Things I Like
-
The people in a system are seldom acknowledged as a component of a system. Instead, they are people who act on a system. I think this is a mistake. People take work. In most organisations, the people of a system represent continuity and sometimes the only thing stopping it from being rebuilt and redesigned from external HIPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) influence. How I'd define people would be any real person interacting with the system; the team building it, stakeholders, open source community etc.
The idea of layers in a system and organizing them by how fast and often they change is intriguing and very clever. This piece by Boulton is really great with a lot to think about in it.
-
Great visual design or even the UX of a style guide isn’t anywhere near as important as the documentation being in a single location that everyone can easily find. And if our work saved an engineer or designer five minutes asking someone else on Slack about how to use component X then The Guide is a success, if only a small one.
There is so, so, so much great stuff in this post by Robin. The way in which how you make your style guide or the exact way you use it doesn't matter as much as the way it enables communication, needs to work for your team, and, in the quote above, how it can be ugly and messy and still be incredibly useful.
-
This is not about being austere for the sake of austerity, but it circles back to the question: Am I’m giving time and focus to activities that I feel help cultivate a deeper respect for the short time we may have? Making sure my fixed cost of living is as low as possible immolates the issue of doing certain jobs just to pay for a particular lifestyle. Living in a country with good health care means that you don’t have to worry about bearing the expense of treatment if tragedy strikes. These details add up. They collude to create space for thinking about and exploring the world, a space which feels non-negotiable in the quest to be present and reflective.
I've long enjoyed Craig Mod's work and writing, but this interview really struck home with me. Especially the above quote, it's much the way I think about life and work. The less income I need, the more freedom I have. But they way he treats technology and using the internet also intrigues me, just shutting it out for most of the day.
-
For me, our response to an increasingly digital world has to be more about connection than just convenience. What if HelloFresh connected me to my local shops and farmers market rather than just supplying me with ingredients to cook fresh food? In my opinion, this would support their underlying mission better than their current business model. But, arguably, it would also be less profitable, so these are hard business choices. To deliver human value, internet-era organisations need to learn to build more on existing social connections, rather than always looking to remove them. This is then convenience that recognises the importance of connection.
Really interesting and good points in this piece. I've resisted delivery of groceries and many other things that I can walk to get in my neighborhood for many reasons, but primarily because it gets me out of the house and among people, something I need since I work from home. But connections are harder and harder to come by in our siloed digital worlds and I wonder if maybe we need to rethink that going forward.
-
Here’s what I finally figured out, 25 years in: What Silicon Valley loves most isn’t the products, or the platforms underneath them, but markets. “Figure out the business model later” was the call of the early commercial internet. The way you monetize vast swaths of humanity is by creating products that people use a lot—perhaps a search engine such as Google or a social network like Facebook. You build big transactional web platforms beneath them that provide amazing things, like search results or news feeds ranked by relevance, and then beneath all that you build marketplaces for advertising—a true moneymaking machine. If you happen to create an honest-to-god marketplace, you can get unbelievably rich.
As usual Ford looks back to help us understand the current situation and points out that maybe we should think about ethics from the get go rather than after it's too late, much as we're doing right now with fake news and social media and all ramifications we didn't think about in the beginning.
-
I find HSL enormously liberating. Historical color wheel concepts map directly to the 360-degree hue system, and HSL’s three foundational attributes let me create and fine-tune color directly in code like never before. Let’s take a look at how I’m using it with Sass.
I've been looking at use of color in watercolor painting for the past several weeks, and the way Rob talks about color with HSL maps really well to the way I now think about color. This is a really excellent post on the ins and outs of color and how you can use it and I love the system Rob is using.
-
It’s interesting to note that many of these apps are corporeal. Contrary to intuition, the way to better technology is through the body, because we do not leave our body behind when we log on. We may be striving to create a nourishing digital condition for ourselves, but it will always be informed by what’s happening on the ground. The place of technology in our lives begins and ends with the place where we find ourselves.
Frank's been doing some amazing thinking about technology and how we use it and this piece is really great. I love libraries, so I was hooked from the start, but I also find the research on what apps make people happy versus those that don't telling. We have control over how we use these things, even if the apps don't want us to think so.
