Sensing the

World
New Media Writing

No you’re
not
keller easterling
easterling

Acting as if they alone have access to the facts, the

followers condescend to litigate the details of their
project for the less reasonable or the ill-informed. The
familiar human desire to occupy a superior platform
perfectly camouflages the power to seduce and hustle.
 It is absurd to continue to give special authority to
easterling

solutionist thinking in legal or quantifiable languages. It is

not enough to name the superbug and propose the
righteous answer to its environmental forms of
violence.
“Where Activism Fails and How We Can Reformat It”
easterling

Opposition to a bully is doomed to circle the human

tautology about being right, but offering an expanded
repertoire of behaviors is a power that can baffle
philosophies by exceeding competition, rationality and
righteous self-regard. 
easterling

Almost everything else in the soft assemblies of most

organisms works by endless iteration, multiplication, or
trial and error.
easterling

The world is run on irrationality and comedy that often

will not compute within our philosophies. Many things
change not because of logical proof or a reasonable plan
but because of irrational desires.
 But just as navigating a river is indeterminate to be
easterling

practical, time-released designs offer an unfolding,

indeterminate set of changes that continually redirect
away from the loop and the binary. That indeterminacy
is not marginal or weak—just agile enough to respond to
the moment when it is out-maneuvered. 
easterling

They are persuasions rather than arguments that start

nowhere and move across populations. Perhaps many
of the world's most puzzling problems—problems that
resist rational explanation—reside in this outlying territory.
 Design is an excellent arena in which to observe the
relentlessly human as well as the possibilities of the
easterling

more than human [...] design can also be about

extending other powers of that nervous system. There are
so many underexploited faculties of voice, skin, skeleton,
muscles in interplay with other solids, photons, and waves.
The more than human doesn't negate human design; it
only multiplies those designs in a larger field so that
there are always many instead of only one.
 Beyond the design of things is the design of the medium
easterling

in which they are suspended, and beyond the design of

a totalizing medium is the design of an iterative medium
[...] But just as navigating a river is indeterminate to be
practical, time-released designs offer an unfolding,
indeterminate set of changes that continually redirect
away from the loop and the binary.
 There might be messages that incite or calm, but without
having to make declarations or organize confrontation, the
designer might also operate like the parent with
easterling

squabbling children. The parent does not try to parse the

content of the argument but swiftly changes the
disposition of the context. They lower the temperature
of the room, move a chair into the light, increase the blood
sugar of one child, or introduce a pet into the arms of
another so that the chemistry of the room no longer
induces or supports violence.
Medium Design
sensing practices
medium design
rhetoric