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On Tools and the Aesthetics of Work - Cal Newport

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In the summer of 2022, an engineer named Keegan McNamara, who was at the time working for a fundraising technology startup, found his way to the Arms and Armor exhibit at the Met. He was struck by the unapologetic mixture of extreme beauty and focused function captured in the antique firearms on display. As reported in a recent profile of McNamara published in The Verge, this encounter with the past sparked a realization about the present: “That combination of craftsmanship and utility, objects that are both thoroughly practical and needlessly outrageously beautiful, doesn’t really exist anymore. ‘And it especially doesn’t exist for computers.'” Aesthetically, contemporary digitals devices have become industrial and impersonal: grey and black rectangles carved into generically-modern clean lines . Functionally, they offer the hapless user a cluttered explosion of potential activity, windows piling on top of windows, command bars thick with applications. Standing in the Arms and Armor e

In the summer of 2022, an engineer named Keegan McNamara, who was at the time working for a fundraising technology startup, found his way to the Arms and Armor exhibit at the Met. He was struck by the unapologetic mixture of extreme beauty and focused function captured in the antique firearms on display. As reported in a recent profile of McNamara published in The Verge , this encounter with the past sparked a realization about the present: “That combination of craftsmanship and utility, objects that are both thoroughly practical and needlessly outrageously beautiful, doesn’t really exis

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