Political philosophies that, for them to work you have to change human nature, I tend not to like. […] You can’t change human nature by changing […] rules. What you have to do is construct a system, such that all the things about human nature, both good and bad, work to make the system successful.
The challenge of distilling a complex set of requirements into a simple, understandable and enjoyable experience is the most important task a designer faces. Among other things, this means creating a consistent design language so experiences in one part of the product make increase comfort and skill throughout the rest of the product.
It often involves creating an appropriate metaphor for the product in order to tap a customer’s existing experiences, online or off. It means placing the most common tasks front and center while keeping the other tasks nearby, where they can be reached but don’t obstruct. Most importantly, it means iterating on the original set of requirements, pruning them away, substituting with simpler requirements that fulfill the same needs.
Pierre Bergé
In an interview with The Talks Bergé mostly talks about Yves Saint Laurent and his eponymous brand which he helped cofound. He remembers Laurent being an artist first, not caring about money and how much he even had. To him, it was all about creating for the sake of creating:
Always. He didn’t really pay attention to anything else – or anybody else. Marcel Proust explained that very well: he said that if you are a genius you are busy with yourself – and it is true. Voilà.
Fashion industry of course has taken a different course since then. As Bergé puts it:
[…] I am sorry to tell you that, but it is very difficult for me to understand what has happened to the fashion business. It is all a question of money and marketing. We never talk about talent – it’s not the point. We only talk about sales. […]
It seems like another industry in a desperate need of overhaul.
Test
These days, memes spread faster and wider than ever, with social networks acting as the fuel for mass distribution. But it’s possible we may see less mutation and remixing in the near future. As internet usage shifts from desktops and laptops to mobile devices and tablets, the ability to mutate memes in a meaningful way becomes harder.
Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs.
The strongest impacts of an emergent technology are always unanticipated. You can’t know what people are going to do until they get their hands on it and start using it on a daily basis, using it to make a buck and using it for criminal purpose and all the different things that people do.
I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story. No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds.
Introducing TumbleBee
I’ve finally made an app:
When you love and support a platform, you want to do everything in your power to make it successful. This is how I feel about Tumblr. Since joining, I’ve discovered a ton of great photos, links and quotes, I’ve been inspired by so many interesting people, and I am amazed by how many creatives still are out there. For the past year, I’ve been using Tumblr heavily on my iPad, but I dislike the web interface. I also haven’t found an app that would suit my needs and taste. Thus I decided to make my own.
The Verge interviews Shaun Inman
On why touch-based control systems are so hard to use:
I think it’s probably the lack of physical context. When you rest your hands on a physical keyboard you know when your fingers are misaligned or resting between rows or columns of keys without looking. Touch screen interfaces rely on manual visual alignment. Buttons on touch screens also lack the light resistance and satisfying snap you get from physical buttons. It’s impossible to identify the state of an onscreen button by touch alone.
The Evening Standard interviews Sir Jonathan Ive
The entire interview is wonderful. Here’s a small part of it:
We struggle with the right words to describe the design process at Apple, but it is very much about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers. If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it’s new you are confronting problems and challenges you don’t have references for. To solve and address those requires a remarkable focus. There’s a sense of being inquisitive and optimistic, and you don’t see those in combination very often.
No other company has inspired me more when it comes to marketing, design, focus, and even capitalism than Apple. Make the best damn product out there, charge a profitable price, and win the world.
Hacking is important
Michael Lopp:
A healthy product company is, confusingly, one at odds with itself. There is a healthy part which is attempting to normalize and to create predictability, and there needs to be another part that is tasked with building something new that is going to disrupt and eventually destroy that normality.
Failure to create some form of predictability will result in chaos. Failure to create some sort of well-maintained Barbaric chaos inside the company guarantees that a fast-moving, ambitious, risk-taking and ruthless someone else - someone outside the company will invade, because they know what you forgot: hacking is important.
9 essential skills kids should learn
Our world is changing at such a rapid pace, even we sometimes cannot follow it. Leo Babauta of Zen habits presents nine skills we should teach children, so they will grow up to understand the future and succeed in it:
What we want most for our kids, as learners, is to be able to learn on their own. To teach themselves anything. Because if they can, then we don’t need to teach them everything — whatever they need to learn in the future, they can do on their own. […]
Add Benjamin Franklin’s 13 virtues to this list and you really have something great to start from.
Happiness is the most important metric in personal tech. If it improves lives, it is important.
