Service Design Breakfast Club meet-up for UK service designers
Service designers of Brighton!
We meet for 1–1½ hours from 8.30am on the first Thursday of every month at Clearleft’s studio in Brighton.
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Scams upon scams: The data-driven advertising grift – Another angry woman
On day 1 of your class about behaviour change in a science course, you learn that behaviour change is not a simple matter of information in, behaviour out. Human behaviour, and changing it, is big and complex.
Meanwhile, on your marketing courses, which I have had the misfortune to attend, the model of changing behaviour is pretty much this: information in, behaviour out.
UX London 2023 | Flickr
These pictures really capture the vibe of this year’s lovely UX London event.
Word Count 53: The state of AI and the Goodreads fiasco
Could the tsunami of AI shite turn out to be a flash flood? Might the models rapidly degrade into uselessness or soon be sued or blocked out of existence? Will users rebel as their experience of the internet is degraded?
In my most optimistic moments, I find myself hoping that the whole AI edifice will come tumbling down as tools disintegrate, people realise how unreliable they are, and how valuable human-generated and curated information really is. But it’s not a safe bet.
Efficiency trades off against resiliency - Made of Bugs
Past some point, making a system more efficient will mean making it less resilient, and, conversely, building in robustness tends to make a system less efficient (at least in the short run).
This is true of software, networks, and organisations.
When we set metrics or goals for a system or a team or an organization that ask for efficiency, let us be aware that, absent countervailing pressures, we are probably also asking for the system to become more brittle and fragile, too.
“Craft at scale” is a white whale | Adam Stoddard
If you look at the available evidence, “craft at scale” is mutually exclusive with the kind of rapid and unending growth that’s the baseline expectation for traditional startups and public tech companies.
We’d say that’s obvious in other industries. Budweiser isn’t craft beer. IKEA isn’t heirloom-quality furniture. But we tend to treat software as immune to the typical relationship between quality and quantity.
Jeepers Frigging Cripes Crypto and NFTs are so stupid and dumb and bad and I can’t even. I’m out. Goodbye. Burn it down please. - Chris Coyier
Literally every experience I have in this world is gross at best and criminally evil at worst. Who it benefits that actually needs the benfefit is vanishingly few.
Here are some rhetorical questions from Chris:
How many years into this are we with no practical use cases for the world? How many resources have to be burned before this is seen?
Craft vs Industry: Separating Concerns by Thomas Michael Semmler: CSS Developer, Designer & Developer from Vienna, Austria
Call me Cassandra:
The way that industry incorporates design systems is basically a misappropriation, or abuse at worst. It is not just me who is seeing the problem with ongoing industrialization in design. Even Brad Frost, the inventor of atomic design, is expressing similar concerns. In the words of Jeremy Keith:
[…] Design systems take their place in a long history of dehumanising approaches to manufacturing like Taylorism. The priorities of “scientific management” are the same as those of design systems—increasing efficiency and enforcing consistency.
So no. It is not just you. We all feel it. This quote is from 2020, by the way. What was then a prediction has since become a reality.
This grim assessment is well worth a read. It rings very true.
What could have become Design Systemics, in which we applied systems theory, cybernetics, and constructivism to the process and practice of design, is now instead being reduced to component libraries. As a designer, I find this utter nonsense. Everyone who has even just witnessed a design process in action knows that the deliverable is merely a documenting artifact of the process and does not constitute it at all. But for companies, the “output” is all that matters, because it can be measured; it appeals to the industrialized process because it scales. Once a component is designed, it can be reused, configured, and composed to produce “free” iterations without having to consult a designer. The cost was reduced while the output was maximized. Goal achieved!
Investing in RSS - Web Performance Consulting | TimKadlec.com
Same:
Opening up my RSS reader, a cup of coffee in hand, still feels calm and peaceful in a way that trying to keep up with happenings in other ways just never has.
Software and its Discontents, Part 2: An Explosion of Complexity | Kellan Elliott-McCrea: Blog
Talking primarily to engineering leaders, but also CEOs, VCs, ICs, and other practitioners, the most common response to the question of “has something substantially changed?” is that software, counter intuitively, has gotten harder to build. This is counter intuitive because the tools are orders of magnitude better, the amount of work you can cheaply outsource is nearly miraculous, computers are so damn fast and cheap these days, the quality of resources, much of it free, is off the charts, and the talent pool has exploded, and shows every sign of being smarter and better educated than ever. But software has gotten harder to build in one very particular and important way: it’s gotten more complex.
Kellan nails it:
We’ve developed an aesthetics of complexity: the sense that a good system is a complex one, that you should prefer a SPA over a web page, a distributed system over a simple one, a service over a config file, the idea if you aren’t on the latest technology you’re wasting your time, and potentially damaging your career.
Hand-thrown frontends - Robb Owen
I’ve personally never really seen frontend as an assembly job. Lego is admittedly awesome, but for me the mental model of assembling Lego bricks in the required order until a Jira ticket can be marked as “done” feels too linear and too rigid for how I like to work. And that’s not to mention the pain that comes when you have to partially dismantle your bricks to correct some earlier misstep.
I like the pottery analogy.
A post by Clearleft on LinkedIn
This is design engineering.
Why Not Mars (Idle Words)
I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.
Maciej lays out the case against a crewed mission to Mars.
Like George Lucas preparing to release another awful prequel, NASA is hoping that cool spaceships and nostalgia will be enough to keep everyone from noticing that their story makes no sense. But you can’t lie your way to Mars, no matter how sincerely you believe in what you’re doing.
And don’t skip the footnotes:
Fourth graders writing to Santa make a stronger case for an X-Box than NASA has been able to put together for a Mars landing.
Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies – Baldur Bjarnason
This extract from Baldur’s new book is particularly timely in light of the twipocalypse.
Craft — PaulStamatiou.com
I often use the word quality when referring to apps, products and services I hold in a high regard but another word that often comes up in this context is craft. Craft, as in something that is handcrafted where something someone spent a lot of time on and maybe even embedded their own personal touches and personality in it. Often something handcrafted feels more premium.
Jack Rusher ☞ Classic HCI demos
At Clarity last week, I had the great pleasure of introducing and interviewing Linda Dong who spoke about Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. I loved the way she looked at the history of the HIG from 1977 onwards. This collection of videos is just what I need to keep spelunking into the interfaces of the past:
A curated collection of HCI demo videos produced during the golden age from 1983-2002.
Towards Growing Peaches Online - by Claire L. Evans
A beautiful meditation on Christopher Alexander by Claire L. Evans.
Syndicating Posts from Your Personal Website to Twitter and Mastodon · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer
A very timely post on using If This Then That to automatically post notes from your own site (via RSS) to Twitter and Mastodon.
I’ve set this up for my Mastodon profile.