven’t even begun to explore: the graphical user interface (GUI).

We already have screens. We already have keyboards and mice. What we don’t have are graphical user interfaces, leveraging existing, ubiquitous (but not that kind of ubiquitous) hardware, that are meaningfully designed for what LLMs actually are: generative and probabilistic. The GUI were are currently using to engage them, the chat, reduces interaction to a linear prompt-response loop. Text in, text out. And that simplicity, while seductive, is shaping a culture of copy-paste dependency, which is leading to a shallow critical engagement with skill that is leading to skill-atrophy. In the context of academic production, that is, students completing assignments, I concede that the chat interface is at least partially responsible for the flattening of what could otherwise be a dialogic, iterative, interpretive process.

And in the relational use of LLMs, which is less my wheelhouse, I still see the interface as a problem. While specifically not-sentient or anthropomorphic, the chat interface frames language generation as conversation, reinforcing ideas of sentience, coherence, even identity as if you’re speaking with a self. That illusion is powerful. And also wild.

What follows is a short provocation based on that in between, what we call the ‘design space.’ A sketch of the interface landscape for LLMs. What we have, what we’ve imagined, and what we’re failing to invent. I look at four modes: the chat interface, the ambient assistant, the wearable device, and the missing GUI category no one seems to be exploring. This is not a product pitch, a prediction, or a polemic. It’s just a recognition: we are finally building the thing that ambient computing always gestured toward. There’s finally a tool to design for, and we have no new novel interfaces, whats up with that?

Chat as Interface

Let’s begin with what we already have. Chat is the dominant interface, the primary way most people interact with LLMs. Whether it’s ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity, the affordances are consistent: black box UIs, prompt bars, output threads. The interaction is structured around a text field, a blinking cursor, a simulated back-and-forth.

These are reactive systems. They wait for you to prompt them. They answer questions, finish sentences, generate copy. They are powerful, but they’re also stuck inside interface metaphors borrowed from customer service and productivity software. We talk to them like help desks. We click “Regenerate response” instead of actually going back and exploring the logic we have co-produced. Instead, we completely erase it when it goes off track; despite its capacity for complexity management, there’s not a lot of it, right? The irony is that the models themselves are deeply contextual, but the chat UI collapses all of that into a single, constrained flow: input, output. In other words, the interface narrows the possibilities of use.

“Ambient Intelligence”

When people try to imagine something beyond chat, they usually leap straight to sci-fi. Ambient systems. Smart assistants. Think: Samantha from Her, J.A.R.V.I.S. from Iron Man, HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

These figures don’t just answer, they listen, they know. They remember your schedule, anticipate your needs, whisper poetry in your ear. They are embedded in context, and they feel alive.

But the ambient interfaces we actually have (Alexa, Google Home) are far more modest. Clinical, even. They respond to trigger words, carry out commands, play the weather. They don’t really converse. They don’t really remember. They’re not really ambient in the existential sense. They’re just low-resolution endpoints for narrow interaction flows.

So while the sci-fi imaginary suggests intimacy, fluidity, seamlessness, the reality is static, brittle, and heavily constrained. In practice, ambient assistants have been largely flattened into a glorified voice remote.

Wearable / Handheld Devices

In steps, the new emerging category in this space of devices under-gridded by LLMs: tangible interfaces. Devices like the Humane AI Pin, the Rabbit R1, or the rumored OpenAI pendant. These products gesture toward something else: a kind of embodied intelligence that lives with you. Always on, always ready. No screen (or a very minimal one). Microphones, cameras, projectors. You tap, it listens.

There’s something conceptually interesting about this direction. Experimenting with form factors, moving beyond screens, that’s not inherently wrong. Exploring tangibility as a modality for engaging with LLMs could open up real use cases. But the deeper issue isn’t the hardware itself, it’s also who’s building it, and why.

Let’s be honest, the world of LLMs and how they might be realized through novel interfaces is a billionaire-class echo chamber. A circle of former Apple execs and hardware visionaries raised on the myth of the iPhone, flush with VC capital, chasing ‘the next big thing’ in a product design landscape that no longer resembles the one they won in. These aren’t design experiments (which we love); they’re speculative wagers dressed up as inevitabilities (which we are more critical of). These bets are being made far above the level of ground-truth context.

The people placing these bets are not designing from a place of need or social embeddedness. They’re building from inside a completely different reality, one shaped by (newfound) generational wealth, which creates distance from the rest of us normies and allows for an unfettered maintenance of the cinematic fantasy of what the future should feel like as set forth in mid-twentieth-century sci-fi imaginiaries. Their imagined future is sleek and frictionless, of course! And quietly authoritarian. These devices aren’t shaped by the complexity of actual life with tools. They’re shaped by a desire to fulfill a sci-fi narrative arc that was never rooted in ‘tech for good’ to begin with.

Additionally, the leap they’re trying to make is far too wide. The iPhone succeeded not by inventing mobile computing from scratch (lol), but by building on decades of prior hardware development, filling in a shape the world already had. These new wearable LLM interfaces are trying to conjure a market that doesn’t yet exist, or at least, not in the way they imagine it.

To be clear: I’m not saying tangible LLM interaction is a dead end. Rather, I am saying that these are niche bets floating in speculative capital. And they’re receiving wildly disproportionate attention relative to the actual site of mass adoption: chat.

People are using LLMs in chat every day. And yet we’ve dropped a generative model into the hands of the public, and left the GUI in 2013. #yolo

So yes, wearables may be part of the long-term future. But they’re not the frontier I’m interested in. The real design space is still the screen.

What the GUI Leaves Behind

So we return to the screen. To the graphical user interface. Disappointingly, despite all this energy and possibility, we haven’t seen much innovation in GUI itself.

LLMs are a new kind of tool but the way we interact with them still assumes otherwise. This is not because the GUI is incapable, quite the opposite. It’s because we haven’t asked the GUI to do anything different. Instead we should be experimenting with questions like:

• What are the visual metaphors for probabilistic language?

• How could interfaces let you trace or tune it’s logic whilst in production?

• How might temporality, multimodality, or spatiality be leveraged to inform the GUI?

We could be designing interfaces that make uncertainty legible. That show a model’s reasoning paths, or invite counter prompts in real time. Interfaces that unfold like [fill in metaphor], or [fill in verb] with the user over time. (These fill-in-the-blanks are left open intentionally, because the metaphor has not yet been locked in, and you, dear reader, may very well have an idea that shakes things up.) Interfaces that don’t collapse language into a magic trick, but reveal it as a living, mutable space of possibility.

Instead, we have chat.

This is not to say we won’t build those things. It’s to say: we haven’t yet.

And that gap, is where I am keeping my eye.

With that, have fun in the undefined design space,

As always,

Caseysimone

When I was preparing a presentation for this summer’s American Society of Mechanical Engineers conference, a gracious friend was kind enough to listen to me tell the story of how the term ‘Spatial Computing’ is best understood in relation to the three industrial revolution eras, Kondratiev waves of innovation, the misattribution of ‘waves of computing’ to Marc Weiser’s paper The Computer for the 21st Century, and that same paper’s identification of the concept of Ubiquitous Computing.

1. The History

Kondratiev’s waves of innovation, which start at the beginning of the First Industrial Revolution with the invention of the steam engine in the 1780s, were proposed by Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev. In his book, The Major Economic Cycles (1925), he proposed a cycle-like economic phenomenon of “waves” that consist of alternating peaks and troughs of sectoral growth and occur in roughly fifty-year increments. Critics of the eponymous K-Waves say the whole concept is apophenia, that the “waves” are a “recognition” of patterns that might not even exist.

Despite the controversy, K-Waves made a big dent in the imagination of technologists and have been leveraged to explain the rapid growth of technological innovation, especially in the last three decades. While I love a good visualization as much as the next info-graphic starved millennial, a close inspection of the myriad of K-Wave graphs found with a quick Google search reveals is a glaring lack of a quantifiable Y-axis.

They do however capture a compelling story of the sub-eras of industrial innovation over the last two centuries.

• 1st Wave, start 1780s: Steam Engine

• 2nd Wave, start 1830s: Steel Industry

• 3rd Wave, start 1880s: Electricity and Chemicals

• 4th Wave, start 1930s: Automobiles and Petrochemicals

• 5th Wave, start 1980s: Information Technology

• 6th Wave, start 2000s: disputed

We are now in the 6th wave, which has been called everything from the wave of Biotechnology to the wave of Sustainability. Time will tell of course, unless we take the critics’ stance and don’t buy into K-Waves whatsoever.

If we zoom into the era of the Third Industrial Revolution, we see a new wave trend emerge; namely, the Three Computing Waves.

This is where the misattribution to Marc Weiser’s 1991 paper The Computer for the 21st Century comes about. (What does certainly happen in that paper, however, is the term ‘Ubiquitous Computing’ is introduced, which we will come back to as it is an important part of understanding Spatial Computing.)

While I have been unable to identify who first propagated this misattribution, one thing is clear, folks have been arguing that there are three waves of computing and like to incorrectly cite Weiser for this observation.

While there are some discrepancies in the titling of each of the three computing waves, there is consistency in terms of the descriptions. Essentially, each wave describes the historical emergence of a computing type in its relationship to how many devices a single user may need or use of that computing type. For example, the Mainframe Computer is best understood as one computer for many users. Whereas the Desktop Computer, sometimes referred to as the Personal Computer (PC), is best understood as one computer for one user.

What these waves, like the K-Waves, seem to miss is any sense of a Y-axis. Once adjusted for approximations of the number of any given computing type in circulation, it is quickly clear that the visualization of Mainframe Computing is far too large, while there is also a gaping lack of a fourth computing type: Server Computing.

When both a Y-axis and Server Computing are added to this wave diagram, a proper graph is created, and with that, the source-less computing wave theory is just a graph of frequencies. (However, there is very little good data on how many computing devices there are by type, so my updated graph has new flaws of its own.)

Computing Types

• Mainframe Computing (One Computer, Many Users)

• Sever Computing (Many Computers, Many Users)

• Desktop Computing (One Computer, One User)

• Ubiquitous Computing: (Many Computers, One Users)

Mainframe Computing (One Computer, Many Users), initiated the computing waves in 1944 when IBM’s Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (called Mark I by Harvard University’s staff) ran its first program. *Mainframes are used mostly by large international organizations, this type of computing is not needed by everyone. Best guesses are that around 10k mainframe computers are in active use, and while there isn't a huge demand, they are still in production.

Sever Computing (Many Computers, Many Users), is actually the fourth wave of computing. However, it most closely resembles the mainframe in that it is made to be used by many users simultaneously. Most versions of the computing waves do not include this kind of computing, but I argue that this is one of the most critical kinds of computing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution; invisible to the daily user, and yet ever-present (and growing). *There are no reliable data on the number of servers in circulation; the best estimate as of 2020 is around 400,000.

Desktop Computing (One Computer, One User), also called Personal Computing (PC), is when computers are non-mobile and dedicated to a single simultaneous user. Though there has been a recent uptick in sales of Desktop Computers due to the surge in gaming; mostly, these computers are used in business or public services contexts (education, libraries, etc.). While they will likely serve a purpose for another 20 years or so, they are also likely to be the first on this list to disappear completely. *Conservative estimates suggest there are around four billion desktop computers in circulation.

Finally, we get to Ubiquitous Computing aka UbiComp (Many Computers, One User), where the story gets a bit more complicated and Spatial Computing makes its debut. Here is also where Mark Weiser’s paper finally makes an appearance.

“Ubiquitous computers must know where they are… If a computer merely knows what room it is in, it can adapt its behavior in significant ways without requiring even a hint of artificial intelligence”

— Mark Weiser, The Computer for the 21st Century

In my definition of Ubiquitous Computing, there are two computing sub-types: Spatial and Mobile Computing. I will be writing a follow-up article on Spatial Computing. Mobile Computing, needs no follow-up, as we know it well; it comprises devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets.

If you’ve seen the terms ‘Pervasive Computing’ and ‘Ubiquitous Computing’ used interchangeably, you’re not alone. Ubiquitous Computing means computing found everywhere; whereas Pervasive Computing means computing diffused through everywhere.

And the reason for these semantic specifics?

Dissecting the semantics of interconnected computing terms facilitates mutual understanding and supports literacy for the coming era of the rapidly emerging Fourth Industrial Revolution. For literacy in the 21st century must also be able to distinguish between potatoes and p0tat0es, tomatoes and t0mat0es.

With that, keep on being pedantic.

As always,

Caseysimone

Despite the archetype I grew up seeing in media of the go-getter professional who wakes at 4 a.m., swims laps, reads the Wall Street Journal cover to cover by 6 a.m., and is at the office by 7 a.m., life is, in fact, never so simple nor productive. Life is, and always has been, full of friction. I know this because it takes me at least an hour after my hair gets wet to look presentable for work. And if I start getting dressed before I’m done blow drying my hair, the humidity-induced sweating will force a full outfit change. Otherwise, I, too, would be my childhood idol, C.J. Cregg.

Scanlon’s premise is that friction has been automated out of our lives, or at least, that we’ve been sold that idea, effectively. But as I read, I kept circling a different problem: not friction’s removal, but its mis-recognition. The article isn’t primarily about that, but it’s where my attention landed. I’m less interested in whether friction is gone (it isn’t) and more concerned with what happens when it’s misnamed (by the trillion dollar PR machine that has been feeding us a notion that “seamlessness” is not only desirable but also right around the proverbial corner of emerging tech).

These are the distortions that I think happens when we internalize the story that in fact, ‘friction has been automated out of our lives’:

1. First, the cognitive work of thinking (developing ideas, making judgments, holding contradictions, knowing why there is not an “and” after the serial comma that precedes this final noun phrase) is quietly replaced by the production of output. The tool completes the sentence, and we accept it as the completion of the thought.

2. Second, friction is rebranded, not as difficulty worth engaging, but as inefficiency to be optimized away. Over time, the distinction between difficulty and inefficiency blurs, and the mandate to eradicate both only strengthens.

