{ 2008.06.06 }
My latest project, Compassionate Communications launched a few weeks ago, but it appears that I’m just now publicly documenting its release for posterity’s sake. Design and Rails programming was done by me, with significant programming contributions by my good friends Lee and Daniel out in that mountainous region popularly known as Colorado. We just signed on Susan G. Komen as an additional charitable affiliate, so that’s also some very positive news.
Tumbleweed Houses designs and builds some beautiful tiny houses. Working under excessive constraints often lead to better solutions, better products and better experiences. Paradoxically, it can also sometimes lead to greater freedom. Which leads to something I’ve been pondering for the past couple of weeks: What does it mean to live a simple, low-impact lifestyle in a technology-saturated world? Is it possible to live simply without being a complete neo-Luddite? What are the constraints? Does “simplicity” imply physical, material simplicity or does it mean more than that? To me, simplicity = freedom.
Books, music, movies, documents, photographs and other media miscellany now live in bits. Bits are physical only in the most microscopic sense. Why do our homes grow ever-larger when our spatial needs only grow smaller? A strange phenomenon indeed. Obviously, culture evolves far more slowly than the artifacts it produces.