Link archive: April 8th, 2019

Atlas of Urban Expansion

Oodles and oodles of data on cities, including gorgeous animations of urban growth over time.

The Bureau of Suspended Objects

200 discarded objects from a dump in San Francisco, meticulously catalogued, researched, and documented by Jenny Odell. The result is something more revealing than most pre-planned time capsule projects …although this project may be somewhat short-lived as it’s hosted on Tumblr.

Tellart | Design Nonfiction

An online documentary series featuring interviews with smart people about the changing role of design.

As technology becomes more complex and opaque, how will we as designers understand its potential, do hands-on work, translate it into forms people can understand and use, and lead meaningful conversations with manufacturers and policymakers about its downstream implications? We are entering a new technology landscape shaped by artificial intelligence, advanced robotics and synthetic biology.

So far there’s Kevin Slavin, Molly Wright Steenson, and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, with more to come from the likes of Matt Jones, Anab Jain, Dan Hill, and many, many more.

Methods - 18F Methods

A very handy collection of design exercises as used by 18F. There’s a lot of crossover here with the Clearleft toolbox.

A collection of tools to bring human-centered design into your project.

These methods are categorised by:

1. Discover
2. Decide
3. Make
4. Validate
5. Fundamentals

Why you should learn vanilla JS first | Go Make Things

Frameworks (arguably) make building complex applications easier, but they make doing simple stuff more complex.

And that’s why I think people should learn vanilla JS first. I’ve had many students who tried to learn frameworks get frustated, quit, and focus on vanilla JS.

Some of them have gone back to frameworks later, and told me that knowing vanilla JS made it a lot easier for them to pick up frameworks afterwards.

User interfaces: hiding stuff should be a last resort by Adam Silver

When we hide content, there’s a greater risk the user won’t see it. There’s a higher reliance on digital literacy and it’s generally more labour intensive for the user.

Worse still, sometimes we kill off essential content.

AddyOsmani.com - Native image lazy-loading for the web!

The loading attribute for images and iframes is coming to Chrome. The best part:

You can also use loading as a progressive enhancement. Browsers that support the attribute can get the new lazy-loading behavior with loading=lazy and those that don’t will still have images load.

Break out of the echo chamber - Andy Bell

So much of my echo chamber is consumed by people, including myself, who have a very dim view of JavaScript frameworks being thrown at everything, arguing with the people who are in the process of throwing JavaScript frameworks at everything. We forget one very important thing, though: we represent the minority of the web community and our arguments probably look very pointless and silly to the majority.