3. And, finally, the illusion is that the effort has vanished, when in fact it has only been aestheticized, outsourced, or internalized.

As an academic, I contest that the effects of these compounding distortions are, increasingly visible in how we teach, how we write, and how we make sense of ourselves as thinkers.

As a technologist, I do not believe the solution is to pretend these tools do not exist. That pedagogical posture has never held. People use what is available to them.

Instead, what interests me is whether we can learn to tolerate the discomfort of actual thinking while also learning to use these tools in ways that do not foreclose the possibility of thought. If friction is not going away, and, as noted by Scanlon, we are deep in an era of styling it to look like it has, our goal as technologists who still remember what it was like to wrestle all by ourselves to find and articulate our ideas need to strive to understand what it means to think in a world that is trying very hard to convince us that the thinking has already been done, by the LLM.

Of course, the fantasy of seamlessness isn’t new. Capitalism has long promised that friction can be optimized away, if not by technology, then by discipline, scheduling, and personal willpower. The reason C.J. Cregg tripping on her treadmill during her “me time” is funny1, is that it is relatable. A Sorkin-esque visual metaphor for a deeper pattern we all know: friction will always find us, and we will always trip.

This is the myth we’re living inside and it is twofold: (1) friction can be conquered through effort or interface and (2) if it isn’t, we won’t trip. But it can’t, and we will.

The forms change, the mechanisms evolve, but someone always stumbles. And that is ok. So the real task isn’t to eliminate friction. It’s to remain cognitively intact despite all efforts to disguise it. To resist the seductive logic that tools that afford efficiency are sufficient for developing skills that demand difficulty.

So let’s look more closely. If friction hasn’t disappeared, where has it gone? And what are the consequences of not recognizing its new forms?

There’s a long history of technologies that promised to reduce friction but instead redistributed it. In the domestic sphere, the microwave and the dishwasher were marketed as time-saving devices, liberators from the tedium of housework. And in many ways, they were. But they also restructured what counted as effort. The time saved did not reduce expectations, it shifted them. What were once seen as optional tasks or conveniences became new baselines. Scholars in feminist science and technology studies have long mapped how such technologies reframe labor and autonomy, often deepening the burdens they promised to relieve.

I don’t intend to retrace their arguments here. Rather, I am interested in their echo in modern technologies like generative AI and LLMs (aka chatbots). They are not the first to displace friction while masquerading as its eradication. They are merely the latest.

Much like the first law of thermodynamics, friction cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another.

A few months ago, I was in the car with my uncle when we were rear-ended in traffic. Thankfully no one was hurt. We pulled over, exchanged information, and then, after the shock had passed, called the insurance company on speakerphone from the car. What followed was not a conversation so much as a polite deferral. The representative thanked us for reporting the incident, explained that they’d log the claim, and then said, almost cheerily, “We’ll send a link to your phone. You can upload everything there, photos, paperwork, the works.”

In other words: your problem, your labor.

After we hung up, while keeping his eyes fixed on the road, my uncle said to me with a kind of paternal clarity in the tone of someone passing down a piece of generational knowledge, “Don’t forget, once upon a time, companies paid people to do what they’re now asking you to do.”

I haven’t stopped thinking about that sentence. Because during the course of my life (which is about the same age as the modern tech history) there’s been a quiet, steady redistribution of responsibility from institutions to individuals. Not just responsibility, but labor. And not just labor, but effort. Effort that gets framed as “convenience.”

And to do this, this re-meaning making, we’ve been trained to interpret these moments (i.e., submit your own documentation, find your own forms, troubleshoot your own issues) not as burdens, but as upgrades.

The friction is GONE!

It’s seamless, streamlined!!

You are in control!!

The insurance rep even said, “It’ll just be easier, we’ll text you the link.” But easier for whom? The work didn’t go away. It just became invisible. Unpaid. And, ours.

I’m not the first to notice this shift. But I do think it’s worth saying plainly: when a company invites you to “self-serve,” what they’re often doing is offloading paid labor onto you, cloaked in the language of autonomy. And now, increasingly, it is the displacement of the worst type of friction there is: thought. A pattern which surfaced, perhaps most insidiously, in the rise of generative AI.

Part of the reason LLMs feel so helpful, so seamless, is because the friction they alleviate is real. Writing is hard. Coding is hard. Math is hard. But the kind of difficulty they displace, perhaps even more so than the technologies that came before, is what we might call ‘formative friction.’ The kind that of friction doesn’t just slow you down, but institutes what you know.

What I mean is: the work of learning is not to perform competence, but to develop it. Memorizing your times tables is useful only insofar as you understand what multiplication is. If you can’t tell me what six times eight means, your recall is trivia, not knowledge. And if you are not interested in memorizing it just for the party trick, then I don’t know what to say other then your incompetence is not even hiding at all.

In this way, the displacement of friction LLMs afford is more than practical. It is epistemic. The technology doesn’t just ease the burden, it confuses us about what the burden was to begin with.

The challenge of writing, for instance, was never just about putting words on a page. It was, and is, about the internal work of locating the shape of a thought. Of wrestling with the distance between what you almost mean and what actually mean. (And getting from almost to actually sometimes this takes drafts, and drafts, and drafts, edits, and edits, and edits - both your own, and others). That work is effortful. That work takes time. That work is frictional by its very nature. And now, that friction is something LLMs encourage you to bypass.

You prompt the model, and it returns a sentence. Or five. I never imagined “be more succinct and cogent” would become such a mainstay in my daily conversations with a machine. And yet. The output is smooth. People say it writes at the graduate level, and I tend to agree. Chat’s outputs sound like something you might have written, in any case it sounds pretty damn close to what you almost mean, and since no one actually knew what you actually intended on saying (how would they, how would you, you were never quite able to articulate that, were you?). And in that moment, where something like what you mean has been said and said better then you may have been able to say the thing you actually mean, you accept the sentence as the thought itself. As your thought.

This is the crux of the displacement: the substitution of output for process, product for progeny. In our century-long quest to collapse the distinction between difficulty and inefficiency, we’ve created the conditions to rebrand intellectual difficulty as inefficiency outright.

And now, we are walking, fuck it, sliding down a path of erosion. Not just of skill, but of the capacity to tolerate not knowing. To stay with the friction that begets our capacity to think.

There’s so much more to say here that I had hoped to say herein - about the aesthetic performance of seamlessness, the quiet restructuring of how we relate to knowledge, the hidden labor that props up these systems, and the growing intolerance for discomfort that seems to shadow those growing up alongside the stratospheric rise of tools like ChatGPT. (Maybe I’ll turn this into a series.)

With that, all the best staying with the friction.

As always,

Caseysimone

This one is mine.

I have spoken before about how writing has long been one of the central practices in my life; how writing is difficult, often maddening, but unequivocally the most essential ingredient to thinking clearly. This guide traverses that relationship as it plays out in the context of writing about design in an academic context.

My perspective on design thesis writing comes from both sides of the table, as it were. I completed my own Master’s of Design thesis at TU Delft, where it earned me summa cum laude. Now, as a PhD student working within the Berkeley Institute for Design and the Co-Design Lab, I am a graduate student instructor in UC Berkeley’s Master’s of Design program.

In that role, I teach the Thesis Writing Studio and have worked closely with more than 50 students on composing their theses, some of which have gone on to be published in academic venues and receive awards, and others which, well, have received fewer accolades. All to say, I have seen both what works and what students struggle with, and thus, the aim of this guide is to gather instances of the latter as a way of supporting the former.

But I also wrote this how-to guide to help myself. Because writing is hard. Because even with multiple degrees, publications, and an uncountable number of written pages behind me, writing remains hard. Because as soon as I start to feel competent, the ambitious writer (neé thinker) within me demands more of my competence. And the easy-writing stretches, again, just out of reach. In that way, this guide is also a letter to myself: a way of making legible what I’ve learned (and what I’m still learning) about writing about design.

Ultimately, this guide is also for anyone interested in crafting strong academic design research, especially work intended for publication in venues like:

Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)

• Design for Interactive Systems (DIS)

• Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)

• User Interface Software and Technology (UIST)

• Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW)

American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)

• International Design Engineering Technical Conferences / Computers and Information in Engineering (IDETC-CIE)

• Journal of Mechanical Design (JMD)

Other Conferences

• International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED)

• Design Computing and Cognition (DCC)

Other Journals

• Design Studies, Elsevier

• She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, Tongji University & Elsevier

• Design Science, Cambridge University Press

• Design Issues, MIT Press

• Journal of Design Research, Inderscience Publishers

Lastly, because a Berkeley MDes thesis sits in that unique overlap between scholarly document and (personal) artistic artifact, the lessons here generalize anywhere you’re trying to communicate about design in a theoretically and procedurally situated way.

The Three-by-Three Matrix

Before we get to what makes writing a design thesis hard (and how to do it anyway) we need a shared understanding of what a strong thesis is meant to do.

Based on the MDes thesis expectations at Berkeley, I’ve found it helpful to frame this through a three-by-three matrix that comprises:

• The three goals your thesis must accomplish.

• The three modes of knowledge you must show fluency in.

While not every thesis balances these equally, the strongest ones touch all nine cells in the grid.

The Three Goals of a Berkeley MDes Thesis:

1. “Take a critical position in the literature.”

   Your thesis should intervene in an existing conversation in the design literature. That means reading and linking back deeply, not just broadly, across the literature and taking a stance thereon. You’re not summarizing existing work; you’re showing how your thinking, at the very least, builds upon it, and ideally, also reshapes or redirects it.

2. “Engage stakeholders thoughtfully.”

   Your thesis should be grounded in our world, a world that is shaped by the people, systems, or conditions it hopes to impact. That engagement should be meaningful, not performative. (More on that below.)

3. “Craft an exquisitely considered artifact.”

   Whether the final output is a system, a service, a product, a provocation, or even the thesis document itself, it should reflect the care, learning, and design sensitivity of the process that led to it.

The Three Modes of Knowledge:

1. Theory

   You need to demonstrate that you can think with and through design theory. This is a research degree at a top-tier R1 institution, which means your thesis must be situated intellectually, not just practically.

2. Method

   You should be able to articulate how you learned what you learned: through interviews, prototypes, workshops, cultural probes, whatever tools and practices you used. And, you must be able to articulate and document why you used these methods and not others.

3. Technology

   This might mean literal technologies (like software, fabrication methods, or interfaces) but it can also mean the material logics or infrastructures that your work engages or critiques. Every thesis is embedded in some technical or systemic context. Name it. Work with it. Show that you understand what it affords and what it constrains.

   

This matrix isn’t a rubric, exactly, but it is a map. If you feel lost in your writing, come back to these nine squares and ask: which ones am I inhabiting? Which ones am I avoiding? Which ones need more care?

The rest of this guide is about how to build a thesis that lives across this full grid. But first, let’s talk about what tends to go wrong and why.

What Makes Design Thesis Writing Hard (and Why That’s Not Just About Writing)

The most infuriating part (though I promise, in time, it also can become the most delicious part) about writing is that, in design work, it happens in tandem with the doing. Writing and doing are not diametrically-opposed, separate-acts, and they are certainly not sequential.

Even though it might feel comforting to imagine that you can just do the work and then write it up, that’s not how design research works. And you, writing a thesis for a Master’s program at an R1 university, are being asked to do something harder. You must write to think, and think through doing. It’s in the back-and-forth where clarity emerges.

But that movement is cognitively demanding. Especially if you’re a monotropic thinker, i.e., someone who enters flow states most easily when immersed in one mode or topic of work. Maybe you find your flow in coding, or fabrication, or speculative ideation, wonderful, that’s part of what draws people to design: the joy of finding yourself inside a particular kind of making.

But flow is not the whole job.

Academic design asks you to move (again and again) between different modes of knowing and making. Between doing and naming. Between situated messiness and abstract synthesis. That movement is uncomfortable. And it’s unavoidable. And you must write the whole way through, that’s what makes design ‘practice’ different from design ‘research.’

What’s tricky is that writing about design doesn’t just reflect your work, it reveals how you’ve done it.

Many of the things students struggle to articulate in their theses are the very same things they’ve struggled to enact. The problem isn’t just that the writing is hard. It’s that the doing was uneven, or unexamined, or difficult to tolerate. And the writing surfaces that.

So, before we dive into what each section of your thesis needs to include, I want to name some of the real struggles that show up again and again. Not just on the page, but in the practice. These are five patterns I’ve seen across more than fifty MDes theses:

1. Design Fixation: Rushing Toward the Exquisite Artifact

It’s understandable that you want your final piece to be beautiful, ambitious, and satisfying. And for many of you, that’s where flow lives: in (the imagining of the) making. But when the artifact becomes the gravitational center of your thesis too early, everything else starts to orbit it. The questions get blurry. The research flattens. You skip steps because you’re designing toward a solution, not through a process. Academic design work doesn’t reward perfection, it rewards rigor. Your outcome should be exquisite because of what you learned, not in spite of what you ignored.

2. Situating the Work in the “Disciplinary Lineage”

Many students confuse “having a domain” with “being in dialogue with the literature.” But writing a design thesis means entering a lineage of thought, not just a topic area. If you’re working on museums (setting/domain), you’re not just writing about museums, you’re intervening in experience design, cultural criticism, or speculative futures, depending on your frame (disciplinary lineage). You need to locate your work in a discipline, not just a setting/domain. This is what lets readers understand how to take your work seriously, and what kind of contribution you’re aiming to make.

3. Background ≠ Setting/Domain Dump

Relatedly, the Background section is not a Wikipedia page for your setting/domain. It’s not the place to tell us what a museum is, or that climate change is real. That kind of setting/domain context belongs in your Introduction. The Background is where you show us who else has worked in this space (designers, researchers, theorists) and what their work makes possible or impossible. Think of it as a lens you hand your reader: “Here’s how I want you to look at what follows.” That lens should come from design literature, not just real-world facts.

