Things I Like
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And right now there are glaring gaps in our methods, our experience, and our team dynamics that let through unethical products. I heard about usability while I was still in college, in the early 90s, before the web was mainstream. It’s been around for a while. And we’ve spent so much time and energy on ensuring things are usable. We should perhaps turn our attention to make sure our products are not abusable.
Really glad to see someone talking about this and to see some ideas for how to do it as well. (Via Lisa Marie Martin's fantastic newsletter.)
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I feel like I taught myself to draw by looking at comics and cartoons when I was younger and looking at art on the internet when I was a bit older. Just getting slowly better over the years with practice.
This is a really delightful interview with the creater of the Hilda comics which I just posted about over in my reading section. Mark sent me this link and I'm so glad, it was a ray of sunshine that I needed, plus I love seeing the in progress illustrations.
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The writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ once said that, in Africa, when an old person dies, it is like a library has been burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn’t understand it, but over time I came to realize that it was perfect. Our minds and our souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories catalogued and stored inside, a private library of a life lived. It is something that no one else can entirely share; it burns down and disappears when we die. But if you can take something from your internal collection and share it—with one person or with the larger world, on the page or in a story told—it takes on a life of its own.
If you've been reading my site for any period of time, you know that I love libraries and I'm an avid library user. I love this piece so much and I can't wait to read her book.
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Goodness is a notoriously difficult topic — a tangled knot at which religions and philosophers have been picking for all of human history. A 22-minute network comedy seems like exactly the wrong tool for the job. It’s like trying to hammer a nail with a banana peel. And yet that was the tool that Michael Schur had. So he was going to try.
I've only watched season one of “The Good Place”, but I loved it and will soon be sitting down to watch season two. This article made me love it more, that there is so much thought behind the ideas and I'm now excited to see where it goes.
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The light changed, and I ran on. I stepped in a puddle, and I ran on. I shook my head to clear out visions of the news, nearly tripping as I did, but I ran on. I took circuitous, rambling routes, exploring hills I’d never climbed, running down side streets I’d never seen. I ran on.
Beautiful writing.
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Focusing the conversation on the ethics of disseminating speech rather than the actual content of that speech is hugely useful for the far right for three reasons. Firstly, it allows them to paint themselves as the wronged party — the martyrs and victims. Secondly, it stops people from talking about the actual wronged parties, the real lives at risk. And thirdly, of course, it’s an enormous diversion tactic, a shout of “Fire!” in the crowded theatre of politics. But Liberals don’t want to feel like bad people, so this impossible choice — betray the letter of your principles, or betray the spirit — leaves everyone feeling filthy.
Lots to ponder and think about in here about how we interact with people spouting ideas that are awful. I had a hard time picking what to pull out, because as I read it just kept getting better. (Via Rob's fantastic links newsletter.)
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Developing a design system takes collaboration between the makers of the design systems and the different users of the system. It’s a continual process that doesn’t have to require a huge investment in new departments or massive restructuring.
I think a lot about this part of design, the system that can scale. And again and again I keep coming back to the fact that each company and team are unique and the system that they use and maintain should be also. That runs contrary to a lot of the way we want to solve these problems, but a tool isn't going to replace the hard work of a team figuring it out for themselves.
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Together, Solid and inrupt will provide new experiences benefitting every web user - and that are impossible on the web today. Where individuals, developers and businesses create and find innovative, life- and business-enriching, applications and services. Where we all find trusted services for storing, securing and managing personal data.
This look interesting, I'll be keeping an eye on it to see where it goes.
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This Steve Jobs-esque fantasy to be at the very heart of things and to rule the world is the stuff of kings and backwater monarchies. And wanting to be an Uber or a Facebook or a whatever feels like anti-government sentiment to me. And I hate that recent events have led us all to point at those government institutions and sneer at them. Government might be broken, yes. But it’s fixable. We just need to reimagine what government is for. That’s the hard part.
I love a good rant and Robin doesn't disappoint with this one. The collective we seems to want to put our hope in tech companies (whose goal is to make money and grow, not do the best for society) rather than government. I know several folks working in the civic tech world and I would love to work on project in that world as well, government can do great things if we give it the same attention and time that we do to building the next great tech company.
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Lost here is the gentle pursuit of a modest competence, the doing of something just because you enjoy it, not because you are good at it. Hobbies, let me remind you, are supposed to be something different from work. But alien values like “the pursuit of excellence” have crept into and corrupted what was once the realm of leisure, leaving little room for the true amateur.
This piece is so great. I've been talking to people lately and many have said they don't have hobbies. Part of this is because we don't see things as hobbies that I think actually are (film buff is a hobby, reading is a hobby) but also because the sharing world of social media is intimidating. How can I draw if it doesn't look like that professional illustrator's work I love? I run, I do it for my health, I'm trying to get better at it, but I have absolutely no desire to run a marathon or even run in a 5K race. It's a hobby, I do it, I'm not great at it.
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I don’t presume to say what capital-T Truth is. But I do know my truth, and it’s this: Everyone I know, including me, has lived through devastating times at least twice, through seemingly unsurvivable loss. And yet we have come through because of the love of our closest people, the weird healing properties of time, random benevolence, and, of course, our dogs.
Hope is hard to find these days, never more so than this week in the US, but I'm trying my hardest and I'm reading this piece over and over again to remind myself that it still exists. I see people fighting and they give me hope.
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In other words, this question forces me to step outside my default assumptions and biases about how I think the web works. It’s a way for me stop, pause, and reflect on what other folks’ needs might be, and to think about how best to design for those needs. So, yeah: this little question’s proven to be a really useful design tool. I can’t do my job without it.
Me too, this is a question I try and ask myself over and over again as I build things for the web. No one is perfect, but trying to jolt myself out of my assumptions and habits hopefully makes me better at my job.
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Years from now, we will look back in horror at the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people—long after we knew there was a better path.
This article is difficult to read, it's heartbreaking at times, and it honestly makes me ashamed to live in this society. Our health care system is broken in so many ways and how we treat obesity is a glaring example of this.
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Third, do not underestimate the destructive power of lies. When the war broke out in 1939, my family fled east and settled for a couple of years in Soviet-occupied Lwów (now Lviv in western Ukraine). The city was full of refugees, and rumours were swirling about mass deportations to gulags in Siberia and Kazakhstan. To calm the situation, a Soviet official gave a speech declaring that the rumours were false – nowadays they would be called “fake news” – and that anyone spreading them would be arrested. Two days later, the deportations to the gulags began, with thousands sent to their deaths.
A quick read that's so timely right now and worth the reminder. The past will only be useful if we remember it and learn from it.
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It’s not speech per se that allows democracies to function, but the ability to agree—eventually, at least some of the time—on what is true, what is important and what serves the public good. This doesn’t mean everyone must agree on every fact, or that our priorities are necessarily uniform. But democracy can’t operate completely unmoored from a common ground, and certainly not in a sea of distractions.
I've thought about this a lot since I first read it. As a reader who loves to write, are we being inundated with too many things? How, amongst all this noise, do we find a common place to agree?