My Favorite Design Articles of 2017
Well, mostly design anyway
Virtual Reality as a Possibility Space, Monika Bielskyte
[VR] is simply a technology that can finally begin to echo what the shamans of time immemorial have been bringing us into through their sacred rituals. Rituals that, since their inception, have had a goal of teaching us how to dive into the parts of our psyche unknown to our conscious minds so we could learn how to come closer to the world that we are inextricably linked with. I know this might sound somewhat esoteric, but that’s what ‘being in the space’ while knowing that that space is not there very much is — it is literally an out-of-body experience.
More than ever before, creation — be it artistic, scientific, or technological — needs to have some of that shamanism within it.
Why a Toaster is a Design Triumph, Ian Bogost
The designer’s job is not to please or comfort the user, but to make an object even more what it already is. Design is the stewardship of essence — not the pursuit of utility, or delight, or form. This is the orientation that produces solutions like the Breville “A Bit More” button. The design opportunities that would otherwise go unnoticed emerge not from what people know about or desire for toasting, but from deeply pursuing the nature of toasting itself.
Datafication and Ideological Blindness, Cennydd Bowles
Now, there’s nothing wrong with incremental innovation per se, unless it becomes the only way you innovate. In an environment of data-enforced caution, there’s no way to climb down that hill to higher pastures elsewhere: a single metre is downhill, so you’ll never walk a hundred. Companies thus paralysed, unable to take bold steps in new directions, become vulnerable to eventual disruption.
Questions to ask as a New Designer on a Team, Jason Cashdollar
By ignoring the knowledge the team had learned in the past, I managed to create one of the most context-free, unscientific, and useless designs the team had seen.
How to Give Helpful Product Design Feedback, Mike Davidson
Instead of concentrating on providing feedback that will help our colleagues improve their work, we often spend our time thinking of remarks that will make us look or feel smarter.
Not Even Wrong, Benedict Evans
Really, the new technologies that matter give us superpowers. Is that what we’ve made this time? Electricity is a superpower, and so are cars, and flight, and mobile. I can rub my watch and tell the djinn that lives inside to summon a car, and there’ll be one waiting at the door. We can hear, or see, or travel, in ways we could not do before. Where we go and what we listen to are secondary questions. You can’t necessarily predict the applications, but you can predict that people will like having a new superpower. What you do with your superpower is up to you.
What We Get Wrong About Technology, Tim Harford
When asked to think about how new inventions might shape the future, our imaginations tend to leap to technologies that are sophisticated beyond comprehension. We readily imagine cracking the secrets of artificial life, and downloading and uploading a human mind. Yet when asked to picture how everyday life might look in a society sophisticated enough to build such biological androids, our imaginations falter.
How Fonts are Fueling the Culture Wars, Ben Hersh
I’m not interested in whether Clinton or Trump had good logos. I’m interested in the different values they reveal.
Inside Facebook’s AI Machine, Steven Levy
Candela breaks down the applications of AI in four areas: vision, language, speech, and camera effects. All of those, he says, will lead to a “content understanding engine.” By figuring out how to actually know what content means, Facebook intends to detect subtle intent from comments, extract nuance from the spoken word, identify faces of your friends that fleetingly appear in videos, and interpret your expressions and map them onto avatars in virtual reality sessions.
The World Doesn’t Want Your App, Sam McAfee
The most innovative companies today are providing a service, or set of services really, that touches the customer across a variety of different media and touch-points. There may be a mobile app for some types of interactions, possibly serving as the main touchpoint. There are usually other actions that require a browser. There may even be a chatbot, perhaps interacting over SMS, Slack, or Facebook messaging, but it will all be a seamless set of customer interactions that “follow you around” the Internet, rather than requiring you to go to a “place” online or on your phone.
Designing the Next Generation of Condom Packaging, Richard Morgan
The packages are stored in small round tins, like breath mints. “It’s unusual enough and discreet enough that someone can drop it out of her purse in an ice cream parlor full of kids and nobody is going to gasp,” said Gaines. “That is huge. We took it out of that hyper-sexual, hyper-clinical pharmacy space where it’s on an aisle with Band-Aids, cough syrup, and adult diapers. It needs to be more like lipstick, something that makes you feel sexier and braver and bolder when you use it.”
how to do nothing, Jenny Odell
This is real. The living, breathing bodies in this room are real. I am not an avatar, a set of preferences, or some smooth cognitive force. I’m lumpy, I’m an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I’m different one day to the next. I hear, I see, and I smell things that hear, see, and smell me. And it can take a break to remember that, a break to do nothing, to listen, to remember what we are and where we are.
Take the Time to Use Fewer Words, Torrey Podmajersky
To be more trustworthy, I use fewer words, in shorter sentences. That clarity gives the listener mental “space” to formulate their own considerations. I trust them to reach the same conclusions I’ve come to — without needing to drown them in words.
Creating robots capable of moral reasoning is like parenting, Regina Rini
We might discover that intelligent machines think about everything, not just Go, in ways that are alien us. You don’t have to imagine some horrible science-fiction scenario, where robots go on a murderous rampage. It might be something more like this: imagine that robots show moral concern for humans, and robots, and most animals… and also sofas. They are very careful not to damage sofas, just as we’re careful not to damage babies.
Shh! Don’t tell them there’s no magic in Design Thinking, Jared Spool
To those of us who’ve been doing this for a long time, design thinking doesn’t mean anything new. But it also doesn’t mean ‘make it pretty.’ And that’s why it works.
It changes the conversation. When you add ‘thinking’ to the word ‘design, it’s no longer about color or decoration. It’s now about process. It’s about getting to a more intentional outcome. It’s about thinking about the experience of the customer, user, and employee.
Innovation as Being Present, Jeff Sussna
Post-industrial innovation relies on feedback loops. Agile product delivery doesn’t work if it just focuses on delivery, without understanding and responding to the outcomes that result from what you’ve delivered. Too many digital business practices optimize for output. Output-centered practices are not mindful. To really understand customer needs and behaviors, you have to momentarily give up trying to change things. You have to be present; i.e., mindful; i.e., without hope or fear of whatever the market, or your support team, or your monitoring tools are telling you.
