This is not luxury. This is not convenience. This is an ancient forest turned out as celebrity gossip. This is the tar sands hiding behind 34 different kinds of breath mints. There is literally nothing here worth sacrificing for and yet we're sacrificing everything for it.

Most shapers of the built environment, designers and policy makers, understand that we have to change the way we do things moving forward, but we have to do more. It is not good enough to be for sustainability we must also be against waste and destruction – indeed, given our role in creating these problems, it is our professional obligation.

Stephen Fry on Christopher Hitchen's love of the craft of argument:

With a deep understanding that the connection between style and substance is absolute; that a true thing badly expressed is no more than a lie.

I have two things in common with Christopher Hitchens: a great passion for well crafted discourse and we had both been diagnosed with cancer at about the same time. I took comfort in reading Hitchens so well articulate an experience similar to my own:

To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

While I would never claim to have anywhere near the intellect and wit of Hitchens, few could, today I learned, sadly, that I've faired much better than he with cancer.

Christopher Hitchens died today at 62 and with that passing we've lost one of the great defenders of humanism of this or any generation. We've also lost a craftsman of the highest order.

I'm a designer. I solve problems or, more accurately, I craft solutions. Simpler still, I argue. Design is argument. At its simplest, a house is an argument against homelessness. A logo is an argument for disambiguity and recognition. A well planned neighbourhood is an argument against traffic congestion, alienation and sprawl.

Reading Hitchens, or listening to him, is a master class in crafting an argument, in concision, efficiency and clarity. Hitchens hones every sentence; his arguments are exquisitely designed tools as beautiful to behold as any well crafted chef's knife or carefully appointed garden.

The field of design, so easily swayed by fashion and ideogical tribalism, is sorely in need of the kind of carefully reasoned discourse that Hitchens was so passionate about. The kind of robust and human rationalism that Hitchens employed should be the first tool we reach for as designers so that we may find deeper solutions for our troubled times.

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses.

Hitch.On location.

“It’s not just the number of hours we sit at a desk that determines the value we generate”.

Tony Schwartz for The 99 Percent with a great article on work hours and the law of diminishing returns. Schwartz speaks directly against the design studio culture of long days and late nights. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that rest and renewal increase productivity – my personal experience confirms this – and yet here we sit hour after hour.

Full article.

I love good tools. For me, there are few joys greater than working with a well-made tool – the way a good tool disappears into your intention, gets out of your way so you can focus on the act rather than the action.

Everything, in my current incarnation as an environmental designer, has been made on one tool, a Mac. The Mac, and it's extension the iPhone, are the only electronic devices that have ever achieved that "disappearance" for me. The tool should always be and extension of the act and not an act in itself, or, as Steve Jobs put it, "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works".

Steve Job's contribution to the tools Apple created was to think as a user. To identify the needs that the tool must address and then use rigorous and uncompromising design to meet those needs. Why else would you make a tool? People use Macs because they are made to be used – designed to be used. So few tool-makers understand this, so few designers understand this and no other computer company does.

Thanks, Steve. RIP.