Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.

Amouage, the Omani House of High Perfumery, expands its global presence with its first Asian flagship in Zhang Yuan, Shanghai’s...

Growing Up at the Dawn of Cyberspace For those of us born around 1980, William Gibson’s Neuromancer might be the most prophetic novel we never read as teenagers. Published in 1984, it predicted the digital world we would inherit: a reality where human consciousness extends into cyberspace, where corporations control the digital commons, and where being “jacked in” to a global information network is the default state of existence. But it was The Matrix, arriving in 1999 when I was nineteen, that captured something even more fundamental about our generation’s experience. Beyond its surface narrative of machines and simulated reality, beyond its Hot Topic aesthetic, the film tapped into a profound truth about coming of age in the digital era: the experience of ontological shock. Every generation experiences the disorientation of discovering the world isn’t what they thought it was. But for the last X’ers, this natural coming-of-age shock coincided with a collective technological awakening. Just as we were questioning the nature of reality and our place in it as young adults, the stable physical world of our childhood was being transformed by digital technology. The institutions, social structures, and ways of being that seemed permanent turned out to be as mutable as computer code. Neo’s journey in The Matrix — discovering his reality is a simulation and learning to see “the code” behind it — paralleled our own experience of watching the physical world become increasingly overlaid and mediated by digital systems. The film’s themes of paranoia and revelation resonated because we were living through our own red pill experience, watching as more and more of human experience moved into the digital realm that Gibson had imagined fifteen years before. The timing was uncanny. The Matrix arrived amid a perfect storm of millennial anxiety: Y2K fears about computers failing catastrophically, a disputed presidential election that would be decided by the Supreme Court, and then the shocking events of 9/11. For those of us just entering adulthood in the United States, these concurrent disruptions to technological, political, and social stability congealed into a generational dysphoria. The film’s paranoid questioning of reality felt less like science fiction and more like a documentary of our collective psychological state. This double shock — personal and technological — has shaped how I, and I suspect many of us, think about and design technology today. When you’ve experienced reality becoming suddenly permeable, you assume disruption, glitches, and the shock of others. You develop empathy for anyone confronting new technological paradigms. You understand the importance of transparency, of helping people see the systems they’re operating within rather than hiding them. Perhaps this is why our generation often approaches technology with a mix of fluency and skepticism. We’re comfortable in digital spaces, but we remember what came before. We know firsthand how quickly reality can transform, how easily new layers of mediation can become invisible, how important it is to maintain awareness of the code behind our increasingly digital existence. The paranoia of The Matrix wasn’t just science fiction — it was a preview of what it means to live in a world where the boundaries between physical and digital reality grow increasingly blurry. For those of us who came of age alongside the internet, that ontological shock never fully faded. Maybe it shouldn’t — I hold on to mine as an asset to my work and thinking.

Switchup designed Nanobébé’s office with a focus on simplicity, natural light, and glass dividers, creating a modern, collaborative space that...