Can't have one without the other.
"Web 1.0 started as a streaming publish-to-read medium; web 2.0 has established itself as a publishing platform for everyone. Now web 3.0 is said to be a technologically advanced Internet, where the user executes and the machines do the thinking."
Unfettered brilliance
Industrial and organizational psychology is a worthwhile rabbit hole.
@mulegirl I have been evaluating the business case for starting an import company just to bring their sub-brand’s totes to the United States. I have like 20 Toyo boxes 🫣.
@jcolman Reminds me of @tejucole’s “FABLE” post about another noise monster in 2016
RT @swardley: HBR is comically bad -"How to Communicate Your Company’s Strategy Effectively" . Opening image is a map of a playing field and then it completely fails to discuss any form of maps. PS. Secret is in the map, that's why we use them from sports to military.
GPT3 could learn a thing or two from On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt: “Bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth.”
RT @PavelASamsonov: Recording of my talk at @ProductMakers is now up! Gathering my random thoughts into a single presentation from across years of tweeting was really helpful to organize my thinking, and hopefully it makes sense to other people too.
RT @FiloSottile: Folks, the time to run or is now. You don't need to have an account elsewhere yet. Download the CSVs while you can, and you can import them later. go go go go
RT @FiloSottile: Folks, the time to run or is now. You don't need to have an account elsewhere yet. Download the CSVs while you can, and you can import them later. go go go go
Did @Twitter layoff or overrule everyone who has a basic understanding of HCI, design research, and idk, people? Hmu on Mastodon.
Today is ten years since we lost @aaronsw. "No, you can’t force other people to change. You can, however, change just about everything else. And usually, that’s enough."
RT @eaton: Sometimes you get so angry about an idea that you actually update the company blog.
@johncutlefish This looks like a company approved video overview of the tool from a couple years ago, in case it may be helpful
@deanchahim Systems thinking helps. E.g. and Meadows’ greater body of work. Also see
RT @CAldenJacobs: @librarythingtim I remember going on and on about this idea in 2010 when @craigmod published Books in the Age of the iPad. Bookstores should be third places! Third places should be bookstores!
@leila_c on Ego and Altruism (updated link)
Hire more designers… A nostalgic share for the time way back when Sunday’s were for the infernal clash of design Twitter and product Twitter.
Currently reading about the history of automobiles in @parismarx’s book and I feel like we’re at a stage where these people are trying to do exactly the same type of selling utopia and lobbying the shit out of governments and multilateral orgs.
🚨 Red flag: When teams say their feature "makes it easier" to do something, rather than starting with the capability it adds and the problem it removes. "Make it easier" is a sign that validation, rather than research, is at work.
1/ The Library of Economic Possibility (LEP) is now live 🥳 Our mission is to advance public knowledge of innovative economic ideas for a thriving 21st century economy.
2/ LEP’s searchable network of insights, together with our comprehensive policy reports, makes it easy to discover and share powerful economic ideas. Read our launch announcement here:
The knowledge-base may be the part of LEP that I'm most excited about. You can explore and filter hundreds of insights from empirical research on these policies. For example, what's the research say about basic income's effect on entrepreneurship?
Shower thought: the concept of “prompt engineering” fails Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. The variety of the model and the variety of the user query both exceed the variety of the prompt by many orders of magnitude.
Check out our explainer...
Teams are defined by having a shared goal. When teams take on a stakeholder request to "build my idea" they downgrade the shared goal from solving problems to "we finished the work" and downgrade themselves to a workgroup individually measured on outputs.
LEP is up at @ProductHunt today for anyone who wants to explore + support:
@systemsdesign @kevinriggle lol
I talk w/ @FastCoDesign about dogma in UX and how it's emerged in my own work. I hope the essay gives designers, especially those who pride ourselves in doing "ethical" work, permission to question the rigid thinking that interferes with doing actual good
Great talk by the brilliant @davidwengrow. I'm finally reading "The Dawn of Everything" (more than halfway through), and it's pretty incredible. Wengrow and Graeber present an oceanic mass of evidence that our standard narrative of human history is wrong.
@De_Minimis Oh, and the wikipedia article on participatory design is quite good, actually 😄
Why goal cascades are harmful and what to do instead.
I'll just keep tapping the sign. Don't run a survey unless you have eliminated all other possible options for gathering the information.