4. Stakeholder Engagement is Not Just a Checkbox

Stakeholder engagement is not a box to tick, it’s a foundational method. And yet, students often skip it, rush it, or under-report it. You need to show who you talked to, why you chose them, how you engaged them, and what changed as a result. Did your questions shift? Did your design direction evolve? Stakeholder work is a living part of your research, it deserves evidence and attention, not just a quick sentence and a shrug.

5. Process Documentation: Tell Us Exactly What You Did

Writing about methods isn’t glamorous, but it’s necessary. Students describe what they did at a high level (“we prototyped several versions”), but never show us how they got from one moment to the next. What prompted iteration? What failed? What surprised you? What did you make between the prototypes? If someone else were to follow your steps, what would they do first? What materials would they need? Without process documentation, your outcome reads as magic. Show us the work.

If you say you “talked to participants,” that’s not a method. How many? For how long? What were you looking for? What did you learn? If you did “iterative prototyping,” describe what changed across iterations and why. The burden of proof is on you, not your reader. A well-articulated method invites trust. A vague one invites suspicion. The best theses make you feel, as a reader, that you could do it too.

How to Write Each Section

Now we’re going to go through each of the sections.

Think of this part as a tour through the architecture of your thesis. Each section has a job to do. And while many students want to start with the “juicy” parts (i.e., showing off the outcome) your writing has to do more than describe. It has to structure your reader’s attention and your conceptual aims. It has to build clarity.

Below is a description of what each section is for, what I’ve seen go wrong, and what makes it work.

FRONT MATTER

In the Berkeley Master’s of Design program, your thesis begins with three distinct sections: Introduction, Background, and Motivation. Not all venues separate these quite so cleanly, you may find them collapsed into a single section with subheadings, or even blended together entirely in other disciplines or institutions.

But at Berkeley, we separate them on purpose.

The structure is pedagogical: it teaches you to recognize how these types of content (domain context, disciplinary lineage, and research urgency) do different work. As you become a more seasoned researcher, you may choose to blur or reorganize these boundaries. But for now, learning to treat them as discrete will sharpen your thinking and clarify your writing.

Here’s what each section does, what I’ve seen students get wrong, and what belongs where.

Front Matter: Introduction

There are three things the Introduction needs to do:

1. Introduce your domain, i.e., the world you’re working within. If your project is about museums, this is where you tell us what kind of museums, what they’re doing in the world, and why they matter.

2. Surface the problem you’re addressing. What’s not working? What gap or tension are you intervening in?

3. Set the scope of your work. What is your Research Question (yes, you need a research question)? What are you taking on? What are you not trying to solve?

In other words, the Introduction is a TLDR without findings.

This is also the place where students often confuse domain and discipline. If you’re writing about museums, it’s tempting to go long on institutional history and somehow students end up doing that in Background, but that is actually domain context, and it belongs right here in the Introduction.

Front Matter: Background

The Background section is where you show us your disciplinary lineage. It’s not about the real-world facts of your domain, or about the one or two or three papers that directly support your idea. Rather, it’s about who you are in active conversation with in the design literature and sometimes also the academic literature beyond (critical theory, psychology, sociology, etc.).

What designers, theorists, or researchers have taken on questions like yours? Whose shoulders are you standing on? Are you extending work in critical design? Participatory design? Systems thinking? Show us.

I often use this metaphor: imagine your thesis is a house on a hill, with windows on every side. The Background effectively says, “Yes, there are many windows to see the view from, but this work only wants you to look out of this window.” It shapes our perspective and tells us what kind of design work this is.

This section is also not meant to be comprehensive. It’s not a literature review in the traditional sense. It’s curated. You’re making an argument through what you include and what you don’t.

Importantly the Background is also where you should cite the approach you plan to use. You’ll describe the method in more detail later, but this is where you name it, ground it in precedent, and give us a sense of why you’ve chosen it. This rationale belongs here because methodology isn’t random, it co-defines your problem space (two thesis might look through the same window, but one might use Method A while the other might use Method B). The Background is where you set that frame, and help the reader understand not only what you’re studying, but how and why you’re choosing to study it that way.

Front Matter: Motivation

The Motivation section connects the domain and the discipline, and sometimes your own personal reasons for doing the work. It answers the big questions: Why this? Why now?

This is where you build urgency. Maybe you’re responding to an emerging technological shift, or a persistent social problem, or a lack of critical framing in your field. Maybe you’re picking up a thread from your own life or identity. Regardless, this section tells us what makes your work timely, necessary, or resonant.

It’s also a place to reference precedent work (if that work genuinely shaped your desire to explore this area. For example, maybe you’re designing a participatory toolkit for museum visitors because you’ve seen powerful engagement strategies succeed in other cultural institutions, but you’ve noticed their absence in museums. If that’s your motivation, say so. Show us why museums are the right site for this intervention, and what you hope such a toolkit might shift.

BODY

In the Berkeley Master’s of Design program, the second half of your thesis (Body) houses the most tangible parts of your research: Approach, Outcome, and Discussion.

These sections are where we see what you did, what came of it, and how you make sense of it all.

Each one builds on the last, but they’re not interchangeable. Together, they form the arc of your contribution: the design research you conducted, the artifact or system that resulted, and the insights or arguments you’re now able to make because of it.

We separate these sections deliberately.

The structure is pedagogical: it teaches you to differentiate between the doing (Approach), the result (Outcome), and the meaning-making (Discussion). In real design work, these often unfold iteratively and in dialogue. But in thesis writing, they must be presented clearly, so your reader can follow how each phase sets the stage for the next.

As you gain more experience as a design researcher, you may begin to blur or remix these boundaries. But for now, treating them as distinct will help you sharpen your documentation, clarify your logic, and develop a strong voice in your writing.

Body: Approach

The Approach section is where you show us how you arrived at your final solution. Not just what you did, but how each step informed the next.

Some successful ways I’ve seen this handled include breaking it down into prototyping phases or thematic pivots. A strong design journal can be a huge asset here, especially if it lets you trace your movement between desk research and in-situ work, and then back again.

You could even create a diagrammatic map of your process. Anything that makes your choices legible.

That said, I’ve seen students struggle here more than anywhere else.

A metaphor I often use comes from my own elementary school English class. (And apparently its now used to teach Computer Science at Harvard.) It goes like this: imagine you are teaching someone to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with words alone. If you write, “spread the peanut butter,” but don’t say with what or on what, someone might end up spreading it on the counter with their bare hands. What the exercise teaches you is that, understandably, we make many shortcuts in language because we correctly assume competence, but your reader could pick up your document in ten years with no knowledge of an MDes, for them to make the leaps you are intending for them to, you have to be precise. Your aim is to support someone reasonably follow your thinking well enough to replicate your approach without ever speaking to you.

What belongs here: the full arc of the process that led to your final artifact. That includes early research, design pivots, rough prototypes, failed ideas, and the moments where feedback or reflection reshaped the path forward. If you tested three different versions with users and learned something each time, those findings belong here.

Outcome is where we’ll meet your final design. Approach is where you show us how you made the sandwich, as it were.

Body: Outcome

This section is also where your discernment matters most. You are the best authority on what counts as the “final artifact” (Outcome), and what belongs to the process that led you there (Approach). Maybe your project moved through ten iterations, and you made a judgment about what you wanted to put in front of people for that final round of testing. That final version, and what you learned from it, belongs here in the Outcome.

What you include in Outcome should be:

• The final artifact (or system, tool, provocation, etc.)

• The final user/stakeholder engagement with that artifact

• What you learned from that final moment of evaluation or reflection

Earlier tests, design pivots, failures, and formative feedback? That’s Approach. The final test, and the insights it yielded? That’s Outcome.

And yes, please show us the evidence. Include photos, sketches, screenshots. Append interview questions or testing protocols. Make the final round of learning feel visible and credible. This is the moment when we get to meet your design and understand how it behaved/ was received in the world.

Body: Discussion

The Discussion section is where you make meaning. Not just reporting on what happened, but reflecting on its implications.

This is where you synthesize what you learned across the approach and outcome. What design principles emerged from your process? What tensions remain unresolved? What are the theoretical stakes of what you found?

It’s also a place to re-situate your work within the broader literature introduced in the Front Matter. Earlier in the thesis, you showed us what conversations your work was entering. Now, you have something to say back. How does your project extend, challenge, or complicate the work of others? Where does your contribution land within those traditions or debates?

Your voice matters here. Not just the voice of your participants, not just your citations…but yours. This is where you surface your interpretive thinking and place your work in the broader discourse. What should we take from what you did? What should designers or researchers do differently because of your thesis?

Abstract

Your (extended) abstract should be like a mini version of the entire paper. One to two sentences that describe each of the core sections: Introduction, Background, Motivation, Approach, Outcome, and Discussion.

If someone in your life were to only read this one page, they should be able to reasonably act as if they knew what was in the rest of the document, and could hold a curious, informed conversation with you about your thesis project.

Conclusion

Your Conclusion is where you bring the thesis full circle. It’s not just a summary of what you did, rather, it’s a moment to step back, synthesize what it all added up to, and signal what that work contributes to design as a field. A good Conclusion often includes:

1. A re-statement of your original problem or research question. What did you set out to explore or investigate?

2. A synthesis of what you found or learned. Not a list, not a repeat of your Outcome section, but a concise articulation of the key insights, principles, or patterns that emerged from your work.

3. A reflection on what changed…In your understanding, in the design direction, in your sense of the problem, what evolved?

4. A statement of contribution. What does your thesis offer to other designers, researchers, or stakeholders? What might someone take from your work?

5. A sense of what remains unresolved or open-ended (i.e., future work). What are you choosing not to answer? What questions are still worth exploring? What do you hope others might take on?

The best Conclusions read like someone who’s gained perspective. You’re not in the weeds anymore. You’re telling us what the work did, not just what you did. That’s the difference.

References

Your references need to be in IEEE format. Even if you use visual or inline citations (which some graphic designers like to do), you still need a formal reference list at the end.

And a note on in-text citations: don’t just slap a name and date at the end of a sentence. Build the citation into your prose. Mention the author. Give a little context. Especially when citing canonical work, this helps the reader understand its place in your argument and improves the flow of your writing.

With that, happy engineering-design-researching,

As always,

Caseysimone

I can confirm that these topics are worth your attention.

1. Elon’s dad gives an unhinged interview

2. Maps, maps, maps

3. Telepathy

4. A Bay Area cult

5. TikTok brain rot supplemts

1. Elon has a dad and his dad has, clearly, not spoken (or listened) to a PR consultant:

2. I mean, the West Wing (RIP) already told me maps are contested, but this still hits …

Consider watching the whole show here (from 9 months ago, prophetic, I think so…):

And for the uninitiated, please welcome CJ Craig, love of my life, as she is introduced to maps and their myriad projections:

3. Speaking of prophecy, have you encountered the Telapthy Tapes podcast of the critique thereof?

@maxddrummer#maxddrummer #finally #research #on #savants #fyp

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@maxddrummer#maxddrummer #taps #to #his #favorite #song #savant #thetelepathytapes #fyp

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Critique one: The Telepathy Tapes: A Dangerous Cornucopia of Pseudoscience

Critique two: my own…

@caseysimone_for anyone whose been to the hill, does *aunts and uncles* mean anything to you? #telepathytapes #autisticsavant #telepathy #actuallyautistic #sceptic

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4. While we are at the fringes, umm, the ‘Zizians’ …

Click the image above for an Independent article about Zizians, or if you prefer to stay in Substack, read more here:

Read Max

The Zizians and the Rationalist death cults

Greetings from Read Max HQ! Today’s newsletter is a ~4,700-word missive on the “Zizians,” the transcontinental Rationalist cult implicated in at least six murders since 2022. In the piece, I try to explain “Rationalism,” cover the Ziz lore in a fairly straightforward fashion, and understand why Rationalism has been a breeding ground for so many cult-lik…

Read more

a year ago · 429 likes · 100 comments · Max Read

5. Lastly, and lovingly, fodder for your doom scrolling, you’re welcome:

@archiescrewthere’s a correlation there. Advanced Pilates girlies are a different breed #pilates #GATE #giftedandtalentedburnout #millennialwomen

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@iamrichrollMy guest today is Arthur Brooks, a Harvard professor and behavioral scientist who has reshaped our understanding of human happiness. Now streaming on all platforms including YouTube. Episode 891.

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@everyonehateselonfree stickers. link in bio #elon #peoplevselon #tesla

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@chooklionjust lose it #eminem #dog #fyp #chooklion @eminem

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@carolyndodson0 @carolyndodson0 ♬ original sound - CarolynD

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@ajdronkersAny women down to marry a gay man? #fyp #lavendarmarriage #queertiktok #singlewoman #gaytiktok #lesbiansoftiktok #datingproblems

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@emilyteppThis pulled me straight out of a depressive episode I love women 🥹 creds: @abigail.bailey0 #greenscreen #hopecore #womenpower #womensupportingwomen #spreadlove

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@zaidleppelinhobby categories (inspired by @isabella) - shoutout friends who entertain thought experiments w you #typesofhobbies #thoughtexperiment #friendship

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@ianisuglyyif you wanna watch the full session go to my profile

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@ianisuglyyhe was NOT vibing with my wardrobe

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@jamiemazurskiLet's just hope he doesn't see this #hinge #datingapp #greenscreen #greenscreenvideo

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@lulaluce_The superior way of holding your friends @hannahhamam #poledancer #aerialduo #aerialdance #duo

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With that, that’s it, folks. See you at the next random interval…

As always,

Caseysimone

If you are new here, every so often I free up real estate for gathering experiences, locations, media, etc. by sharing the things I am already in love with, with you. If you want the full annotated commentary, read on. If you just want the brass tax, you can always pop over to the Obsessed Database where I am cataloging all of the recs I make across this series.

This week I went to a new oyster bar in Oakland, and it was so mid I almost made a dummy gmail just to review it. But why be anonymous when I can share *all* of my thoughts with my *all* loyal subscribers, right?

