Today I Learned

Work, Structures, Design

Good Design

An evolving list of design principles:

  • Balanced: Good design harmonizes aesthetics with utility, creating beautiful and practical solutions.
  • Inclusive: Design should be usable and beneficial for people of diverse abilities, backgrounds, and means, without exclusion.
  • Adaptive: Effective design responds to changing human needs, environments, and purposes.
  • Simple: Good design reduces complexity to its essence, making solutions intuitive and easy to use.
  • Sustainable: Design should provide lasting benefit, giving more to users and society than it takes in resources or effort.
  • Better: There are many ways to solve human problems, and good design does it better.
  • Aesthetic: Design should evoke positive emotional responses and meet or exceed cultural expectations for visual and experiential quality.
  • Accessible: As in a11y—but not out reach. Everyone deserves beauty, function, and design.
  • Innovative: Design leverages new ideas and technologies to meet genuine human needs and aspirations.
  • Ethical: Good design respects user agency, promotes well-being, and considers its broader impact on society and the environment.

While it’s important to ground good design in principles, it’s also important to understand how good design comes to life and what needs to exist to create great products. My README shows more about creating that environment.

Must-reads

Other book recommendations

  • Set Boundaries, Find Peace. Breaks down different types of boundaries and how to assert them.
  • Activist Affordances. The entire design of the world works against people with disabilities. This book shows how disabled people navigate their world with creativity and ingenuity.
  • Creative Leadership: Born from Design. I did not love this book as a total product, but it has transformed what I view as my (and other design leader’s) superpower: creativity.
  • Dilla Time. This book fundamentally changed how I create art, embracing imperfection and humanization.

Working

Topics

Design

Design Leadership

  • 🔥 Katie Dill: Building beautiful products.
    • Beauty and delivery are not at odds. Don’t underestimate the role of sentiment in how people perceive products.
    • Gotta have the courage to say: this doesn’t meet our standard of quality.
    • Essential journeymaps. Create 10-15 critical journeymaps for your product and Walk the Store regularly to keep leadership and teams close to how people use your product.
    • Great product companies have an “editor”–a person in power who is somewhat opinionated about product design upholding the standard-of-quality.
    • In hiring, look for judgment and taste in addition to design skills.
  • Most HR Data is Bad Data. The processes for assessing performance are rife with bias and fundamentally broken.
  • $400,000 a year and 10 hours a week at Google. The bar to get promoted is very, very high, but the bar to get fired is very, very low. Because HR data is broken, you can easily game the system to do as little as possible without getting fired.
  • 9 - I am involved in the planning of the work that affects me. The Ritz-Carlton service values comprise 12 “I” statements that allow them to fulfill their service promise to themselves, each other, and guests to create an elevated experience.
  • Managing Someone Who’s Too Collaborative. Great distinctions between leaning on collaboration when faster (and more autocratic) decision making is needed, considering how this presents different for women and men in the workplace.
  • The myth of Servant Leadership. Explores the religious and patriarchical roots of Servant Leadership through a feminist/gender neutral lens. I noticed a rise in Servant Leadership’s popularity during COVID-19 (perhaps related to burnout and mental health in the workforce). However, I have always felt some tension between S-L theory and application.
  • Staying hands-on: how designers can lead without lwaving the work behind. Examining the false narrative of leadership meaning you leave design and designing behind.

Design Systems

  • Porsche has a Design System. Besides the regular hits of a modern design system, it includes some interesting content like their Definition of Done. I love the details like “Smallest possible DOM hierarchy.”
  • Expressive Design Systems. In the pursuit of consistency and maintainability, design systems risk suppressing creativity by being too rigid. Perez-Cruz proposes flexible design systems that are “expressive,” allowing them to be bent and broken where needed to evolve.
  • The broken promises of design systems. Great designs never start with the system.

Strategy

  • OKRs are bullshit. I’ve used OKRs extensively in my career and find them challenging as a framework due to their universality.
  • An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification. Cory Doctorow breaks down the phases of enshittification, which plagues many of the software platforms around us. First, there’s a fight for users in a two-sided marketplace. The switching cost is made artificially low. As profit becomes more lucrative, the business then taxes its seller or business personas in the ecosystem. In the last phase, when it’s not enough to tax the business users, the entire ecosystem is taxed because the cost of switching is too high and everyone is being held hostage. Introduced me to the term “chokepoint capitalism.”

AI

  • Language Model Sketchbook, or Why I Hate Chatbots. Getting past the laziness of chatbots and into the real power of LLMs.
  • ChatGPT is bullshit. “Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit.”
  • I will piledrive you if you mention AI again. Where does hype end and utility begin?
  • Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier. Lots to unpack here and many references to previous work, but this can help inform approaches to complex task automation and how to create cognitive load when human intervention is needed in task automations that are risky or flaky.
  • AI Design Studio. Open-sourced RISD course.
  • Project IDX. I’m composing this update to my TIL on Replit, and I love the idea of an integrated, web-based IDE (basically Visual Studio Code on the go) with agentic coding built in. I’ve already edited code on the train, while I was on a trip, and other random contexts. I used to do this via SSH and neovim, but this feels more accessible and fun.

Audio, Video, Disco

What am I playing? Mary in the Junkyard

Random

  • How Complex Systems Fail.
    • Post-accident attribution accident to a ‘root cause’ is fundamentally wrong. The evaluations based on such reasoning as ‘root cause’ do not reflect a technical understanding of the nature of failure but rather the social, cultural need to blame specific, localized forces or events for outcomes.
  • The Shirky Principle. “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” In systems thinking, I think this maps to the resilience of systems and how they protect and preserve themselves.
  • 68–95–99.7 rule. I’m bad at stats.
  • Explorations on Single Usability Metrics. Qualifying SUM with threshold selection for subjective ratings - perceived time, perceived ease, and satisfaction. Objective measures move to pass/fail to get a slightly different lens on SUM.
  • git column is a thing. Did you know that you can format output into columns using git?
  • pkl takes key-pair values and objects and prints them in other extensions like yaml or json. But wayyyy more portable.
  • Thinking Fast and Slow: A Meta Scientific Analysis This was one of my favorite books (previously a must-read), but this article changed my perspective and challenged my knowledge model sourced from pop-science books.
  • Humane isn’t Apple, no matter how hard they try. Analysis of why the Humane Pin failed so spectacularly.
  • Primarium. Shows how handwriting is taught in countries around the world. I’m in a handwriting phase and have added it to a few album covers recently.
  • Promote your art. Tyler, the Creator explains why you need to stand on your art proudly.
  • The secret of how not to be fooled.
  • The 7 Questions For Any Technological Idea.
    • What is the problem that this new technology solves?
    • Whose problem is it?
    • What new problems do we create by solving this problem?
    • Which people and institutions will be most impacted by a technological solution?
    • What changes in language occur as the result of technological change?
    • Which shifts in economic and political power might result when this technology is adopted?
    • What alternative (and unintended) uses might be made of this technology?