I've been pretty head's-down and quiet about my work on the @ShopifyUX Polaris design system, but I want to share 2 things I've shipped that I'm proud of: rebooted Patterns pages and updated+expanded alt text guidelines 🤩⤵️ |
@systemsdesign The OG anti-PP rant
To walk through life. To crack open the world. 😭❤️ @craigmod
“Garbage language permeates the ways we think of our jobs and shapes our identities as workers. It is obvious that the point is concealment; it is less obvious what so many of us are trying to hide.” — @magicmolly
"OpenAI Is Now Everything It Promised Not to Be" "While the firm has always looked toward a future where AGI exists, it was founded on commitments including not seeking profits and even freely sharing code it develops, which today are nowhere to be seen"
@lrb23 there's a for vehicle EPS... I've had a look through it. Really didn't need to know all the things that are possible to control on a vehicle... your worst psychological thriller possible in real life
You can, though.
“The more each site tries to create its own little walled garden, the less valuable the open web becomes”
Deeply appreciate @craigmod's earnest and honest reflections on running a membership program. An odd membership program. But one that drives to a deeply ingrained creative through line: producing creative work
Personality types are a myth. Each trait exists on a continuum shaped like a bell curve. The MBTI is outdated. You're more likely to be an ambivert than an introvert or extravert. And you don't have to choose between being a thinker or a feeler.
Using “AI” to screen job applicants is deeply unethical. It’s pushing the responsibility onto a system that isn’t neutral, but is just clumsily using all the biases that went into its data set.
The strip plazas in the Toronto suburbs have some of the best food you can get anywhere in the world. Growing up I assumed this was normal and everywhere was like this:
I really enjoyed this episode of @techwontsaveus with @timnitGebru >>
Timnit Gebru founded the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, which analyzes the risks of AI systems. Gebru says there needs to be more oversight in the world of AI chatbots.
@timnitGebru is leading the way for #AIGovernance 💪🏾 Y’all better listen to her + do what she says, ya heard?!? Data citizenship is no longer an option. We’re in these digital streets together. Get started: Learn more abt DAIR:
@timnitGebru is leading the way for #AIGovernance 💪🏾 Y’all better listen to her + do what she says, ya heard?!? Data citizenship is no longer an option. We’re in these digital streets together. Get started: Learn more abt DAIR:
In this @60Minutes, Microsoft chairman Brad Smith says "its a screen its not a person." Then why do you keep on misleading people as to the capabilities of your products? Why did you endorse this manifesto by Sam Altman "planning for AGI and beyond"?
40 multiple choice questions you should be able to (eventually) answer about each item on your roadmap link:
Originally, user stories were an artifact for capturing the user's goals. Along the way, they turned into a way for teams to convince themselves users need more features. But even bad user stories contain a shred of value. You just have to invert them.
Bluesky AT protocol has a very clever way to specify custom domain @handles using DNS text records
Unironically "We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection."
I had a lot of fun teaching this course combining the practice of design research with complex systems theory. Curious if anyone knows of other programs where it might fit in?
current brain status, post-burrito:
Norlha's luxury Tibetan clothes look so beautiful. All the wool products are made from khullu, which is the soft, downy undercoat of a yak (sort of like the yak equivalent of cashmere). Fabrics are handloomed. IG: norlha_atelier website:
Ok, I get that the timing is weird but: When I was young I was afraid. I made music but mostly just for myself. But 2 yrs ago I started working on an album and today I'm releasing the first @onnujonuson song. Spotify: YouTube:
Ok, I get that the timing is weird but: When I was young I was afraid. I made music but mostly just for myself. But 2 yrs ago I started working on an album and today I'm releasing the first @onnujonuson song. Spotify: YouTube:
Last night, Sauce Gardner burned the cheesehead he took from Lambeau as part of his pitch to Aaron Rodgers to leave the Packers and join the #Jets. Breece Hall and Garrett Wilson were there too. (Full video: )
Since we published Stochastic Parrots two years ago, the issues discussed in it have only become more urgent and salient. Join me, @timnitGebru @mmitchell_ai @mcmillan_majora and an esteemed group of panelists for discussion and reflection, March 17 2023.
just finished a provisional layout for the homepage of —holy crap has css come along.
New on the blog: How AI and Crypto combined, are the future of the web
Today my friends and I are beyond happy to introduce the new Gowalla. We believe the time is right once again for a social app to connect us with our REAL friends in the REAL world. While you grab it, let me tell you why this means so much to me 👉 🧵1/x
“Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. Importantly, writing is also the process by which you figure it out.”
got sick and had it hit a good bit last night so haven't been pushing much today. Decided to watch this talk that was hosted at The Stoa while doing some stretching this afternoon and it's got me quite stoked, fantastic vibes. Very worth the listen:
An overview of my conversation with a leading designer, thinker, and educator about the evolving role of design.
Unbelievably, kottke[dot]org turns 25 years old today – the site predates Google! "That's more than half of my life, spanning four decades and ~40,000 posts, almost cartoonishly long for a medium optimized for impermanence." Thx for reading!