In any case, I love oysters, and this disappointment got me thinking about all of the oyster places (around the bay) that I would patronize again.

In this way, like an oyster, this obsessed digest is relatively small. (In the next obsessed: TV shows I would watch again and don’t think you’ve ever heard of…)

Oysters 🦪

Small Change Oyster Bar

Let’s just get this out of the way. I do not recommend going here unless all you want is oysters *and* possibly wine. Here’s a breakdown:

• Oysters 5/5 (What else needs to be said, I love oysters, and these were good. I got the smallest ones they had on the menu that day.)

• Mignonette Sauce 5/5 (Best mignonette Sauce I have had, a bit spicy, really impressed.)

• French Fries 0/5 (They couldn’t make fries unless you got it with the battered fish. Was a very odd interaction trying to understand this limitation. The explanation was the kitchen was too small, someone who works in the food service industry, am I the asshole or is this a thin excuse?)

• Ceviche 2/5 (Flavorless fish. The worst chips to accompany it: grainy when the fish wanted a proper tortilla chip like from Morenita, instead it was more like the bottom of a whole foods tortilla bag :/ . Most chips were broken like they were at the bottom of the bag. Really disappointing. It looked nothing like the promo image on their website, maybe I just caught them on a bad day. )

Anticipated sticking around and ordering more, but after this plus the wait staff being oddly disaffected on 4 pm on a Thursday, it was time to go. Didn’t even look at the wine menu. That said, the ambiance of the back patio was 4/5. It’s a total gem of a backyard in the Temescal district. So if all you want is oysters, I think you will have a lovely time. I will likely go back under these strict conditions.

Hog Island Oyster Farm

Don’t walk, run (well drive quite carefully) to Hog Island Oyster Co.’s farm just north of Pt. Reyes. Here’s the they only sell rundown:

• Oysters 5/5

• Mignonette Sauce 3/5 (Average mignonette sauce, no complaints, also no praise.)

While their terrace is sometimes closed, it’s a great place to pick up oysters cheap and then drive down the coast until you find a quaint spot to pull over (just make sure you bring:

• a cooler,

• a shucker,

• something to protect your hands (a dish rag can do the trick),

• anything you might want to garnish your oysters (though the farm sells anything you forget), and

• a cutting board to get leverage on the oyster— I learned the hard way that shucking oysters on a sandy beach without a hard surface is a fool’s errand).

If the Farm’s terrace is closed and you are in need of a local spot, I love Alan Sieroty Beach just about 15 min south of the farm. During the week, there is a non-zero chance you will have the whole beach to yourself. If Hog Island Oyster Farm’s terrace is open, it’s a great spot too, so I have heard.

Tony's Seafood Restaurant

It doesn’t get much more quintessential than Tony’s. It’s right on the water, and is charming as all get out. It looks like the Aflec’s just shot a dreary feature film there. In this way, its like Small Change, that is, mostly about ambiance *and* oysters.

But in this case, it just isn’t a problem, because, well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t expect ‘cuisine’ on the water, I expect excellent fish. And this is on full offer here.

• Oysters 5/5

• Mignonette Sauce 3/5 (Same as Hog Island, avg. sauce, no complaints/praise.)

• Market Greens Salad 2/3 (I really wanted something fresh and tangy, this was barely this. But I’m a salad snob and rarely find people dress salads correctly in restaurants, this salad was no exception.)

• French Fried 3/5 (Solid fries, nothing special, not bad either.)

Whole Foods’ $1 Oysters on Fridays

Last summer I got into a Friday oyster ritual (which I highly recommend, of course) after I learned that Whole Foods sells their oysters for $1 on Fridays.

There is really nothing more to this rec than that.

It’s great, it’s cheap, it could be your new Friday tradition. (Just make sure to go early to get your pick of the little guys, you are not the first to hear of this deal, others want fishy traditions too!)

With that, may you be as happy as a clam and as delicious as an 🦪 ,

As always,

Caseysimone

The boundary-line of the mental is certainly vague. It is better not to be pedantic, but to let the science be as vague as its subject.
- William James, 1890

The experience of neuroatypical individuals as users of products is not an edge case. Design for inclusivity is central to responsible future-proof design methodology. Failures in voice assistants, like the Google Home Mini, misunderstanding the user can easily be dismissed as a downside of early adoption, “the tech just isn’t there yet” — for neurotypicals.

As environments are increasingly automated by voice control alone, the neuroatypical individual could become increasingly alienated and excluded from their environment. Consider autism conditions like nonverbal autism, apraxia, and monotone speech which limit the accessibility of voice-automated products. And when voice assistance is the only way to turn on the lights, agency over one’s spatial conditions is denied.

Historial Perspectives on Cognition

The mid-century was a time when machinery was radically reconstituting its meaning in society which allowed for a fuzzily defined1 “cognitive science” to adopt first the mind-as-machine metaphor2, and then with the ubiquity of computing in the 70s, the mind-as-computer metaphor.

REC scientists and Enactivits reject the idea that the brain is an analog of computer vision, simply ingesting symbols and printing actions in the form of speech, movement, etc. While Cognitive Scientists are increasingly moving away from a computational understanding of cognition3, the prominence of mind-as-computer metaphor has irreversibly affected how we design products and interface devices, people, and our environment.

[The] simple fact that [mechanized ideas of the mind] already exist in people’s minds affects how we see the world and how we see ourselves.
- Jean-Pierre Dupuy

An Argument for Radical Embodied Cognition

If you were asked to draw what a human looked like only based on the primary devices that contemporary humans use daily (phones, computers, keyboards, mice) would you draw legs?

What we see is that many of our primary tools-for-living don’t require us to use our whole body, nor do they afford us the opportunity to. One arena where this is being challenged is in voice assistants.

When critically examined, even while affording the use of an underutilized modal function (voice), contemporary voice-activated technology presupposes a computationalist take on cognition.

When I awake to my Google Home Mini sounding my alarm, I must effectively shout a piece of code, a command line, “Hey Google, stop.” {Object; Action}. What I can tell you from using my Mini each morning, is that I notice a stark confrontation with my own inability to externalize my thoughts into the desired input form the device has to receive in order to work. I think something vague, about wanting some ambient sound?, music?, white noise?, a podcast?, but the thought is barely formed in my mind by the time a parallel and competing realization begins to gel: I am going to have to choose, with only my words. No browsing through records, CDs, mp3 titles so that I might formalize it into an input that my device understands. And stat. Lest I hear in return, from my silence as I try to form words, a devastating, “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.”

Klemmer et. al. suggest this phenomenon of struggling to articulate a desired interaction and outcome happens because “reflective reasoning is too slow”4 . In their seminal article, How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design, their second theme, performance, discusses how engaging physical artifacts is a way of making cognitive processes more fluid and tacit. Turning a light switch, thus, is a more reliable and embodied trust in what will happen with the lights than my current, “Hey Google, turn on the lights.”

Tangible interfaces that engage the body can
leverage bodycentric experiential cognition.

— Klemmer et. al.5

Instead of only voice activation and buttons to change the volume of media already playing, voice-activated devices might consider having QR codes that allow users to control central functions of their environment from their own device. Instead of, “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that,” Google might respond, “My apologies, I didn’t get that. But I’d like to help. Please find a unique QR code on the bottom of this device that will allow you to control the ambient features of this environment yourself.”

This is not a perfect nor foolproof solution (and I am not blind to the fact that my suggestion recommends yet another interface with the unembodied-smartphone), but rather, this an idea that expands accessibility and doesn’t presume the user will be able to, or interested in interacting unimodally with the device.

With that, may your most-used devices operate in your preferred modality,

As always,

Caseysimone

Last week, because the internet is brilliant, or more precisely because the team at Protein Journal does an incredible job curating their monthly newsletter, I happened across Hoel’s substack article ‘Futurists have their heads in the clouds.’

So that you’re well and good up to speed, I would suggest popping over to read his article before continuing with mine. (And also, of course, because I can be quoted saying, “If you only read one thing this year, let it be this article.” Bold.)

Should you have chosen to read two or more articles this year (even bolder) see the following as my contribution to the reading group for points 1–8, next week I will address points 9–18.

Predicting the Future

Hoel starts by perceptively noting that the rest of us have stopped being perceptive. Namely, 2050 is as far away as 1992. For those of us who were alive in 1992, his remark reminds us to wake up, and do the math. (Or “you do the math” for comedian Chris D’Elia fans). 2050 is just not that far away.

2050, that super futuristic year, is only 29 years out, so it is exactly the same as predicting what the world would look like today back in 1992. (Hoel, 2021)

And I should know, given I’ve been alive 29 (and only 29) of those years. Wherein, despite Moore’s Law, the inventions that have emerged in my (memoried) lifetime could have easily been predicted by following the trends.

What was most impactful from 1992 were technologies or trends already in their nascent phases, and it was simply a matter of choosing what to extrapolate. (Hoel, 2021)

When folks ask about my research, folks who are not as deeply entrenched in technology (read: the future) as I am, I often show them the 1998 work of filmmaker Frans Bromet. While it’s in Dutch, anyone who has lived through the 90s and has been told “heeft u een mobiele telefoon,” means “do you have a mobile phone,” will be able to extrapolate that folks are not so sure about the idea of being reachable at all times. Saying things like “I’m certainly not so important as to need to be reached at any time.”

In under two minutes, most of the nay-sayers, who are simply well-intentioned (and mostly under-informed) Luddites are disarmed for they know all too well what happened: we all got smartphones, are glad no one calls us on the landline, and for the most part, we like this change.

But I do not want to invalidate folks' concerns. In fact, we should all be more familiar with the history of the Luddites, for their concerns, should be our concerns.

In her book 12 Bytes, Jeanette Winterson reminds us of the true origin of the term Luddite:

The Luddites of the early 19th century were not against progress; they were against exploitation. The 1812 Frame-Breaking act made damage to a power loom punishable by death. Luddites were not risking their lives to return to some sentimental rural Arcadia, but to earn enough to feed their children. (p. 39)

And so while it is a matter of digital literacy to understand that new technology begets new technology, silencing the hope for improved circumstance over what Winterson calls “new world order, capital, and property” is as ill-advised as it gets, of course.

Instead, I center my projections for the future on the past, as does Hoel,

If you want to predict the future accurately, you should be an incrementalist and accept that human nature doesn’t change along most axes. Meaning that the future will look a lot like the past.

as does Winterson…

We need to learn from the past. That's what the past is for. (p.34)

Part One: Technological changes

Space Exploration.

Hoel’s Take: There will be a Martian colony.

My Add: More people will be in Space.

Hoel is correct, “extrapolating the incredible progress in the private space sector over the last decade…there will be an established and growing civilian presence on Mars.” Where I would like to add some more resolution to the prediction is around whether society at large is excited about this. Especially when those likely to be enabling this reality are polarizing characters (welcome Musk and Bezos to the chat).

In addition to the science, construction, and/or tourism Hoel points to, there will also be discussions down on Earth about the mere act (and cost) of settling on a new habitat.

As construction in space turns to mining, temporary habitats turn to ostensibly permanent ones, and both governments and corporations begin vocally splitting hairs about land ownership (the 1967 Outer Space Treaty withstanding) folks on Earth will begin taking sides. Not everyone will be excited.

There will be questions about terminology and the implication of concepts like ‘occupy,’ ‘colonize,’ and even ‘settle.’ And realizations about the technical support on Earth needed to viably sustain such initiatives.

Material resources will also be a huge concern when it comes to space travel. Namely, the fact that getting to space is wildly taxing on the environment. Folks will be divided between those who think Mars exploration is in conflict with increasing environmental volatility on Earth and those who see Mars as a requisite backup plan deserving of Earth's limited natural resources.

Commercialization of (All) Data.

Hoel’s Take: The marketization of everything.

My Add: The data-fication of everything.

So in case you haven’t heard, spatial computing is on its way. That means more extended reality and more ambient intelligence. This means virtual reality gaming will become customary — which Facebook (now Meta) made a big claim on in their most recent annual conference, Connect. But another kind of extended reality, namely augmented reality, will be the true data aggregator. Augmented reality will be near-ubiquitous in 2050, in the form of glasses. (If you don’t believe me, I direct you again to the video from 1998 above).

Everything you look at (and I truly mean look at as there will be cameras looking directly at your eyes to contextualize where you are looking) will be captured, and because of the improvements in computer vision, what you look at will also be categorizable. Didn’t read the email, but you said you did, the AR glasses will know. (But not know in any sentient sense, intelligent artificial intelligence is still very much fiction in 2050).

And all of this data. Well someone will own it.

The early 2020’s will bring Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) to the web. With this, came a conceivable way to own your data (and privacy)— and to choose to whom you would sell, lease, loan, etc. your data.

And yet, being the broker of all of your own data has brought new problems. Firstly, there is too much of it. You will be overwhelmed by the number of considerations you will be asked to make, and when you have the (financial) privilege to do so, will prioritize convenience over decision-making (think of financial advisors advising you instead on who is trustworthy of using your data). Secondly, a clear inequity will arise, those who have no other means will sell their data (and attention) simply to survive.

Commercialization of (All) Data.

Hoel’s Take: AI will be the most futuristic impactful change in day-to-day life.

My Add: The line between automation and artificial intelligence will remain blurry.

Despite the calls of folks in the computer sciences to please stop calling AI, AI (they preferred the technical term machine learning) as it implies a level of intelligence that is incredibly misleading. The term Artificial Intelligence will stick. And much like how few in 2020 knew why restarting a router made the internet work again, few will understand what AI truly entails. Therefore, simple automation will continue to be perceived as AI (a light turning on when someone enters the room, for example), while true machine learning will grow leaps and bounds out of the eyes of the consumer marketplace.

