Almost everywhere I go, I have to explain what “Design” actually means to people, as I’m sure many Designers do. Most people still think of design as making a page look pretty and aesthetically pleasing enough for people to purchase it/consume it/identify with it. I’m currently reading the book “Little Bets,” which contains myriad references [...]
Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo. This talk by Bret Victor was almost certainly the best talk I’ve ever watched online. Some of my favorite insights: “So much of art.. so much of creation is discovery. And you can’t discover if you can’t see what you’re doing” You have to be [...]
Nice, someone’s made an infographic video of my favorite little part of Ira Glass’s video about getting better at something. I posted first about it here, but saw it on HackerNews today. Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.
Here’s a quote from a Steve Jobs interview from 1995: Many companies get the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 percent of the work. And if you just tell all these other people here’s this great idea then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem [...]
We all (should) know by now using Apple’s examples that it’s all about sweating the details and getting everything. just. right. This blog post and lesson by Aaron Swartz is a great reminder that details that impede your user tend to overshadow details that delight your user. I think he hit the nail on the [...]
Flickr: Rambouillet shellac beausage, Gino This article Aged to Perfection reminded me about the notion of “beausage” in physical goods. Beausage is shorthand and refers to “Beauty through usage”. I was reminded by the author of the article that most products live in the “raw/worn” state for a majority of the time they’re in use [...]
So. Good. “We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.” Walt Disney (via redcact.us, via daringfireball.net)
If someone came to me this second and asked me what the two most important books to read are in creating new software services, I would easily and emphatically state two books by Fred Brooks. Our professor in undergraduate senior design class, Elliot Soloway, made us read “The Mythical Man Month,” and the “Cathedral and [...]
A designer makes things. … Typically his making process is complex. There are more variables—kinds of possible moves, norms, and interrelationships of these—than can be represented in a finite model. Donald A Schön, The Reflective Practitioner Understanding how people learn (and improve skill level) is complex. Designing elegant stuff is also complex. Put them together, [...]
The rock garden at Daitoku-ji In December, I visited Japan. Japan is an wondrous country if you’re interested in the roots of zen, Buddhism, and the roots of modernist design. You can’t really walk around Kyoto without coming across temples or shrines filled with peaceful rock gardens. Perfect spots to sit down and think for [...]
It’s the little things. I love this: when you forget your Apple password, you go to “iforgot.apple.com”
Tim Brown raised interesting questions on the ideo blog: “Firstly, why is the design of tangible things so reliable and secondly are there lessons from attempts to design in the abstract world of economics that may be useful to all design thinkers?” I had to stop and think about it for a while to ask [...]