I recognize my now-former team in this:
I say this a lot, so here is a link you can send around.
Untitled (https://open.substack.com/pub/huw/p/ride-or-die?r=7w84&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email)
Huw on psychedelics therapy, with a knife to masculinity and desire:
Been heads down on technical stuff, it's time for a gentle organizational culture palate cleanser 😈
According to this, I've been doing "Design 4.0" all this time. It's still a lonely place to practice, though, and not nearly as profitable as the others.
mkay after fighting with the substack editor for two entire-ass hours reformatting the newsletter i had already formatted, le voilà:
“Writing is the job… The better you are at writing, the more effective you will be at building software.”
This explains so much about Google
New ≠ Improved. (Dark Sky UI edition.)
It requires us to start seeing content items and learning materials as data fields, and to start treating them as such. Content modelling is essential, as is a robust taxonomy. And some cultural shifts and serious leadership must drive this:
Some issues are simple and linear, some are complex and systemic. It is important to know the difference and why we need systems approaches when dealing with wicked challenges, this video explains:
“In this immersive listening journey from (@emergence_zine) archive, acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton guides us into the Hoh Rain Forest—one of the quietest places in North America” (Very lovely)
Our statement:
“Whatever parts of the earth u touch u can heal.” 💕💓💖
“Most modern business practices encourage an elaborate game of whack-a-mole. When combined with "human nature" (a big topic and a vast oversimplification, but let's go with it), justing seems inevitable.”
We are all rich informational ecologies extending across space and, more importantly, time. The whole of creation, from matter to life and back, is implicated in every one of us, and every one of us is implicated in its structure. And meaning, implicit in matter, is the invisible skeleton supporting it all.
Bateson’s Method: Double Description. What is it? How does it work? What do we learn?
Bateson's Method: Double Description. What is It? How Does It Work? What Do We Learn? | SpringerLink
A Legacy for Living Systems
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
Logical Type: 1) The name is not the thing named but is of different logical type, higher than the thing named. 2) The class is of different logical type, higher than that of its members. (Mary Catherine Bateson, 1987, pp. 209-210).
There is, in fact, almost no formal theory dealing with analogue communication and, in particular, no equivalent of Information Theory or Logical Type Theory. This gap in formal knowledge is inconvenient when we leave the rarefied world of logic and mathematics and come face to face with the phenomena of natural history. In the natural world, communication is rarely either purely digital or purely analog. Often discrete digital pips are combined together to make analog pictures as in the printer’s halftone block; and sometimes, as in the matter of context markers, there is a continuous gradation from the ostensive through the iconic to the purely digital. At the digital end of this scale all the theorems of information theory have their full force, but at the ostensive and analog end they are meaningless.[1] — Gregory Bateson
"Simplified checklist" from Archer's handwritten notes entitled "Lecture for London College of Furniture 25 Feb 1965 Systematic method 1 -Introduction" from L Bruce Archer Archives, RCA, London: box 2.1.2. The brief precedes and lies outside the design cycle.
The Time of the Feminine - A Global Sisterhood Podcast: Riane Eisler: From Domination to Partnership
"The Nature of Cybernetics There are many definitions of cybernetics [29], with illustration in Principia Cybernetica Web: the 18th century French physicist and mathematician André-Marie Ampère thought that there was a need for a science of control that could be used on governments; some two centuries later, in the 1940s, for Norbert Wiener it is the science of communication and control in the animal and the machine; Warren McCulloch thought it to be an experimental epistemology concerned with c...
(A Swedish) Encounter with Gregory Bateson
This article examines how a classroom art lesson can reproduce a Cartesian pattern of thinking where creativity is represented as an autonomous act and the aesthetic is seen as a property of an art object - which also is considered to have an autonomous existence. The ideas of Gregory Bateson, as well as insights from the field of semiotics, are used to illuminate how the individual (as artist) is part of a larger ecology of relationships and how these relationships serve as the information pathways essential to the survival of the larger system. The recent work of Ellen Dissanayake is used to clarify how art, as "making special," can involve giving everyday relationships (sign systems that communicate) an aesthetic dimension - which is a view of art that corresponds more closely to the ideas of Bateson and to an understanding of the aesthetic dimensions of the sign systems that we use to communicate about relationships.
However, some aspects of Gestalt Practice are derived from the theory of Gestalt Therapy. Gestalt Practice incorporates some typical Gestalt awareness experiments borrowed from the Gestalt therapy model, along with eclectic techniques of meditation, physical exercise, environmentalism, contemplation, and spiritual practice.[14]
Requisite variety