Whatever it is called, it will be ubiquitous. And the mundane, routine tasks of the early 21st century will be largely automated. Indeed, Hoel forecasts correctly many jobs will be lost:

White-collar workers, like tax attorneys, lawyers, and programmers. (Hoel, 2021)

But perhaps this is not such a loss,

Getting rid of what the great econimist and anthropologist David Graeber called ‘bullshit jobs’ is nothing to mourn. What we need is economic fairness. (Winterson, p. 51)

Hoel suggests, “the worst hit will be artists like writers, painters, poets, and musicians, who will have to deal with a total saturation of artistic content by AI.” I don’t disagree, but want to add some depth. Namely, creativity is challenging to quantify. And in 2050, we will still be bound to what Ada Lovelace knew to be true in 1840 (though folks will be actively working to unbound this limitation).

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. (Lovelace, 1840)

Essentially, knowing how to order machines to perform creativity is still hard.

We can, and should, learn how a poem works, because that increases our pleasure in it, but emotional hit is odd and harder to pin down. The hit is like the ghost in the machine — we can see how the poem is made, but the elusive sprite-like thing refuses to get in the bottle and, well, be bottled. (Winterson p. 29)

Stimuli Economy.

Hoel’s Take: The supersensorium will grow in power.

My Add: Calm and the un-augmented will increasingly be for the rich.

Hoel could not have said it more precisely,

VR addiction will be much more impactful than the ill-defined notions of “internet addiction.” (Hoel, 2021)

What was missed is that that predicament will not befall the rich who understand that plugging into the metaverse rarely to come out is some kind of hell on earth. The multiple private attempts to purchase Esalen and the myriad of no-tech private schools in the Valley, for example, show a clear trend to guarding oneself and one’s children from too much stimuli.

[The metaverse] takes us away from what fundamentally makes us happy as human beings. We’re biologically evolved to be present in our bodies and to be out in the world. — John Hanke, Niantic CEO

Instead, those with the resources will opt for a minimalist AR or fully ambient intelligent levels of technology. Those who can not afford such a lavish lack of technology will rely on digital worlds increasingly for calm.

Anticipated Needs Alters Shopping.

Hoel’s Take: A mostly storeless society.

My Take: Sensors radically change shopping patterns.

You want a burrito for lunch? There’s an app for that, and you’ll receive it tin-foil wrapped and still warm via drone or human carrier in ten minutes. (Hoel, 2021)

But the question is, will you really purchase based on your wants, or will it be more likely that your whole meal plan is coordinated for the week based on analysis of data from your wearables, smart fridge, and bank account? In aggregate, your data will be able to increasingly predict and plan your need to purchase anything. Running out of toilet paper: thing of the past. Wondering what foods cause an afternoon dip: thing of the past.

But yes, when you are craving literally anything a drone can carry, it can likely be to you in under 10 minutes. Want something from your favorite bakery on the other side of the country, you’ve got it! (Though maybe not in under ten minutes).

In-Person Learning for the Elite and Kids Under 5.

Hoel’s Take: Education will take place mostly online.

My Add: In-Person Learning = Prestige.

While the understanding of the importance of in-person interaction for the socialization of young children, development of fine motor skills, and lifetime performance outcomes only increase, the notion of post-secondary education being in person will be wildly reevaluated.

The notion of spending 18–22 at living on campus will be considered an anachronism or a wasteful indulgence of the rich. (Hoel, 2021)

And indeed, the institutions that do remain for in-person learning, will be the tenured-prestigious ones, and will be as much a social club as a learning institution. They will be able to do this based on a long legacy of hiring one another.

Gene Editing is Prominent.

Hoel’s Take: Genetic engineering of embryos to avoid disease will have become common.

My Add: Medical ethics will transform to accommodate these changes.

Superficial genetic upgrades for babies (heterochromatic eyes, for instance) will be a trend among the super rich or pop stars. However, there will be no genetic engineering that improves the fundamentals of human traits like intelligence or athleticism or even anything like attractiveness above and beyond all-natural humans — the available technology will still be focused solely on avoiding downsides, like genetic diseases or disabilities. (Hoel, 2021)

Like any science, there will be folks who push past the established ethical boundaries of the time “in the name of science.” Gene-editing will make it challenging to resist experimentation.

Unfortunately, the Cherry Pit I have always dreamed of having as a pet will still not be available for purchase.

Youthful Glow.

Hoel’s Take: Anti-aging technology will extend the health-spans of the rich.

My Add: Social media breaks down gatekeeping and tricks of the rich are shared.

(Baby) Botox has become standard (especially given its proven correlation with decreased rates of depression and tension headaches from squinting at screens). Social media has democratized access to the beauty rituals of the rich. The ability to look young, formerly had only by those with celebrity facialists, is common knowledge across the general public.

Already it is quite obvious that people at the top are not aging in the way they used to. Jennifer Lopez, Paul Rudd, and The Rock are classic examples of celebrities over 50 — even our president, Joe Biden, is unimaginably old for a president in the 19th century. (Hoel, 2021)

What’s the time-equivalent idiom for “your eyes are bigger than your stomach?” Whatever it was, mine were. So now that three PhD applications, and a journal paper, and a portfolio update are behind me, I return with part two of two of, ‘2050 is not far-off, after all.’

A quick catch-up, in November Protein Journal included a link to Hoel’s substack article ‘Futurists have their heads in the clouds.’ It is a list of 13 predictions about the future. The essay made my jaw drop; if you see the array as a kind of compass, Eric Hoel is headed due north.

These are my contextual additions to points 9–13. (Haven’t read either article? You’ll be fine, but I’s consider giving Hoel’s article a spin for reference.)

OKAYYYY, LET’S GO!

Part Two: Demographics and Politics

Aesthetics/Standards of Digital Living.

Hoel’s Take: Huge improvements to standards of living.

My Add: No more screens, more curves and pastels (for those who can afford it).

Hoel got it right in simply saying, “Everything will just get nicer.” And if you’ve got the cash (or crypto) he’s right, A/V systems, high-quality food, ambient intelligence, and autonomous vehicles will continue to get better and more ubiquitous.

Siri is now also in the garden and can play your favorite podcast as you are planting decorative kale; no need for an actual vegetable garden; food deserts aren’t in your neighborhood. You are a member of your local Whole Foods vertical-urban-farm (it’s the modern equivalent of a CSA box). But unlike the days when you picked up a beaten-up cardboard box from the local farmers market only for half of the veggies to go bad cause you didn’t know what to do with them, now you’ve got a personal digital ecosystem that keeps this from happening. Your AR glasses or contact lenses ensure that you pick only the food that is nutritionally aligned with your unique needs.

Your smart home and appliances work in tandem to show you how to store and prepare new ingredients, making sure you not only cook that mushroom risotto to perfection but also ensure the leftover crickets don’t go to waste whilst lying in a forgotten drawer in the fridge.

But the aesthetic will be more effortlessly soft than either Hoel or this terribly inaccurate aesthetic from Hoover predict. Looking at car concept designs starts to paint a portrait of this…

I mean, sure it’s a bit cartoony. But do you want this or a G-Wagon driving towards you in a Level 5 autonomous driving zone?

Plus, screens will be almost completely phased out of non-work life, so designers can return to softer lines. Minimalism a la Apple will still be chic (and they will stay the leading player in defining the aesthetic) because minimalism is a privilege of the rich, but a sense of ‘natural’ curvature, or at least a ‘return to how it used to be’ will be included. Think along these aesthetic lines…

The contrasting aesthetic will indeed be what Hoel calls the “polygonal Tesla aesthetic.” Which will look something more like this, still natural, but make it brutalist…

Women, Families, Gender, and Partnerships

Hoel’s Take: The future really is female. … Families will continue to decline in importance. … The rise of the throuple.

My Add: Hoel’s points 10, 11, and 12 are most salient when collapsed into one concept and gender is brought in.

As of now something close to ~60% of all college degrees go to women: by 2050, it will be well above 70% (although this will be decentralized from traditional colleges and universities, as discussed earlier). And while women’s salaries are not as high on average as men’s now, this has already switched in urban areas, which is generally a predictive indicator, and therefore women’s wages in the workplace will indeed be greater than men in terms of their salaries by 2050. Just as the invention of the teenager as a consumer category reshaped popular culture, the ever increasing rise of independent women with disposable income will reshape society, from what entertainment is produced to who is an elected official.- Hoel

This is critical ^.

When women become both the dominant consumer and producer/creator, what happens indeed? As a woman, I am dying to know. (And I feel lucky I will get to see.) But from where I am and where the women I know, read, and listen to are…this means three things change off the bat:

• Partnerships

• Child rearing

• Gender

Here is where I think Hoel misinterpreted the rise in single parents in Denmark (or his extrapolation to other circumstances). Instead of a rise in single parenting indicating “a near majority of children will be being raised in single-parent homes by 2050,” what the data simply indicates is some trend in the disappearance of men from especially young children’s lives. My guess. No one has taught them how to be good parents (or to care for anyone really, including themselves), no one has taught them to be good partners (and the lack of legal dependency women have on their male partners means that if you’re not a help, perhaps you’re better off not being a burden?), and finally, gender constructs no longer work (any adults acting as caretakers need to be able to do just that, caretake).

Most certainly, the idea of not wanting children will become less taboo. More speculatively, the possibility of women having biological children together will be in sight, if not already occurring.

Perhaps this trend in paternal abandonment could reflect a future where “the state will necessarily become more socialist in terms of childcare,” it might also reflect new ideas around child-rearing. Community-based, and yes, increasingly the thruple, or more likely relationship anarchy polycules, may change this trend by centering children in more active, but distributed ways than the history of late-stage capitalist monogamy has allowed.

Majority-Minority or Minority-Majority

Hoel’s Take: A minority-led country.

My Add: … but how different will it look?

This trend of outperformance by minorities in the upper echelons of society like at elite universities, major corporations, and in creative endeavors (books published, movies starred in, etc), will continue and intensify — even just by demographics alone 2050 America will itself be majority non-white. -Hoel, 2021

This prediction is incredibly challenging for me to address as a white-presenting Latina. While a lot changes when white people are not exclusively in power, history does not reverse itself overnight. The imprint of values, processes, and beliefs takes generations to adjust within our systems. Changing the demographic breakdown of power is critical, do not get me wrong, but changes might be slow to come (though come the will), especially if AI has anything to do with it.

Read either of these books if you want to understand how oppressive bias could be codified before this demographic switch occurs…

(Online) Geo/Politics

Hoel’s Take: The world will not war. … Soft totalitarianism will make the West more like China. … The age of the mob will spur domestic turmoil.

My Add: I can not speak to the first prediction (despite my JSA alumni status)… but in the race to ubiquitous computing and the spatial web, the tech savvy will come out on top, where who decides what ‘top’ is what is whose on top. In this way, I thought it important to collapse Hoel’s points 14–16.

While, who can’t predict war (I mean, I’m sure that’s what the militaries around the world are paid to do), a trend I think we can predict is a continuation of discreet border changes. And land grabs in the metaverse, of course (will war wage there instead?)

It has become too technologically easy to steer the ship of the culture with the rudder of social media, and putting a hand on the rudder is irresistible for political parties. So there is nowhere to go but toward China, toward stricter speech laws and codes, toward state observation and censorship and policing of debate and ideas. -Hoel, 2021

So, I agree, but for a slightly different reason. Hoel’s vision presumes malicious intent and forethought. I see it differently. And, this is just my hot take, but China (with South Korea and Japan close behind) will create digital governance best practices that the US and Western Europe will happily adopt. Not just because the conversation is desirable by governments, But to be quite frank, when I look at governments like the Netherlands, one has to ask, does anyone in government actually know where they’re headed? As Hoel points out well, “Western political parties are like two people in a fight who have both seen a gun lying on the floor and are in the process of leaping to wrestle for it. There is now no chance it does not go off.”

Instead, I think this aptitude trend toward governments’ pervasive intervention in digital infrastructure will have much more to do with digital literacy. And at the governmental level, digital literacy will only be had by governments who ‘got into tech early,’ if you will. All the evidence you need is in the fact that no one knows what to ask Big Tech at congressional hearings and that WeChat only shows three ads max a day. You tell me which government is prepared for smart cities of the near-future.

Social media will ensure an endless culture war and internal social upheaval. … Many people will undergo public shamings at some point in their lives, creating a divided and bitter underground of quiet dissidents and lower caste citizens. Society will be extremely sensitive to heresy, with what constitutes heresy shifting continuously so as to reliably signal social virtue and status in massive online social networks in which it is difficult to gain prestige in other ways. -Hoel, 2021

This is a bleak part of the future, and one that, to continue the war metaphor, we should arm ourselves against. But how? No seriously, how?

When I talk to my friends with children about raising their children not just for any future, but this very specific upcoming one, I wonder in astonishment at our collective lack of preparedness. The 20th century readied us to be ‘present-parents’ who don’t use either the threat of or actual physical violence to raise children. These are wonderful tools, but not sufficient to keep teens from bullying one another on the internet, apparently.

Boredom

Hoel’s Take: People and culture will become boring.

My Add: … this is one of those blessing-and-curse dilemmas.

Being boring will become a survival trait. And look around. It already has. All socially risky behavior is on the decline, and has been in the decade since social media and the introduction of the smart phone. -Hoel 2021

So the guy who made the infinite scroll is upset with us, no one can sleep, and people’s dopamine is already all out of whack. Income inequality is egregious, people are getting vocal about late-stage capitalism, and in the very thick of the storm, people are also outing that they just want to be comfortable. Aka, maybe boring is not so bad if your basic needs are consistently met.

Which then makes Hoel’s prediction that, “creativity will decline in correlation,” more of a philosophical stance; one that implies creativity is an indication of a flourishing, happy population. Is it? I guess we will find out…

Our final predictions

Hoel: It will be the winter of my life.

I will have made any scientific discoveries I will ever make. I will have written all the books I have inside of me, left hollow like an exhausted mine. -Hoel, 2021

Me: It will be the summer of my life.

Here is where Hoel and I have no alignment. (Which seems about correct as we are not the same person.) Rather, the idea that in 2050 I will be empty sounds like the furthest thing from the truth I can imagine, for myself.

