My next book, Philosophy of Design of Philosophy, is still forming in my head. I know what I want to convey, but the conceptual ingredients are evolving. Some new ingredients I’m entertaining are liminality, conceptual integrity and multistability. These new concepts will help me simplify my system and link my thinking to other bodies of … Continue reading Useful usable desirable
I’ve been pretty outspoken about the damage Lean Startup has done to design. Mostly, I have emphasized the way such engineer-centric methods tend to encourage rushed release cycles that expose users to inconsistent user interfaces, often flawed ones. I’ve complained that an engineering mindset conceives products as things, where a design mindset thinks of products … Continue reading The worst product management fad, ever
My dad is a retired ceramic engineering professor. He is what many people would call “extremely left-brained”. He is the kind of guy who stays up late into the night doing math puzzles for fun. Engineering has always been a core part of his personal identity, even after he became a professor. For him teaching … Continue reading The “material science” of people
If I were giving my talk on the differences between design researching service design problems versus UX problems today, this would be my talk: * A confession: not long ago I thought of service design as just one variety of experience strategy, specifically an experience strategy that defines the experience of a process, a connected … Continue reading Touch-points, touch-lines, touch-planes
If you want to produce that soulless quality we call “corporate” just design an organizational structure that has design report up to engineering and engineering report up to business administration. Corporateness will naturally result as more expansive disciplines are truncated to fit inside horizons of narrower ones.
I posted something (plus a bunch of comments) on Facebook that belongs here: I propose an amendment to Useful, Usable and Desirable: RELIABLE. Who’s in? Reliability is knowing that when you go to use a thing that it will work as expected. The problem with most software design today is that it is embedded in … Continue reading
Reading postphenomenology, I’ve become enamoured with the notion of postexistentialism. Why not? If existentialism developed out of phenomenology, why shouldn’t postexistentialism develop from postphenomenology? Each phenomenology is the personal property of a single genius: It isn’t too hard to see Ihde as the Posthusserl. Reading What Things Do, Verbeek seems to be taking things (so … Continue reading Postexistentialism?
A friend texted me a link to an article by Yascha Mounk, “Authoritarian by Instinct“. What follows is a somewhat edited (and hyperlinked up) version of my SMS avalanche of a response. * I was about to say that I’m surprised at the naivety of so many liberal critics, and that this reminded me of … Continue reading Rewrite of Autumn 2011, when the canary died
Could it be that OOO is an engineer’s philosophy? It seems somewhere between possible and likely. Since good designers must develop knowledge of the engineering involved in their chosen medium, I probably need to learn to think OOO. Maybe I’ll glue it to my designer’s philosophy with ANT paste.
As great as television has become in the 21st Century, podcasts are even greater. The wealth of insight available through podcasts is staggering. My suspicion is that this is largely due to the medium’s low production overhead, which enables individuals to work relatively quickly and spontaneously (thanks to advancements in sound recording technologies and user … Continue reading Golden Ages
People think software is becoming more frustrating because the world has become more complex. This is false. Software is worse because development has been drastically accelerated. The shortened cycles leave little or no time for best design practices that ensure that real people experience the updates as useful and usable. The QA testing often suffers, … Continue reading It’s the experience, stupid
I do not do well when my thinking loses direct contact with my own core moral impulses. And by moral impulses, I mean whatever it is behind my mind that invests the world with purpose and value. My moral impulses drive me to pursue problems I feel as live problems. Problems that feel insignificant to … Continue reading Problems, living and non-living
A friend texted me a link to an article by Yascha Mounk, “Authoritarian by Instinct“. What follows is a somewhat edited (and hyperlinked up) version of my SMS avalanche of a response. * I was about to say that I’m surprised at the naivety of so many liberal critics, and that this reminded me of my frustrations … Continue reading Autumn 2011, when the canary died
A childhood of training for multiple choice tests, being exhorted to make the right choices, choosing between predetermined programs and paths… It is producing a world on rails, with discrete decision points that carry us to the next switchyard. We answer as asked, and fail to grasp the freedom between the questions. * Design reduced … Continue reading A/B
Any competent engineer will tell you that good engineering depends on understanding materials. If you misunderstand your materials the system will fail. Materials must be understood with highly nuanced specificity. Two metals that look and feel the same to an untrained eye and hand might behave drastically differently when subjected to friction, heat or strain. … Continue reading Know your materials
Gewollt – Ge’-volt (adj.) deliberate, intentional, intended (piece of art) contrived, awkward, cheesy * Gewollt occurs when art, which is supposed to be the exhibition of concrete, tacit qualities, is produced by explicit and general categories. Nietzsche said it well: “When a poet is not in love with reality his muse will consequently not be … Continue reading Gewollt
I would like to write these: The Ten-Thousand Everythings From Correspondence to Coresponse Imagining a Better Scientism A Book of Peculiar Prayer Ambidextrous Liberalism Philosophy as Design Practicable Utopias: a Social Design Primer Overcoming Engineering Knowledge Design But would anyone want to read them?
Applied natural science is engineering. Applied worldview is poetry. Applied social science is design.
In his instant-classic The Lean Startup, Eric Ries restores some crucial components of the Scientific Method to innovation processes, long-neglected by “scientific” management. Among his most important restorations is the the experimental practices that are the heart of scientific discovery. This is enormously important: without experiment, the creative dimension of science is lost and “scientific … Continue reading Scientific Method vs Lean Startup
Arendt’s quote on politics and plurality is one of my key intellectual landmarks: Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects … Continue reading Political pluralism