Calvin 🕯

Craftsman & designer. Writing at Father. Husband of @jujubileen.

[Calvin 🕯 @ProxyUniversal]

Relics

[Calvin 🕯 @ProxyUniversal]

Excellent essay. Worth a read!

[Louis Elton @LouisElton96]

An infinite tide of AI-generated video is torching our retinas and our souls. Is this it? Is this really the future of culture? NO. It must not be!

My new essay in @unherd is a grand thesis on how "artisanal intelligence" is the perfect antidote to the prevailing "autonomous hyperslop" that is torching our retinas and our souls.

The piece is a meditation that starts with a framing of slop and stagnation via Mark Fisher and @JonAskonas.

I then decode two factions warring for our post-slop future:

1. Arcadians. The people who want to run away from the machine, e.g. tradwives, Bopeas, soil people, offal eaters, RETVRNists — via Rousseau, Thoreau, Morris, Heidegger, Kaczynski.

2. Prometheans. The people who want to fully embrace the machine, e.g. Andreessen, Karp, Marinetti, Thiel, Musk, Klein, Bastani

Then it gets weird as I draw upon John Ruskin, Paul Ricœur, architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton, Simone Weil, and King Alfred the Great’s ninth-century translations of Boethius to argue that while we cannot stop the machine, we can at least root it with a tradition to extend the good bits of culture, rather than be flattened by it!

I argue the answer isn’t Arcadian retreat or Promethean machine worship.

Rather, it’s artisanal intelligence: artisans and technologists fusing the deep wisdom of craft with cutting-edge technology to build things that are useful, beautiful, and scalable.

I actually wrote it in January while unpicking the philosophy behind the £60k Cræft Prize, but it took on a life of its own… crawling to self-indulgent 6000 words before the editors wisely negotiated me down from the edge of naval gazing, esoteric irrellevance.

My mother tells me it is *still* esoteric and navel-gazing. Give it a read and tell me if you agree with her!

[Calvin 🕯 @ProxyUniversal]

Happy Pentecost!

[Calvin 🕯 @ProxyUniversal]

Mori point

[Calvin 🕯 @ProxyUniversal]

Bernal

[Calvin 🕯 @ProxyUniversal]

Snapshots

[Calvin 🕯 @ProxyUniversal]

This is really cool! The integration of the gothic details into the ui caught my eye. Definitely gesturing towards something interesting with this.

[𝖊𝖉𝖉𝖎𝖊 𝖏𝖎𝖆𝖔 @eddiejiao_obj]

What if your whole computer were just pixels streamed to you from a model? I’ve been working with @zan2434 and @drewocarr to imagine a version of generative computing that’s much more flexible and visually rich than the GUIs we have today.

(Video is sped up and edited)

[Calvin 🕯 @ProxyUniversal]

@chronictanvi This is really cool!

[Calvin 🕯 @ProxyUniversal]

Christopher Alexander also emphasized the significance of the workshop! One of the keystone patterns

[Sam Gorman @gormankind]

the creative class craves workshops not offices

[thorncube @thorncube]

josef hoffmann

[kartik @sathaxe]

Now that agents are making an app every second design matters more than ever

You and your agents are designers now whether you like it or not

You just have to decide if you want to be a good one or not - work with Calvin to level up!

[Calvin 🕯 @ProxyUniversal]

The goal is simple: help you make better design decisions, faster, with more intention.

Saturdays, May 2nd - 23rd
2:00pm – 4:00pm
In person: San Francisco

Learn more at: https://t.co/cH9IKndDrc

[Calvin 🕯 @ProxyUniversal]

When anyone can ship, everyone is a designer.

The barrier to building has collapsed. But the ability to craft something thoughtful, that resonates with real users is still a challenge.

I’m launching Design for Builders, a small, in-person course for generalists who want to sharpen their design instincts.

[Calvin 🕯 @ProxyUniversal]

I've pulled together my work and writing from the past 7 years and have been tagging concepts and locations across the work. I'm now experimenting with different ways of surfacing the connections, seeing the ways my thoughts are embedded.

[Calvin 🕯 @ProxyUniversal]

@herzbergdesign This looks amazing!

[Calvin 🕯 @ProxyUniversal]

A lot of agent observability exploration leans into play. I’m curious how this element of play is preserved while also enabling useful data visualization. I wonder if minesweeper or Tetris are potentially examples of how to achieve an abstraction/ map reduction while inviting play.

[Calvin 🕯 @ProxyUniversal]

Exploring different views for navigating my work

[Calvin 🕯 @ProxyUniversal]

@bratton I prefer framing it as organelle vs scavenger

[Calvin 🕯 @ProxyUniversal]

Love this!

[River Marchand @Riyvir]

here's another little tool i've been working on called "typoverse." i have thousands of fonts but i find myself always using the same ones. and i am simply not going to manually tag or categorize fonts either. so i built a tool that compares all my fonts to each other and maps them based on similarity. would this be useful to anyone?

[Calvin 🕯 @ProxyUniversal]

Viewing my work as graph