In 2050 I will turn 58. That will be a whole year older than my mother was when she died of a cancer which medicine-of-the-future likely wouldn’t have missed. And my mother, she was just beginning: her first book, nearly done; a career that was increasingly compelling and aligned; even new love. At 58, I will be reticent to see summer leave, but prepared for the eventuality of the decay that fall brings, but still terrified for winter and its finality. I will laugh with folks my age about how “kids these days” neither know the mime for a rotary nor home phone, I will be scared about new things I could have never forecasted, and say, “see, I told you so,” to others. But’s don’t we all.

With that, praying for a hospitable future,

As always,

Caseysimone

With all the caveats about overconsumption of all sorts (tl;dr: they say it’s bad—and I’m not inclined to disagree), I am a netizen who before that was chronically collecting beauty in the analog world. In other words, my head is full, brimming. And I’ve just gotta make space.

So, and with all the caveats about the iniquities of being a landlord (tl;dr: they say it’s bad—and I’m not inclined to disagree), I’ll be kicking some mental tenants, as it were, to the curb every now and again.

That is, expect a periodic recommendation-grab-bag of music, podcasts, films, shows, restaurants, swimming spots, books—what have you. That is, the things I’ve collected along the way; things that I’ve delighted in, treasure, and want to share. (Because isn’t that the fun of collecting? The communal reverie of their very existence and their being perceived?)

I was hesitant to make this a series, as I am a completist, and like to collect everything before sharing. But you can’t organize without making space. And in a certain way, this is a list of everything, for as long as I am seeking, so too shall I find more. But for the part of me that loves organized databases, I will be including a spreadsheet in each edition that will be the growing list of obsessions so you (nor I) will ever be without the complete list. (Phew!)

Take me to the database

In this edition, fresh on the heels of a weekend away at my cinephile godparents’ home where I took long walks with Cobi accompanied by a requisite podcast, I will be sharing a few standouts in those categories: Film and Podcasts.

Films

Night of the Hunter (1955)

This is the scariest movie I have ever seen. Full stop.

But unlike other scary movies I have seen (which, admittedly are few—my tolerance for terrorizing psychological manipulation induced by a screen is low, on a scale of The Wizard of Oz (not very scary) to The Exorcist (too scary to consider watching) I don’t go above a Hitchcock—The Night of the Hunter left me feeling deeply settled emotionally and psychically at its end.

I slept fine afterward, is what I am trying to say. In fact, I felt a renewed sense of faith in humanity so much so that I’ve decided I will watch this movie on Christmas as a new tradition (obviously with no children around—oh yeah, DO NOT watch this with children).

I don’t want to give too much of the plot away. If you are interested in those kinds of things, Google it. What I will say is this: The Night of the Hunter is deeply precise, beautiful, and compelling in everything from its soundtrack to its set design to the acting.

Across its 189-minute run time, I pulled a blanket over my head in fear and cried sweet tears of resolution. I found it incredibly gratifying, I felt lucky to have watched it (at the nudging of my godparents, I would have never dared otherwise—“Trust us, you’ll love it,” they said, they were not wrong).

You’ll also love it if you also obsess over: lighting, architectural section diagrams, (hand) tattoos, evangelicalism, (minimalist) soundtracks, implied social commentary, traditional American hymnody, or bear vs. man.

Daisies (1966)

First, this movie is beautiful and bright. It centers on the hijinks of two women, Marie I and Marie II, who embody girlhood in all its rebellious splendor.

I can’t say enough good things about how incredibly delicious this movie is to watch. It is saturated, and fun. It feels like you can almost step into the screen and join them as they take bubble baths, lounge with their curlers on, jump on furniture, make prank phone calls, eat cake, swing from chandeliers, you know, girly pop things.

I watched it for the first time on a couch next to my best friend. In this context, Daisies felt like a ride at an amusement park made bespoke for our pleasure. It was as if she and I were also seated side-by-side on a banquette, embarking on a surreal and anarchic journey in response to a world we, too, find absurd.

Second, this movie reinforces the notion of girlhood as radical and political—a tenet to which I, also, subscribe.

This film is famous for the stir it caused in 1960s Czechoslovakia when the film was filmed and released during a period of political transition. In an attempt to evade censorship, as well as for artistic merit alone, the film uses allegory and novel editing to enact social critique.

Apparently, this artistic limb was not received well at the time by film critics at the New York Times, who disparaged the duo as “thoroughly empty-headed” and the film as “pretentiously kookie.” (The most familiar insults for women in the book.)

The Criterion Collection’s essay on the movie comes to the defense of the Maries’ ditz, noting that “under patriarchal and totalitarian oppression, clearing one’s own mind can be a radical act of deprogramming.” And I must agree. This movie appeared to be as carefree for the actors as it is for the viewer. And this is, in itself, a radical act. But their analysis misses what I think is the important rendering of the permission that normative ideas about girls and girlhood afford women and girls in being authentically joyous in their politically-aimed subversion.

In other words, Marie I and II, just like any girlhood duo dreaming of a more equitable and flourishing world, are not de-programming as the Criterion Collection suggests, but re-programming. That is, imagining what could be that isn’t already (cc: radical speculative futures).

This movie, or at least my viewing of it reinforces the idea that: ‘because they are girly they slip below the radar,’ and challenges the idea that: ‘because they are girly in their ditz they couldn’t possibly also be enacting intentional subversion.’

Because, oh, but they could. And they do.

In their antics, from food fights to wanton destruction of property, are a vibrant rejection of the restrictive roles imposed on them. And through the portrayal of their play, the film showcases the power of joy and absurdity as tools of resistance.

You’ll also love it if you obsess over: refined coloring, 1960s women’s hairstyles, girlhood, (the futility of) embodying political resistance, maximalism, or giggling.

Tuesday (2023)

Let me start by saying, I typically would run from the theatre if someone told me the story revolved around a CGI mackaw that spoke in a grizzly voice and was called, Death. And I won’t judge you if you stop reading this reccomendation now that you know that.

The thing is, I didn’t.

See, one of the things I love most about going to the movies is not watching the trailer nor reading the synopsis beforehand. I’ll avoid even looking at the poster if I can help it. This way, I am a blank slate. And I either like the movie or I don’t. But I am not burdened by a preconceived notion I had of what the film would be.

In the case of Tuesday, this meant the difference between seeing and never seeing this movie. (And, well, because it’s on this list, you know the seeing of it was worth it.)

Unlike the other two films in this list, the visuals were good, but not what made the film exceptional. (If anything, it was the CGI’s capacity to inject an element of the fantastical, whether you want to call it fairy tale or magical realism -like, that really is where the aesthetic wow factor lay.)

Rather, and despite (or because of) one of the main characters, Death, being animated, this movie was deeply moving and sentimental. Heartwrenchilgly so.

I have experienced a lot of death in my life and can say few portraits have felt so completely familiar with the experience of losing as Tuesday did. Familiar with its poetry, and tragedy, and fury, and surreality. Familiar with the refusal and acceptance that are at play when losing someone, or losing yourself. And with the performance of competence, with the ‘it-will-be-alright,’ when it both will and won’t.

I also have experience being a daughter to a mother. Of being in that dynamic when death was imminent. Tuesday was the first time I saw or read scenes about death that felt so specifically snatched from my own life. How even amongst the saddest and scariest near-future when one of you will no longer be around, the banality of everyday life plays alongside the raised emotions of the imminence of “death,” both canonical to a life where love is abundant and absent in life once one dies.

You’ll also love it if you obsess over: the importance of end-of-life and death doulas, Grief is the Thing With Feathers, motherhood, daughterhood, London (especially in a zombie apocalypse-type scenario), or Ice Cube’s ‘It Was A Good Day.’

Podcasts

Tech Won’t Save Us (hosted by: Paris Marxx)

I have had a bizarre career through tech, reminiscent of Anna Wiener’s memoir Uncanny Valley. Through a techno optimist-libertarian adjacent belief perpetuated that the tech will save us by colleagues and a city of origin that revered the likes of the Long Now Foundation, and then back through the beliefs perpetuated by my family of origin (and common sense), that no, in fact, tech will not save us.

(Why I still work and will continue to work passionately in tech is a story of seeing something else in tech besides a binary savior or lack thereof: a material.)

Tech Won’t Save Us is hosted by the Canadian Author Paris Marxx, who has a lovely Canadian lilt and spacious interviewing style that lets his guests do 90% of the talking, making each episode like a miny lecture signposted with expansive questions posed by Marxx. In addition, scrolling through the guests is a good way to find journalists to follow on X for a critical take on big tech’s chokehold on, well, everything.

You’ll also love it if you obsess over: if and when the robots are going to take over, why self-driving cars will never work, infrastructure, or the Canadian ‘about.’

• If you only listen to one episode (and it’s before the 2024 presidential election), let it be this one where Jacob Silverman walks us through the entanglement between the Valley and the Republican party. Did you know the largest donor to the Trump campaign is a crypto super PAC? Here is where I found out:

• If you live in the Bay Area and want to know more about the investments in undermining the democratic process through land acquisition and how this, too, is entangled with the Valley’s East Solano Plan, this interview with Gil Duran is your episode.

• And if either A) you weren’t able to make it through Malcolm Harris’ book Palo Alto (I tried, and still plan on it, so much good info, but I wasn’t in love with the editing) and/or B) you’ve always thought Stewart Brand was a stand-up guy (turns out, he wasn’t), you’ll appreciate this relatively compact episode with Harris.

Material Girls (hosted by Hannah McGregor and Marcelle Kosman)

As an academic who thinks critically (in the critical theory sense) about things and unabashedly loves many vestiges of consumption culture (from bedding to media), when I first encountered this podcast it gave me strong ‘why didn’t I think about that?’ energy.

The premise is this: after Hannah McGregor and Marcelle Kosman, PhD set up the topic for the show, be that Tupperware or Gilmore Girls, they introduce academic theory they will use to query their object of study. At the end of the episode, they pitch a thesis statement that they posit sums up their analysis and then spend a bit of time critiquing that thesis before rounding up with the inevitable incompleteness of an academic examination: remaining questions.

You’ll also love it if you obsess over: critical theory, (pop) culture, demystifying academese, You’re Wrong About being post it’s pandemic heyday, or Sounds Like a Cult always leaving you wanting more.

• If you’ve ever thought cafe lights and a spacious backyard would fix all your problems (guilty, also, not entirely ineffective), you’ve probably been (willingly) brainwashed by ‘Normporn’ found in the likes of Gilmore Girls and Parenthood. I can’t tell you how much I liked this episode, it might be my favorite podcast episode of 2024.

• If you play or wish you played Dungeouns and Dragons (me! HMU if you want to form a guild!) this episode takes us through how it came to be positioned culturally (and I would argue) aesthetically, as something for boys in basements:

• And if you want to brush up on what the heck ‘neoliberalism’ or a ‘materialist critique’ really is, and/or have asked yourself who is profiting from the rise of non-toxic masculinity, and/or watch Queer Eye, listen to this:

With that, happy consuming, more still to come,

As always,

Caseysimone

Are you considering graduate school but don’t know where to start?

As a first-gen PhD student, I understand how overwhelming it can be. I was the first in my immediate circle to consider doctoral studies. And without any family or close friends in academia, I felt completely lost when I decided that pursuing a PhD was the right step for me after completing my Master’s. Fortunately, mentors from my Master’s program guided me through the process, helping me navigate the otherwise obtuse nature of grad school applications. Especially the very research-intensive activity of finding the right program and lab.

I’ve observed a similar struggle among the students I mentor and teach. You have a vague ambition for attending graduate school but lack a concrete understanding of what it truly entails and how to find the right program.

That’s why I’ve created this guide—the resource I wish I’d had.

Here, I offer a six-step guide for finding the best place to study and conduct research.

While this guide focuses primarily on PhD applications, it applies to Master’s programs as well, especially in the US.

Pro-Tip: In many cases, you can earn a Master’s en route to a PhD, often at a reduced cost.

Step 1: Start Early

Give yourself at least ONE YEAR or more before your intended application date.

This may seem like a lot of time, but trust me, it’s well worth it. This journey is all about finding the perfect fit, and that takes time. Furthermore, building relationships with potential advisors requires patience. In the academic world, responses don’t always come swiftly. So, if you’re eyeing the fall 2026 application cycle, you should be getting started soon.

Starting early gives you an edge and ensures you have the time you need to make informed decisions.

Now, I understand that this process may not always be methodical. Procrastination is a universal challenge, especially in academia. However, even if you can’t adhere to a strict schedule, this structured approach will give you a better sense of deadlines and help you determine how many applications you can reasonably manage and, more importantly, which ones genuinely pique your interest.

Step 2: Define Your Boundaries

Next, let’s talk about location. Are you limited by geography, or are you open to studying anywhere?

Create a list of places you’re willing to consider, whether it’s specific universities, regions, countries, or cities.

The types of places you are even willing to consider are idiosyncratic, so take time to talk to people who know you well and think through what kinds of places you have thrived in and what places you haven’t.

I can’t reiterate enough: starting afresh in graduate school, potentially in a new city or country, can be a significant life transition. Consider your personal needs and what will help you thrive not only academically but also socially, emotionally, and mentally.

Important: Don’t narrow down your options too soon. While prestige and location matter, they’re not the only factors. Keep an open mind because the right fit might not always be at the most prestigious institution, often it is with the right advisor in a geographic location that is a good fit for you.

Step 3: Universities, Departments, and Deadlines

Now that you have your list of potential destinations, it’s time to dig deeper into the nitty gritty.

Start by visiting the websites of the universities that made it onto your list. (Obviously, if your list was just locations, then go look into the universities in that location.) Then navigate to the department links that align with your intended area of study.

Keep in mind that the academic landscape is evolving, with more interdisciplinary opportunities emerging. While this might not apply to all fields, it’s becoming increasingly common for students to explore departments beyond their undergraduate or master’s field of study.

So, in a web browser, per university, pull up all the departments (sometimes called schools) that you believe are relevant and start reading about their programs. At this stage, don’t be too hasty to eliminate departments unless you’re absolutely certain they’re not the right fit for you. Leave them in for now, as you might discover unexpected connections later in the process.