-
Let’s be more like that tortoise: diligent, direct, and purposeful. The web needs pockets of slowness and thoughtfulness as its reach and power continues to increase. What we depend upon must be properly built and intelligently formed. We need to create space for complexity’s important sibling: nuance. Spaces without nuance tend to gravitate towards stupidity. And as an American, I can tell you, there are no limits to the amount of damage that can be inflicted by that dangerous cocktail of fast-moving-stupid.
This piece resonated with me a lot, it's something I've been thinking about as well and I've even written about it. I'm not nostalgic for the way the web used to be, but I am, increasingly, concerned about the people we leave out with the complexity we've created. There are a lot of hard things on the web right now, this is a small piece that affects a lot of us every day in our work and, I think, makes our work less efficient and less accessible.
-
There’s another theory floating around as to why Facebook cares so much about the way it’s impacting the world, and it’s one that I happen to agree with. When Zuckerberg looks into his big-data crystal ball, he can see a troublesome trend occurring. A few years ago, for example, there wasn’t a single person I knew who didn’t have Facebook on their smartphone. These days, it’s the opposite. This is largely anecdotal, but almost everyone I know has deleted at least one social app from their devices. And Facebook is almost always the first to go. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other sneaky privacy-piercing applications are being removed by people who simply feel icky about what these platforms are doing to them, and to society.
The backlash on social media platforms is beginning and at the same time those same platforms are getting more and more desperate to keep our eyes glued to them. I don't have a Facebook account, but I do use Instagram a bit, and I'm bombarded with it wanting me to do something to make it easier for the app to bug me every time I open it up. These things have the opposite effect on me as I'm now close to leaving the platform altogether.
-
I love Le Guin's writing and this is a great compilation of a bunch of various quotes from her books, speeches, and more. Well worth a read through if you're unfamiliar with her work.
-
Designers like to talk about how they finally have a seat at the table. It’s an attractive idea, especially since companies have started to build internal design teams rather than outsource to agencies. But sometimes it feels as if designers have been tricked into thinking they have a seat, when in fact they’ve been taken hostage, only to develop Stockholm syndrome.
Interesting thoughts from Paul about how we choose who we work for and what that means in the larger sense of ethics and the state of the internet.
-
But I also worry about how shallow the tech community’s interpretation of craft is; how aesthetic and performative we’ve made it. We buy handmade holsters for our Sharpies. Our conferences offer wood-turning workshops. Our dress code somehow blends hipster fetishisation of a blue-collar past with the minimalism of the urban rich: we yearn to connect with a handmade, physical world (perhaps to compensate for the ephemerality of our materials), but above all we must display our appreciation of quality, and hence our taste. Craft underpins how we dress and even behave. It’s easy to see where this leads: these identity performances become acts of gatekeeping. Those who look the part and fit the groove are given attention, hired, and respected. The rest are filtered out. Craft as class warfare.
I love this piece and the way in which Bowles equates our talk of craft with class. Also the Chachra piece he links to is a fave that I return to again and again.
-
I don’t just want to see the quality of your final mockup, your finished set of templates: I want to learn how you got there. I want to read what worked, what didn’t, and the decisions you made along the way.
So much this. I would also add that writing and communicating are vital skills, sometimes more vital than just being able to design well or code well. And writing about your work, your thoughts, and your ideas is one way to show more of what you'd be like to with on a team.
-
So instead of being just another way to get posts from blogs that you were interested in, RSS fostered countless communities and friendships across oceans, across networks. And because of that I now think of RSS as a window into a room with the smartest, kindest people — and sometimes, on the rarest of occasions, they would open up the window and wave back.
I am at once happy to see this post and sad to see this post. I love the way in which Robin describes RSS and what it is, but I'm sad that so many people have forgotten or never known about it that he felt it necessary to write it in the first place. I'm seeing a resurgence of blogging (yay!) and many sites that are still in my feed reader are coming back to life. As I like to say: RSS 4 lyfe.
-
This is a super good look at the ways in which nostalgia for World War II was used to then justify and promote the war on terror post 9/11. It led me to think about the late 90s and how it was the first time there wasn't a uniting "evil" that all Americans agreed is bad and should be fought (think the cold war and the Soviet Union). And the war on terror hasn't united us, if anything it's fractured us even more in many ways. And that led me to wonder what could unite people, what can be the common good that we all agree on? Note: I'm not saying that any past era was perfect, but I do wonder about the different underlying unifying themes of past eras.