07/12/2018
Reflections on a ten-day course in Transition Design at Schumacher College in the UK.
Hi there
I’m Alex Wright, a writer, researcher and designer based in Brooklyn, New York.
I currently work by day at Etsy and moonlight as a grad student at Carnegie Mellon School of Design. I’ve also written a couple of books, some articles, and give occasional talks.
Recent writing
Medium
03/14/2018
Recapping a workshop on the future of design education at the 2018 IxDA Education Summit in Lyon, France.
Medium
12/16/2017
What does it mean to do “meaningful” work? According to a recent MIT study, most of us find meaning in our professional lives in highly individual and idiosyncratic ways: one person’s tedium is another’s labor of love.
Medium
06/02/2017
In his 1905 novel A Modern Utopia, H.G. Wells imagined a future world in which a small group of highly skilled creative workers wielded enormous power over the rest of society. He dubbed this new breed of elite professionals the “Samurai.”
Medium
03/19/2017
Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin …. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. — Wendell Berry
Medium
12/30/2016
As the global network continues to shrink the distance between producers and consumers, the global economy is also beginning to respond to a set major systemic shocks: climate change, growing income inequality, mass migration, and the rise of populist right-wing nationalism, to name a few.
Books
Oxford University Press
06/04/2014
The dream of capturing and organizing knowledge is as old as history. From the archives of ancient Sumeria and the Library of Alexandria to the Library of Congress and Wikipedia, humanity has wrestled with the problem of harnessing its intellectual output. The timeless quest for wisdom has been as much about information storage and retrieval as creative genius.
Cornell University Press
07/13/2011
The "information explosion" may seem like an acutely modern phenomenon, but we are not the first generation―or even the first species―to wrestle with the problem of information overload. Long before the advent of computers, human beings were collecting, storing, and organizing information: from Ice Age taxonomies to Sumerian archives, Greek libraries to Dark Age monasteries.