For each University you are looking at, your browser should look like this:

Once you’ve explored the departments, it’s time to uncover the nitty-gritty details of their admissions requirements. Dive into the specifics.

• How many letters of recommendation are needed?

• When’s the application deadline?

• Are there any unique materials required, distinct from the standard Statement of Purpose (SoP)? (I can touch on SoPs in another post.)

• Do they require a portfolio? 

This information will be crucial for creating a strategic plan. Also, take note of universities that only allow you to apply to one department per application cycle. (This is why you looked at departments before deadlines: to not have a scarcity mindset when evaluating but to give all programs equal opportunity.)

Discovering Hidden Gems: Sometimes, prestigious universities or departments might overshadow smaller or less-known ones. However, don’t underestimate the value of exploring lesser-known programs. You might find hidden gems with exceptional faculty and research opportunities. It’s essential to base your decisions on the potential for growth and learning rather than prestige/familiarity alone.

Step 4: Seek Guidance and Reflect on Your Research Interests

Now that you have your own mental model of the landscape of opportunity as it relates to your personal needs and research directions, you are ready to fold in other people’s feedback.

So start reaching out to professors and/or graduate students you know or have connections with (maybe they were your teacher, or they gave a lecture, etc.). Indicate your interest in pursuing graduate studies and ask for their valuable insights on four things:

1. What universities do you think I should look into? (And why?)

2. What departments do you think I should look into? (And why?)

3. What labs do you think I should look into? (And why?)

4. What researchers do you think I should look into? (And why?)

This direct approach can yield valuable recommendations and insights. Remember, anyone in your field or closely related to it can provide valuable information. As you engage in these conversations, you may find your perspectives evolving. Maybe you’ll discover a research opportunity in a location you hadn’t initially considered, or you’ll learn about a lab doing groundbreaking work that aligns with your interests.

So, don’t underestimate the power of these conversations. They can help you refine your grad school goals and, who knows, may lead you to unexpected but rewarding paths in your academic journey. And later down the road when you have a personal sense of where you want to apply, you may want to ask these same contacts for an intro to the folks they identified.

Pro-Tip: Do not forget to email the professor back and thank them for their recommendations within two business days of their reply. Thereafter, send them periodic updates (every few months) with your application journey so you stay on their radar.

Step 5: The Shortlist and Reaching Out

Now comes the exciting part.

In the departments, you have on your list, open EVERY SINGLE faculty member’s page in a tab. Dive into their bios and research interests. Per department, aim to identify two to five potential advisors. This list will serve as your starting point for reaching out. Do this for every department in every university you are interested in. (2-5 possible advisors per department is a MAXIMUM, you will find that some departments don’t have any well-aligned faculty, and that’s ok.)

Before you finalize your list, go back through your academic journey and reflect on the readings that have inspired you, the papers that have shaped your perspective, and the authors who have left a lasting impression.

Take a moment to check who wrote those pivotal papers and where they are affiliated —their universities and departments. Now with this list repeat the process of reading their bios and perhaps even explore going back and looking at other people in their departments too.

Pro-Tip: This is an iterative process, the more time you have, the more chance of making a discovery that would have been off your radar in a rush. Choosing advisors is a personal process, and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Consider factors like research fit, tenure status, personal identity factors, and research topics.

With your list in hand, it’s time to reach out to potential advisors. 

When you contact potential advisors, express your interest in their program and mention their work that resonated with you. Show them that you’ve done your homework and genuinely connect with their research and the goals of their lab. Craft your emails carefully, striking a balance between friendly and concise. You’re essentially introducing yourself and expressing your interest in their program. Remember, academics appreciate when you’ve taken the time to engage with their work, so do actually read a few of their articles before reaching out (or at the very least their abstracts).

As you send these emails, prioritize your list of potential advisors and work your way through it (I recommend working in reverse order of excitement, building up the courage to talk to professors you really want to work with can be hard, and if you start with folks you don’t have as much stake in, you can build up your confidence in emailing professors, a kind of exposure therapy).

Don’t be disheartened by a lack of immediate responses; professors often have demanding schedules. Persistence is key. Send follow-up emails (three is a charm), and don’t forget to keep a record of your correspondence. (Staying in touch with academic advisors deserves a whole post unto itself.)

Important: This phase of connecting with faculty members is not just about getting their attention; it’s an opportunity for you to assess if their research aligns with your own. It’s a chance to evaluate whether their lab is the right fit for your academic journey. And, this is your chance to gauge their responsiveness, this qualitative interaction is likely to be demonstrative of what it will be like to work with them. (So listen to how interacting with them feels, does it work for you?)

Step 6: Finalize Your List of Universities and Advisors

After completing these steps, you'll have a clearer picture of the universities, departments, and faculty members you want to work with.

Take the time to create a final list of places you want to apply. Make sure the list reflects your research interests, academic goals, and personal preferences.

Now, you’re not just applying blindly; you’re applying with intention and confidence. You’ve done the groundwork to create a well-informed application strategy.

As you embark on this journey, remember that it’s not just about getting into grad school; it’s about finding your academic community, your mentors, and your passion. With determination, preparation, and a strategic approach, you’ll be well on your way to a successful grad school application experience.

With that, may you have the confidence of Elle Woods in your pursuits,

As always,

Caseysimone

Every possible way of starting this guide is trite.

Either you have a visceral desire to sleep well, and amongst delicious materials (or such a desire was inspired by sleeping in a bed somewhere that awoken that desire in you), in which case you should continue reading this guide. Or you don’t, in which case this guide is not for you.

Sleep is important. And you either believe or don’t believe that the objects you sleep on and under effect that sleep. I am not here to convince you of this.

For me, I adore linens. I love good sheets, good towels, and even good cleaning rags. I used to buy IKEA sheets, but now, I wouldn’t dare. (They do make a few pillows I am not mad about, though.) It is my love for textiles, and the intrinsic desire to sleep amongst nice bedding that keeps me seeking beyond just what sheets look like, but also what they feel like and how they wear over time.

Assuming a similar desire exists in you, or you just want to know my sleeping setup, read ahead.

Alternatively, just browse the spreadsheet.

2025 UPDATE:

So many of you have ordered from this list and given me updates on quality etc. Products that no longer have the same quality as when I purchased them have been struck-through like this. New product recommendations will replace them in time.

TLDR: My recommendations for beds and bedding

Take me to the shopping List

Before we jump in, you need to know two things:

1. Not all linens are created equal.

   • Quality is paramount in this hobby, and targeted ads can be misleading.

   • Avoid direct-to-consumer brands like Brooklinen or Quince. They often lack the quality of higher-end brands and aren’t necessarily cheaper.

   • In this guide, I’ve only included products I have personally bought, used, and tested over months. These recommendations are based on extensive research and experience. With a bigger budget, you can find better options, but you won’t find new1 products cheaper than these.

2. Building a bed is like following a recipe, measurements matter.

   • Beds and linens have different measurements worldwide. (This guide focuses on Western bed-making styles.)

   • Be cautious with brands like Zara and IKEA, as their sizing can vary to keep you within their ecosystem.

   • I have added dimension to the spreadsheet, be sure to cross check when ordering if you are ordering different sizes.

Step 1: Mattress

Choosing a mattress is a full-time job. May I introduce you to the Princess and the Pea?

Long story short, if you want something firm but soft, qualities I have come to appreciate as someone with chronic back and neck issues, these are good options:

• The Wink bed (US): Crazy heavy.

• The Matt bed (EU): Crazy light.

Choosing the right mattress is crucial, but it needs its own guide. For more info, check out The Nap Lab or Reddit’s Best Mattress Recommended for 2024.

Step 2: Pillows

Also called pillow inserts, this is what goes into your pillowcase.

You’ll want at least two pillows per sleeper.

First, the primary pillow should be unique to any sleeper. This is possibly your most important purchase besides your mattress. Try lots of pillows until you fall in love, it can take a while, so make sure the return policy gives you enough time to try it out!

Second, you will need secondary pillows for aesthetic uniformity or support. Here are some considerations:

• do you want to read a book in bed, you’ll need a pillow that can support you.

• do you want to lounge around, perhaps you’ll need lots of pillows that can support you.

• do you only want to sleep and never hug a pillow for support or comfort, then just find one pillow you love and call it a day.

• do you want your bed to be dripping with shape and maybe even texture, get as many secondary pillows as your heart desires (just think about where you will place them at night, the floor is very dusty…)

My Pillow Setup

• Primary Pillow: Foam is my preference. I currently use pillows from Amazon (EU) but have also enjoyed IKEA’s KLUBBSPORRE (US) *Only use the Klubbsporre with the Sefra protector, somehow it is not as nice without. I have been meaning to try millet pillows, I will update this article when/if I do.

• Secondary Pillow: Feather/down works well for me. I use secondary pillows from IKEA for reading support and lounging.

Step 3: Duvet or Cover 

This is what goes on top of you when you sleep. 

At fancy places, like 5-star hotels, you will typically find duvets with a duvet, and a duvet cover, and a flat sheet. But that in no way reflects the best way of sleeping. You should take into consideration what makes you comfortable:

• what seasons/temperatures do you sleep in?

• do you have weight preferences (do you like a heavy or light cover)?

• do you get too cold or too warm?

• do you sleep with someone else?

• is making the bed hard for you?

• etc. 

The Varying Bed-Making Styles

There are three (Western) sleeping styles: Scandinavian-, European-, and American- style. 

The American-style, which is most likely how you are already sleeping, includes a fitted sheet, a flat sheet, a single blanket or duvet (or many-layered), and (often) multiple pillows. In other words, you have one cover that goes across the entire mattress with a flat sheet between the sleeper/s and the duvet or cover.

Hospital corners, in my opinion, make or break the experience of sleeping in this style. (Flat sheet gets all tangled: immediate bad night sleep.) This is the most versatile style, stylistically, as the blanket can be changed for a duvet across the seasons, allowing for visual variation too.

The European style features a duvet with a cover, no top sheet, and fewer decorative pillows than the American style. Folding the duvet in half towards the foot of the bed during the day is a popular way of airing out the blanket.

The Scandinavian style, which is often also found in Germany, is where a bed is made by the number of people in the bed, and the bed is always made with a duvet. So for example, a double bed with one sleeper gets one single-sized duvet, while a double bed with two sleepers gets two single-sized duvets. For this reason, there is no flat sheet in the Scandinavian style. 

Cover Material

When considering the right material for you, think about what kind of weight and warmth you like. If you are sleeping in the Scandinavian style, know you will always be able to kick a leg or two out, which helps with temperature regulation.

If you have read this far, do NOT buy a synthetic cover/duvet, it will make you sweat. (Be careful with covers, often they are a natural material with a synthetic batting, be sure both are natural.)

• Natural = Cotton (Percale, Sateen, Supima), TENCEL (wood pulp of eucalyptus trees), Bamboo, Silk, Linen.

• Synthetic = Rayon, Satin, Polyester, etc. 

My Cover Setup

Firstly, I currently sleep in the Scandinavian style, I grew up sleeping in the European style, and, recently, I have been dabbling in the American style. My preference is by far the Scandinavian style because of the ease of making the bed. But close behind is an American style bed with tight nurse’s corners. (Honestly, while I appreciate the European style is very popular, I really couldn’t name a single upside other than styling.)

• For my year-round duvet, I sleep with TENCEL. From March to November, or whenever it is warm enough that the heat isn’t on all night, I sleep under a duvet made by Yumeko. When it starts to get chilly, I will double them up. When that won’t do, I switch out to my winter duvet.

• For my winter duvet, I sleep with White Goose Down. I bust this out when it gets too cold to comfortably sleep with the windows open in winter. I sleep under this duvet made by Costco.

Step 4: Linens

This is what covers your mattress, pillows, and duvet/covers. 

Your linen needs will depend on your bed-making style:

• American Style: 2 pillowcases per person, 1 fitted sheet, 1 flat sheet, 1 duvet cover or cover per bed.

• European Style: 2 pillowcases per person, 1 fitted sheet, 1 duvet cover per bed.

• Scandinavian Style: 2 pillowcases per person, 1 fitted sheet, 1 duvet cover per person.

Natural materials (cotton, linen, silk) are best. Avoid synthetics.

Protectors

Before we get into the visible linens, let’s talk about the base layer. Investing in luxury protectors at an affordable price is a smart move since they are cheaper than replacing your high-end linens.

Benefits:

• Keep your bedding in good shape for longer.

• Avoid the crinkly feel or sound that comes with cheap protectors.

A protector won’t protect from heavy stains, though, so be mindful about eating and drinking in bed. And don’t forget a mattress protector, it’s much cheaper than a new mattress.

Pillowcases

I only sleep with silk pillowcases on my primary pillow. Silk is good for your skin and hair, which is why I always recommend covering your primary pillow in a silk pillowcase and switching your pillowcases out often (at least once a week).

For secondary pillows, you might choose decorative pillowcases or those that match your sheets or duvet cover. (Hugging a silk pillow is also top-notch, so consider that too.)

Sheets

Since sheets bear the entirety of your body weight, they are some of the most heavily used linens.

Depending on your bed-making style, you’ll need either just fitted sheets (Scandinavian or European style) or both flat and fitted sheets (American style). Alternatively, you can ditch fitted sheets altogether and get a flat sheet that is one size bigger than your mattress. (I have yet to try this, but I think I will with my next sheet set.)

I suggest sheets that keep you cooler rather than warmer, as you can easily add or subtract blankets, but can’t easily switch out a sheet in the middle of the night.

Duvet Cover

If you are going for the Scandinavian or European style, or layering a duvet in the American style, you must use a duvet cover. You are throwing away your money if you don’t cover your comforter. Some people just use a flat sheet in the American style, which protects the duvet from skin contact but not from spills, crumbs, or stray legs. So please cover your duvet with a duvet cover, whether or not you are using a flat sheet.

