Artykul is an elegant-looking macOS and iOS app that combines the power of an RSS reader and a read-it-later tool like Pocket. You can even follow social media accounts and free yourself from the algorithmic madness.

I’ve been enjoying Webflow as a more powerful and customisable alternative to Squarespace for the occasional freelance job. It offers just enough features to build simple, CMS-powered websites, but it also locks you into their hosting platform. Webstudio is building an open-source alternative that offers creators more flexibility and more markup transparency.

Are you the proud owner of a collection of treasured cookbooks? Eat Your Books gives you access to the recipes in those books as a digital catalogue that you can customise, search, filter and extend. You can even request to have a rare cookbook indexed by them. Friends of DD enjoy a free month of premium membership. Become a Friend to access specials like this.

A thoughtfully illustrated project based on the idea that sharing and reading stories about loneliness helps us feel less lonely. Click on an apartment to learn about the many diverse experiences of loneliness.

The Manual of Design Fiction →

Prototyping for possible futures

Design fiction can be a rather nebulous concept. One definition describes design fiction as “taking an object, or idea, and examining its potential, its pitfalls, and its possible applications and future development, by creating a full narrative world around it.” If this sounds intriguing to you, The Manual of Design Fiction will offer more clarity through a thorough, practical exploration of this fledgling discipline. Friends of DD enjoy a 20% discount. Become a Friend to access specials like this.

Strangers to Ourselves →

How thinking about mental illness shapes us

A book that offers fresh ways of thinking about illness and the mind, and the impact of it on our sense of being – written by author Rachel Aviv who was institutionalised at the age of six. “Strangers to Ourselves is a compassionate, courageous and deeply researched look at the ways we talk about and understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on conversations as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, it follows people who have found that psychiatric language has limitations when it comes to explaining who they are, or that a diagnosis, while giving their experience a name, creates a sense of a future life they wish to question or resist.”

Anne Helen Petersen believes we live in an optimisation culture that drives consumption. Whether it’s remodelling our homes, productivity hacks at work or pursuing ever higher beauty and wellness ‘standards’ – the search for perfection happens on the back of a deeper dissatisfaction. Getting out of this ‘optimisation sinkhole’ requires addressing systemic issues – not ‘personal renovations’. “Productivity culture thrives during economic downturns; organization culture takes off for parents (particularly mothers) of young children; beauty and wellness culture explodes in your early 30s; remodel culture starts in the late 30s and continues for decades, peaking, I’d argue, in the years after kids leave the home. All times, of course, when control feels fleeting. Yet instead of directing attention and energy towards the sort of structures that could make us feel less insecure — whether unions or deeper friendships or school year reform – we focus it on the self and the space around it.”

As I discuss in my intro, this piece on Vienna’s public and limited-profit housing model shows how housing can offer remarkable social stability and financial freedom when it’s not treated like an investment scheme. “In Vienna, a whopping 80 percent of residents qualify for public housing, and once you have a contract, it never expires, even if you get richer. Housing experts believe that this approach leads to greater economic diversity within public housing – and better outcomes for the people living in it.” (Possible soft paywall)

Concrete is everywhere – almost every building, road or piece of infrastructure depends on it. It’s almost impossible to imagine building any other way today, but less than 100 years ago, concrete only played a minor role in construction. In this piece (another great read by Noema) you’ll learn about concrete’s success story and its implications for our future. “Concrete is now the second-most consumed substance on Earth behind only water. Thirty-three billion tons of it are used each year, making it by far the most abundant human-made material in history. To make all that, we now devour around 4 billion tons of cement each year – more than in the entire first half of the 20th century, and more than a billion tons more than the food we eat annually.”