// Dreaming Aloud
My brain started fizzing again. I hadn’t felt that in years.
An old post, brought in from Medium. About noticing the same energy that was around from 2010 to 2014, before the NDAs closed in, and what a Turner Prize-nominated artwork in Eastbourne had to do with getting it back.
Also: a Tumblr notebook, Discordia, and a clock that started all of this.
It’s been a while since I put my thoughts in public. I’m nervous about it. Deep breath. Publish. Exhale.
My brain has been fizzing again. Not just the usual hyperfocus on vintage techno and old synths. Something bigger. The overlap of creativity, technology and culture.
I think I’ve found the hook.
Talking to friends recently, I kept saying the same thing. That reminds me of. Referencing conversations, books, blog posts, things I posted to my Tumblr notebook between about 2010 and 2014.
A decade ago. I am old.
I’ve been trying to work out what was good about that period. Wary of nostalgia doing the talking for me. My best guess: it was before a load of radical minds who’d been imagining in public got jobs at the big firms and disappeared behind NDAs.
The conversation stopped. Or I stopped paying attention. Maybe both.
Digital design got dull. Incremental, data-driven, predictable. Curiosity and courage took a back seat to systemisation and homogenisation. Chaos lost to Order. Not surprising. In turbulent times, businesses treat the chaotic side of design as a risk. The big firms culled their innovation teams because none of it connects directly to line goes up. Short-sighted. I get it.
NDAs. KPIs. ROI. The pendulum swung all the way to Order.
AI eats Order for breakfast.
The pendulum has to swing back. All hail Discordia.
That fizzing feeling is a sense that something curious and unpredictable is coming. My antennae are picking something up. Matt Webb’s Poem-1 clock is a good early sign of it. Brilliantly post-optimal.
That weekend I saw Rory Pilgrim’s Turner-nominated work, RAFTS, at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne. It moved me to tears. One line kept repeating in my head.
“For it’s time to figure out / To figure out how to stay around / So we can dream aloud”
Dreaming aloud.
That’s what was missing. That’s the hook.
When you dream aloud, you invite people into your imagination. You start a conversation. You help build a shared idea of a possible future, one you can pull into the present together.
Not the incremental, data-driven trudge toward a smooth, optimised growth curve. Something wider and stranger. Bold leaps, odd tangents, outsider thinking that doesn’t have to justify itself yet. A future we choose to build, not the one the data wants.
I’d been reading about the counterculture of the 1960s. Felt familiar. I asked a language model what it made of the comparison. It said something reasonable: countercultural movements share a commitment to challenging dominant structures and imagining alternative futures built on freedom, equality and justice.
Hope. That’s the hook my brain had actually found.
Here’s to dreaming aloud. Embracing the uncertainty. I think the posts that follow this one will keep circling the same idea.
I'd love to tell you more.
Previous Journal Post
// Awesome Accessibility
The best accessibility features don’t look like accessibility features. They just look like good design.
A short one, brought in from Medium. About a Nike shoe with a collapsible heel, and the case for building access in from the start instead of bolting it on at the end.
Also: the curb-cut effect, and why “well done, more of this” is basically the whole argument.