Saved links
A saved link is not an endorsement. It's just a thing I read or thought about reading.
“Many aspects of our social system serve as filtering mechanisms, determining which interactions happen and between whom, and thus which social patterns people are in a position to observe.”
“Ideological thinking turns us away from the world of lived experience, starves the imagination, denies plurality, and destroys the space between men that allows them to relate to one another in meaningful ways.”
Let's do a quick #a11y review of the first website for each voting category for @AWWWARDS' best of 2020.
This looks like a 4k word story about a database, but it's really about how the government *can* build capacity to battle the pandemic. We didn't know which hospitals were in trouble. Now, we do. How'd that happen?
“If a global advertising company leverages its vast array of dossiers on its two billion users to invite antidemocratic forces to infest its channels with disinformation, democratic states should move to break it up." Siva Vaidhyanathan
Do you think vaccine band-aid ads are dystopian? I dunno, seems fun. You can learn more about the program at
Their one recommendation that works in the US is
“Anger is the first thing I feel because they eliminated my job during a pandemic and the reason they gave us is 'cost-cutting’.” Instacart is firing the 10 employees who voted last year to form a union.
A beautiful essay on the multifaceted nature of Tahrir Square: "Tahrir has the two faces of Egypt. It is the face of the bureaucratic state, and it is the place where people make revolutions. They complement each other — maybe.”
"The Plague Year" is so monumental that it has taken me weeks of scraps of time to read it carefully—I finally printed out all billion pages so I could focus. I'm going to thread some of the things that particularly caught my attention.
www.play.studio
Breaking the seal. Because I am mean to seals and plan to get back to writing more frequently.
There has never been a music video that hit me as hard as this one. I have never identified with a character in a music video as much as I identified with this homeless physicist. It is true, some problems you must be insane or (close to it) to solve.
“I see some tweets from people I know, but a robot locked in a basement somewhere decided the order of this particular timeline, so I don’t trust it” — @rands on using Twitter with Tweetdeck to find & follow info
“Put content at the heart of your design process.” Intriguing! Introducing punkt, a suite of content-focused UX tools. P.S. The little guy down in the corner is familiar to me.
I said this in a panel discussion earlier, but if the fundamental question of the web is "Why wasn't I consulted?"* then I think the fundamental question of #civictech is "Why can't we just...?" *from this 2011 @ftrain piece (that you should read)
We're all striving for perfection but the truth is in design you never quite get it.
"Leaders are orchestrators of systems, and systems instantiate knowledge as information architecture within them. So, the IA that gets embedded and coded, baked into your systems, becomes the way that the organization understands the world." @jjg
One of my favorite things about workin’ at Sentry is *constantly* talking about performance. It's how we design stuff, how we build stuff, how we refactor things. So many companies don't get it: fast ain’t a feature, it's what good software is
If your organization is asking "but how do we evaluate our research practice?"
I recently learned a new word: “jootsing” — a systematic method to foster creativity by breaking the rules. Learn more 👇
@johncutlefish That was probably when Mckinsey built its digital transformation services and all other consultancies followed:
The @MusicanovaHel Xenakis Listening Room opens at Kulttuurisauna next Wednesday 3.2. at 16:00 🎛👉 Bookmark the full program 2.2.-10.2. with links to streams 👉
The @MusicanovaHel Xenakis Listening Room opens at Kulttuurisauna next Wednesday 3.2. at 16:00 🎛👉 Bookmark the full program 2.2.-10.2. with links to streams 👉
Rare that i’m excited about a blog post about colors, but it’s cool to see @Amplitude_HQ doing things to help those of us who are color blind better read their data!
You can listen to From Versailles to Cybernetics as a lecture or read the short version as a PDF by searching for the title. It's also available as part of a collection of essays in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Listen:
Here's a direct link to the PDF. From Versailles to Cybernetics is page 475-483. It's a quick read.
Do yourself a favour. If you write HTML and CSS, then read . In particular, read . Big mental model shift to naming margin, padding, etc as logical properties than presentational. So, not 'margin-left', but 'margin-inline-start'
Do yourself a favour. If you write HTML and CSS, then read . In particular, read . Big mental model shift to naming margin, padding, etc as logical properties than presentational. So, not 'margin-left', but 'margin-inline-start'
Blue bottle—because in spite of the equal parts annoying and almost thoughtful customer experience which is clearly KPI and growth driven, I still get my coffee—and the coffee is good.
The folks at @coralproject have aggregated a lot of that excellent research (and done some of their own)… is an excellent starting point if you run into folks boosting "just make everyone verify their real ID" as a fix.
@skamille Obligatory Silicon Valley moment that epitomizes this
definitely worked for them at coria
Knowing the science behind something beautiful doesn’t rob it of enchantment but “only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe”.
@apenwarr @CAldenJacobs Stafford Beer's 1973 Massey lectures are free here: lucid explanation and a few a-ha moments.
Report: Majority Of Psychological Experiments Conducted In 1970s Just Crimes
From Mollie Ennis: I have a professor who has done a lot of work with non-western font development, I think their mission would really interest him and he might have something to offer? He's done some work with Arabic... mostly African dialects, but might have some insight!
@skullface @Shopify does!
@skullface @Shopify does!
are there any other content style guides (as part of a design system) that talk about alt text specifically? i think @shopify polaris is the first i’ve seen:
“What are you in for?” “For writing, sir.” “It says here ‘gross violation of decency.’ That means you raped or assaulted someone.” “No, sir. It was gross violation of public decency.” “Not a woman?” "No, sir. Just the public.”
I really enjoyed @craigmod’s reflections on crowdfunding his work: One favorite detail comports with my experience: not feeling “beholden” to members, but that they “formalize” my activities—a sense of seriousness and earnest responsibility.
Source: notes on the wonderful Finding Our Way podcast
We're officially 100% employee-owned! 🙌 Creating a culture of ownership has been a focus for years, and now it's become reality. Find out more:
Also liking @tom_d_kerwin's graph on design research effectiveness. In my experience most companies get stuck on the left had side of the curve. Those that escape almost always swing quickly to the right. Few spend any meaningful time in the sweet spot.
Lecture #2 from the @si658 IA class I teach @umich @umsi