ALT The introduction to Lisa Maria Marquis' book, Everyday Information Architecture. It begins: "Walter Plecker was an asshole." Plecker, a 1920s bureaucrat in Virginia, used his position in the state's Vital Statistics agency, to codify his views on race and whiteness in the state's official racial taxonomy — dramatically restricting many Virginians' rights and legal agency. Quoting LMM: "Changing a label is a design decision—one calculated, in this case, to disenfranchise specific human beings. Now, most of us don’t have Walter Plecker’s job. We are, instead, designers, developers, copywriters, strategists. We work on the web, and we may not think our work carries that same weight. I’m here to argue that it does. Whatever our role, we are designers of information. Our choices alter the presentation and flow of human knowledge. We control how people find, understand, and use information in every facet of their lives."
ALT To become a dragon, first wear its skin When she married, my mother wore a cheongsam of red silk bright as a bolt of dragonfire. Her mother tipped her from the bath and poured her into it, all brimstone brilliance and the hottest part of the flame, The tailoring perfect, each button knotted and curled like a dragon's whiskers. The cool material felt like slipping out at night to lie on your back in the sea, or the drawn-out pleasure of a cigarette after sex, sheets pooled in the sticky heat. Shoes, of course, buckled dragonskin. Imagine a bride, knowing she could swallow any man whole. And later, imagine a newlywed, packing a bag for his things (coarse denim jacket stinking of hay and Oreo nicotine smell), and finding the cheongsam at the back of the wardrobe, pressed and forgotten. She cards her fingers through whispering tissue, remembers the dress clinging like smoke. imagine memory as a whetstone. She sharpens herself on it
