Logging Off
You’d rather figure it out yourself. A few days before the trip, though, your overconfidence subsides into nervousness. You’re furiously searching the internet for advice: best beginner mushroom? Whenever you come across the name of a new species, you have to open three more tabs to figure out if it’s in season, if it grows in your area, if it’s easily confused with poisonous varieties.
Maybe you should make a spreadsheet. Maybe you should post on the forum.
In the end you do neither. You use your lunch break to print off a few identification guides for spring mushrooms and, after studying them, decide that morels are the most visually distinctive. You’re nervous that you’ll show up to the national park and find nothing. But everyone is bad at something at first, right?
Celine Nguyen is a designer, design historian, and writer. She is an MA student in History of Design at the V&A Museum/Royal College of Art, where her research considers contemporary web aesthetics and their relationship to our ecological world. Right now, she wants to know: what does degrowth look like for the web?