My Linen Setup

First, I cover everything in protectors. It’s important to me that protectors are silent. Through trial and error, this is what I use:

• US: Swiss Comforts Tencel Mattress Protector by Costco

• EU: Matt mattress protector by Matt

• US: Fiona Pillow Protector by Sferra

• EU: Jersey 100% Cotton Cushion by Biberna

For my primary pillowcases, I sleep on silk.

• EU and US: THXSILK’s mulberry silk pillowcases. They’ve survived several accidental tumble dries over 4 years.

Secondary pillowcases are rotated seasonally.

• Year-round: Macy’s Supima cotton pillowcases, crisp and give hotel bed vibes .

• Summer: Zara’s washed linen pillowcases (160 GSM), light and durable (7 years).

• Winter: Yumeko’s velvet flannel pillowcases, medium pile and barely pill.

I rotate my sheets seasonally.

• Year-Round: Macy’s Supima cotton pillowcases or Zara’s percale cotton fitted sheet (300 TC), the Supima is more buttery while the Percale is more crisp.

• Summer: Zara’s linen fitted sheet (160 GSM), like the pillowcases, they are light and give a lovely crispness when air dried.

I also rotate my duvet covers seasonally. But since it’s on top of me, I do use some warmer fabrics.

• Year-Round: Macy’s Supima cotton duvet cover, it’s buttery and makes me feel like I’m in a hotel every night.

• Summer: Zara’s washed linen duvet cover (160 GSM), they are my most used duvet, and have even survived sewing them to a smaller size and removing the stitches years later.

• Winter: Yumeko’s velvet flannel duvet cover, they are a medium weight.

Step 5: Care

Linen Washing (min. every 2 weeks): Wash your sheets every two weeks and switch your pillowcases as often as you can. I sleep on each pillow for 2-3 nights before flipping it and then doing the same with the other pillow, giving me almost two weeks before washing pillowcases. This routine allows me to wash everything every two weeks.

Air Drying (Silk and Linen): You MUST air dry your silk to keep it from deteriorating. If you air dry your linen it will be a bit stiff, which some like. If you don’t like this, throw them in the dryer.

Bedding Hanging (min. every week): Hang your bedding out often, ideally outside, to keep them fresh and pest-free. This is easier with the Scandinavian style. In the winter or bad weather, or if you don’t have a way of hanging outside, hang over a door while you are out for the day, this gives both the bed and the sheets time to breathe.

Professional Cleaning for Dover/Duvet (max. once a year): In theory, you should not be washing this part of the bedding more than once a year. When you do, professional cleaning is recommended to maintain quality, especially for down duvets. You can wash and dry down in your dryer but it might not be big enough to fluff it back up properly. If you do, use new tennis balls to fluff it up. I have found that at-home cleaning has drastically impacted the life of my duvets (in a negative way).

Colors and Care: White linens are easier to wash (one load, hot, bleach, no issue). Colors need special care and are better for throw pillows, quilts, or coverlets that aren’t slept directly against.

Well, if you’ve made it this far, congratulations! You’ve just spent a good chunk of your life reading about bedding. (A personal dream of mine, and apparently yours too—or you’re just really bored.)

You now know everything there is to know about bedding—or everything I would have told you about the topic if you asked me, in any case.

Now, you too can make the perfect bed. (You’re welcome, another place to spend your hard-earned cash!)

So go ahead, treat yourself to that high-thread-count sheet set, splurge on a down duvet, and don’t forget the silk pillowcases (honestly, if you only take away one thing).

Take me to the shopping list

And if all this still sounds like too much effort, there’s always a trip to IKEA. 🍦 lol.

With that, sweet dreams, and happy bed-making.

As always,

Caseysimone

“Rather than the bracketing characteristic of phenomenology, or the denial of experience found in structuralism, Lefebvre wished to see how the structures, signs and codes of the everyday integrate with biographical life…In recent years there has been a noticeable shift from questions of temporality to those of spatiality. As Frederic Jameson asks, “why should landscape be any less dramatic than the event?” In his work, Lefebvre suggested that just as everyday life has been colonized by capitalism, so too has its location — social space. There is therefore work to be done on understanding space and how it is socially constructed and used. This is especially necessary given the increased importance of space in the modern age.”

(Stuart Elden, 2007)

My very first memory is spatial.

I am two and a half and pressing my hands up against a floor-to-ceiling curtain window. Through the glass I can see straight across San Francisco’s Sunset district, over Golden Gate Park, all the way to the Richmond. The outside light is dimming quickly as the winter sun sets to the West highlighting the twinkle of the streetlights dotting the horizon.

This is always how the memory starts, me, hands up against the glass, the view ahead. And that’s the only part of the memory that is cinematic. The rest of the memory is spatial; planar even, like architectural sectionals.

There is the plane of the window in front of me.

The plane of the chairs directly in front of the window.

The plane of the waiting area behind me; and beyond that.

The plane of an array of columns delineating the circulation space for the elevator.

There is also the plane of a hallway somewhere to my left.

Navigating this memory is like using a joystick to pan the camera in a video game where the feeling that panning to view any given plane evokes is what is most notable.

Looking out the window feels safe and generous, the uninterrupted view is all mine to admire and absorb undisturbed.

Panning directly next to me, my mother; I cannot see her, rather I know it is her by a particular sensation of comfort.

Panning deeper into the waiting area, I feel the presence of others, and an awareness that I am not, in fact, in my own little world.

It is at this plane that I become aware that the interior lighting gives off a muddy industrial orange glow and that there are more planes further still from my perch like the circulation space.

I start to feel a worrying agitated bustle of new emergency room visitors entering behind me by the elevators.

My worry grows as I pan, finally, to the hallway which starts behind me and to my left, I feel the medical staff in there and what I suppose must be a sense of dread about my impending visit with the emergency room doctor.

And that is it, that is the memory: architectural and sensory.

This early memory reflects Lefebvre’s notion that space is not merely a backdrop to events but is integral to the human experience. Just as Lefebvre examined how everyday life is intertwined with its spatial context, my memory is an interplay of spatial and sensory experiences.

The spatio-sensory world.

(I feel as if )I have always navigated the world through the lenses of the architectural and the sensory. I have also gotten the distinct sense that not everyone else does. Thus, I have reasoned that, perhaps, I have some “innate” sensitivity that predisposes, nay, obliges me to see the world predominantly through these lenses.

To this end, I have collected two leading explanations for how this sensitivity emerged:

First, a proposal that this sensitivity is both literal and literally innate, my nature, if you will.

Perhaps my sensitivity is, in fact, a sort of socio-spatial synesthesia that crosses the senses of perception-of-affect with perception-of-real-Euclidean-geometry. As a temporal synesthete already, I am no stranger to conventionally separate senses being intimately and inseparably attached. In my case, time is inextricably connected to my visual field and perception of space. And this might be the sensitivity itself as research indicates that temporal synaesthetes are more accurate in their perception of Euclidean geometry than the general population.

On the other hand, it might have everything to do with how I was raised, the way I was nurtured.

My mother was a psychologist with an uncanny capacity of labeling people’s affect and from the age of 5-11 we remodeled our home ensuring that I was consistently surrounded by floor plans and trips to the San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection’s Permit Services Office. It doesn’t get more concrete than that: I was seeped in buildings and behavior for the entirety of my youth.

If I were someone else, whether I have a biological or cultural predisposition to space and affect might have remained a casual and fleeting inquiry.

The unique thing about humans, they have unique interests. In this case, an interest in the relationship between space and affect could simply be:

• a unique special interest, “did you know ‘drunk-tank’ pink-walls lead to agitation long-term?”;

• a conversation-starting party trick, “when you enter a hotel room, do you choose the side of the bed nearest or farthest from the door?”;

• a particular affinity for spaces that tickled a specific sensory experience in myself like the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg which kept me oscillating between feelings of bright awe and directional squishing.

Instead, and for whatever reason, for the last two decades my singular intellectual obsession has been understanding the science of the built environment’s effect on human experience.

Regardless (some things have no origin, or its origin is irrelevant, the phenomenon is present), I have cared voraciously about the built world since I can remember, and about finding literature to supplement this curiosity since my time as a high school in the mid-late 2000s.

During this these years, any bookstore I passed required a quick skim for any books that might answer my question: how do buildings affect us?

My routine thumbing through the social science, the psychology, and finally the architecture books always left me empty-handed, or with cousin-concepts:

• The Situationist City by Simon Sadler (Sadler, 1998)

• Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman (Norman, 1998)

These were early days for the maturing-internet, where adults assured us teens that all knowledge could still be found at your local library, reminisced about printed copies of spark notes, and discouraged us from researching online because it was, “lazy.”

These were early days for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Scholar, aka, where we now find and request niche and pertinent content before we know the right place to look. Reddit and Quora emerged at this time as well, but it was still before the time that a post would receive enough engagement to yield meaningful answers to hyper-niche queries.

All to say, in this temporal-landscape, I knew only about as much as the bookstore clerks, the librarians, and the adults in my life knew. And lucky for me, most of my parent’s friends were architects or psychologists. They must have the answer.

Unfortunately, whether it was because (1) they didn’t seem to see the link, (2) they saw the link but didn’t know where to point me, or, worst of all, (3) never could imagine how serious my query was, for years I was left without the empirical evidence I sought.

That all changed on an after-school walk back home with my mother when we ducked into Bird and Beckett Books & Records in San Francisco’s Glen Park neighborhood. I cannot recall what drove us into the set-back store that particular afternoon, but my mother and I, as always, slid into our respective sections. She found her way to the poetry whilst I did my procedural check through the overflowing redwood shelves: first social science, then psychology, and then architecture. And there it was.

There was nothing about its title that could have tipped me off, there is no knowing what incited me to reach for the bulk and dense of the book with a soft matte yellow book jacket, A Pattern Language (Alexander et al., 1977).

I remember everything about that moment, the sun flowing through the southwest windows, the weight of my orange pop-punk-checked Timbuk2 messenger bag (my desperate attempt at coolness) dragging me down as my restlessness changed to patience (my mother could read as much poetry as she wished by my watch).

It was in that time-warped afternoon that I first scanned the canonical architecture text written by a cohort of UC Berkeley faculty in the 1970s, Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein, and Sara Ishikawa. The pages were as thin as a dictionary’s, and for over 1000 pages they juxtaposed social phenomenon with architectural designs with tiny chapters with titles like, “Dancing in the Street,” “Opening to the Street,” “Raised Crossings,” “Corner Grocery,” “Number of Stories,” “Stair Seats.”

Finally. It felt like someone else got it, “there is … work to be done on understanding space and how it is socially constructed and used.”

Eventually, my mother swung by my perch. It was time to go home. “This is what I mean!” I exclaimed in a book-store hush.

But, it wasn’t.

Well not exactly.

The principle of relating built environment conditions to human experiences was spot on. But the “science,” perhaps wasn’t as rigorous as I was truly seeking. (The contents were neither identified methodically nor forthcoming in regards to the regions or demographics to which such conclusions would be relevant … a social science no-no.)

Regardless, I felt closer to something ethereal I had long been after, and was empowered to continue reading, and upon my path fell:

• Foucault’s ideas about Heterotopias,

• Bachelard’s Poetics of Space,

• and, of course, Lefebvre’s work.

These theoreticians emphasized that space is not a neutral backdrop but an active participant in the production of social relations and personal identities. In this way, their works comprise the intellectual inspiration on which my research rests.

From theory, to practice, to research

The transition from personal reflections to broader theoretical inquiries necessitates a bridge: understanding how my lived experiences inform my academic pursuits.

After a youth enamored with buildings and their design, my undergraduate studies in architecture and subsequent work in tech consulting further solidified my interest in the built environment as a dynamic artifact. Or at least with the potential to be.

I came to understand that buildings, and all built things, will become increasingly digitized. The future, for good or bad, will be full of increasing computation. Our buildings will not be exempt from this.

Ready with philosophical theory from Foucault, Bachelard, and Lefvbre, and architectural theory from Alexander, Silverstein, and Ishikawa I wondered how empirical research could inform design knowledge as it related to creating computing-rich environments that enhance human well-being and security.

In short, I pin my hat on the following: there are identifiable patterns between the built environment and human experience. And my ambition as a researcher is to:

1. Surface identifiable patterns,

2. understand how design informs the codification of those findings into ubiquitous computing technologies that turn traditional built environments into ambient intelligent environments,

3. and to ensure such codification is done in a values-aligned way that ensures the security of the inhabitants and property.

It is my aim in my research to understand how design impacts the computationally enriched built environments of the (near future). To that end, and without further ado…

3 Principles for the Future of the Built Environment

__________   01 BUILDING FOR HUMAN EXPERIENCE

We will live in environments that actively support our physical and mental well-being, make our social interactions more gratifying, and increase our productivity.

 __________ 02 DATA-DRIVEN DESIGN

Rather than making educated guesses or choices based on gut instinct, our design-engineering behaviors will increasingly rely on data. Everything from the relationship between ceiling height and your cortisol levels to classroom materiality and learning outcomes will be measurable and actionable.

 __________ 03 EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGY

With the emergence of Spatial Computing(SComp), and the growing interest in the SComp domain of Ambient Intelligence (AmI), we are quickly approaching a time when technology is small enough and smart enough to have a big impact while remaining (relatively) invisible.

Mon Oncle, 1958, Directed by Jacques Tati ​​​​​​​. Mon Oncle centers around a (spatial) commentary on the emerging wave of industrial modernization in the French consumer society of the 1950s.

Long story long, my bias is that there is a profound impact of space on human experience. And, as our world becomes more digitized, understanding and designing for this impact becomes ever more crucial.

For, as Lefebvre posited, the colonization of everyday life by capitalism extends to our spatial environments, and, as I posit, is made ever more expedited through (uncritical) technological integration.

Recognizing this, working towards *technology-mediated* spaces that support human flourishing, is not only my personal fixation and academic research area but also, a necessary endeavor for a future of the built environment where everyday life is sovereign.

With that, lighter things ahead.

As always,

Caseysimone