Sean Voisen

@seanvoisen.com

151 Followers 145 Following

Trying to make computers better for human thinking and creativity. Currently leading design engineering at Adobe. Opinions own. Interwebs: seanvoisen.com Pronouns: he/him

Book cover for "The Psychology of Software Teams" by Cat Hicks, held in my hand in front of a blurred bookshelf. The cover features a bright coral-red background with a layered mountain landscape photograph at its center, showing snow-capped peaks in the distance and colored mountain ranges in earthy tones. Overlaid on the mountain scene are white statistical distribution curves and dashed vertical lines, suggesting data visualization and analysis. The title appears in white serif and sans-serif text at the top. The author's name "CAT HICKS" is displayed in white at the bottom, along with the CRC Press/Taylor & Francis Group logo.
Book cover for "Non-things" by Byung-Chul Han, held in someone's hand in front of a blurred bookshelf. The cover features a photograph of the New York City skyline at sunset with warm orange and pink light illuminating the buildings against a dusky sky. The title "Non-things" appears in elegant serif font at the top in black text on a cream-colored background.
Book cover for "The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. Le Guin, 50th Anniversary Edition, held in someone's hand in front of a bookshelf. The cover features bold abstract artwork with geometric shapes in red, blue, and green, depicting stylized human silhouettes against a dark background with radiating lines. The author's name appears in red at the top, the title in gold text in the center.
Book cover for "The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game" by C. Thi Nguyen, photographed on a wooden surface. The cover features a bright blue sky background with white clouds. Three white circles are arranged vertically down the center, containing the title, subtitle, and author name in white text.
Book cover for "Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History" by Thomas Rid, photographed on a wooden surface. The cover features a black background with large white sans-serif title text. At the top is a glowing yellow-green orb against the black. Below the title is a small waveform icon. The subtitle appears in golden yellow text.
Book cover of 'Babel-17' by Samuel R. Delany on a gray textured surface. The cover features a black background with 'Winner of the Nebula Award' in orange text at the top. The title 'Babel-17' appears in large white italic lettering in the center, with the author's name 'Samuel R. Delany' in orange below. A geometric abstract design in orange and gold fills the lower portion of the cover, consisting of interlocking angular maze-like patterns that suggest complexity and linguistic structure.
Book cover of 'Embassytown' by China Miéville on a wooden surface. The cover features a white upper section with the author's name in red text and 'New York Times Bestseller' at the top. Below is a gradient transitioning from grayscale to black, depicting a dense crowd of silhouetted figures, with an illuminated alien cityscape of tall spires glowing in gold at the bottom. The title 'Embassytown' appears in large white letters across the dark section. A quote from Ursula K. Le Guin reading 'A fully achieved work of art' is featured near the bottom.
Book cover of 'Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism' by Leif Weatherby held in a hand, displayed against a bookshelf. The cover features a cream background with a minimalist design of two gold/mustard-colored oval shapes connected by vertical line patterns. The author's name appears at the top, the title 'Language Machines' in large serif type in the center, and the subtitle below. The background shows a partially visible bookshelf with various colorful book spines including blue, orange, and red titles.
Book cover of "A Closed and Common Orbit" by Becky Chambers, laying at a slight angle on a wooden table. The cover features two silhouetted figures against a cosmic backdrop with a large orange planet and distant star.
A hand holds a minimalist paperback edition of Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler" against a bookshelf background. The cover features a geometric design: a dark metallic pentagon or hexagon with thin radiating lines suggesting light or pages fanning outward. The author and title are handwritten in elegant script. The Mariner Classics imprint appears at bottom.
Book cover of 'The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet' by Becky Chambers on a wooden surface. The cover features a dark space background with a glowing planet in the upper left and an illustration of a spacecraft in the center-right. Bold yellow-green lettering displays the title across the cover. A yellow circular badge in the upper right indicates it is a "Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Series." A quote from Ann Leckie praising the book as "Great fun!" appears near the bottom.
Holding my copy of Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" in front of my bookshelf. The cover is plain white with a single bird in flight, drawn in the distance as a small line art "V". The title and author's name are written in simple black cursive.
The cover of Italo Calvino's The Complete Cosmicomics features a simple line drawing of planets in elliptical orbit inside a gray, irregular circle. The text is in hand-written cursive on a white background.
It’s not the desire to teach others what I know or think I know that makes me want to write but, on the contrary, the painful awareness of my incompetence. So would my first impulse be to write in order to pretend a competence I don’t have? But in order to pretend, I have to somehow accumulate information, notions, observations, I have to succeed in imagining the slow accumulation of an experience. And this I can do only on the written page, where I hope to capture at least some trace of a knowledge or wisdom that I just touched in life and immediately lost.
The cover of Klara and the Sun is a bright orange red with a square cutout that reveals a teal page underneath featuring a single, offset yellow sun.
... when you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do. You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely.
A stack of the aforementioned books on a wooden table, along with a plain journal and a Rotring Isograph pen.
The cover of Hamid Ismailov's "We Computers" features a Persian poet with a bright pink computer framing his head.
The cover of the book "How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified" by Bryan Lawson. The cover is solid red with the title in white all caps lettering, and the subtitle in black all caps lettering.
Cover of Context Window by Scott Boms sitting on an ash-colored wood plank background. The booklet features the words "Context Window" printed twice vertically in black and white, with the white background disintegrating towards the bottom into a series of falling square blocks.
3 books laid out on a wooden backdrop: Technology and the Lifeworld by Don Ihde, The Whale and the Reactor by Langdon Winner, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life by Albert Borgmann.
A scent is slow. Thus, as a medium, it is not adapted to the age of haste. Scents cannot be presented in as fast a sequence as optical images. In contrast to the latter, they can also not be accelerated. A society dominated by scents would probably also not develop any inclinations towards change or acceleration. It would live off its recollections and its memory, off those things that are slow and long-lasting.
Two horizontal lines drawn roughly by offsetting endpoints, the midpoint and three-quarters point and then fitting different curves to get a not-quite-straight line that looks hand drawn.
A view from my bike, looking out across the handlebars. A very straight rutted gravel road extends to the horizon under a cloudless blue sky in Marin County, California. Green and brown fields border both sides of the road.
A round plate with six seeded and plain sourdough bagels sitting on a walnut wooden table.
A smoothed Voronoi tessellation inside of a rough circle, where each polygon in the tessellation is filled with imperfect (sketchy) black hatch lines at different angles.
The handwritten word "would" in different processes of vectorization.
Lines of black "scribbles" that appear to look like cursive handwriting in an indecipherable language.
A green tent glows from inside against a deep purple sky at dusk.
Fresh-baked sourdough batard sitting on a wooden cutting board on a walnut wood table.
A foggy overlook of some lichen-covered oak trees and rolling hills.
In amplifying our intelligence, we are applying the principle of synergistic structuring that was followed by natural evolution in developing the basic human capabilities. What we have done in the development of our augmentation means is to construct a superstructure that is a synthetic extension of the natural structure upon which it is built. In a very real sense, as represented by the steady evolution of our augmentation means, the development of "artificial intelligence" has been going on for centuries.