“Design” is now “Product” An Article by Dorian Taylor dorian.substack.com Design has very little to do with what tools or methodologies you use, or what your job title is, or what you have a degree in, or even anything like “creativity”; design is about your relationship to constraints. Rather: to what extent are you defining constraints rather than just obeying them? Design is about taking a universe of possibilities and converging onto exactly one outcome. Being handed a set of constraints which you treat like immutable laws of physics (because many of them are) and solving within that envelope is what engineering is. To wit: what most designers are doing most of the time is actually a form of engineering, and engineers are always doing at least some design. This is because genuine design—the power to define constraints—is a privileged political position within an organization, and not everybody can occupy it. In other words, the “seat at the table” comes first. Design is Steve Jobs infamously dropping an iPod prototype into his fish tank, pointing at the bubbles coming out and yelling at his staff to make it thinner. It doesn’t matter what your title is; Jobs is the designer in that scenario. Steve Jobs designengineeringconstraints
Navigation by shibboleth An Article by Dorian Taylor doriantaylor.com The inverse-chronological colly on the front page is exactly what I didn’t want to end up with. I have tried my damnedest to keep everything on this site as temporally neutral as I can make it. I even intentionally leave the dates off the documents. Temporality only matters if you’ve already read everything and you want to see what’s new or changed, like if you’ve subscribed to a feed. Which is exactly what that is on the front page. Reverse chronology bias bloggingtime
Skeleton, Organs, Circulation, Sinew, Skin An Article by Dorian Taylor I’m concerned with how I witness the work of user experience practitioners getting treated: like it’s just a set of motions toward a product’s all-important implementation, and one that we try to compress, due to its ostensible superfluity. Once the implementation is finished, the UX work appears to usually get discarded. Tracing the answer backThe UX coral reef ux
Design System as Style Manual With Web Characteristics An Article by Dorian Taylor doriantaylor.com In my opinion, what makes a designer competent is precisely their ability to credibly justify their conclusions. If you can’t do this as a designer—no matter how successful your results are—then neither I nor anybody else can tell if you aren’t just picking things at random. What I am proposing, then, is no less than to make a designer’s entire line of reasoning a matter of permanent record. On the surface is the familiar set of prescriptions, components, examples and tutorials, like you would expect out of any such artifact. Attached to every element, though, is a little button that says Why? You click it, and it tells you. The proximate explanation will probably not be very satisfying, so you click on the next Why? until you get to the end, at which point you are either satisfied with the explanation, or you aren’t. The Design of Design decisionsdesignsystemsstyle
On the "Building" of Software and Websites An Essay by Dorian Taylor doriantaylor.com I’m beginning to suspect that software, and more conspicuously the Web, is fundamentally the wrong shape for the archetype of the construction project. You are agreeing to make a ThingThe Thing-deadline calculusTrees and graphsContent as value The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the EarthHofstadter's Law softwarebuildingwwwconstruction
Agile as Trauma An Essay by Dorian Taylor doriantaylor.com The Agile Manifesto is an immune response on the part of programmers to bad management. Many a corner officeIntramural brownie pointsFeature factories agilemanagement
Towards a New Architecture A Book by Le Corbusier en.wikipedia.org The house is a machine for living inBut men live in old housesPrimitive resourcesEmploys nothing at allAll the work of an epoch+6 More Classical absurdity
But men live in old houses It is not right that we should produce bad things because of a bad tool; nor is it right that we should waste our energy, our health and our courage because of a bad tool; it must be thrown away and replaced. But men live in old houses and they have not yet thought of building houses adapted to themselves. tools
Primitive resources There is no such thing as primitive man; there are primitive resources. resources
Employs nothing at all The man of today planes to perfection a board with a planing machine in a few seconds. The man of yesterday planed a board reasonably well with a plane. Very primitive man squared a board very badly with a flint or a knife. Very primitive man employed a unit of measurement and regulating lines in order to make his task easier. The Greek, the Egyptian, Michaelangelo or Blondel employed regulating lines in order to correct their work and for the satisfaction of their artist’s sense and of their mathematical thought. The man of today employs nothing at all and the result is the boulevard Raspail. The Nature and Art of Workmanship tools
All the work of an epoch Style is a unity of principle animating all the work of an epoch, the result of a state of mind which has its own special character. Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style. Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it. style
A taste for fresh and clear daylight Tail pieces and garlands, exquisite ovals where triangular doves preen themselves or one another, boudoirs embellished with “poufs” in gold and black velvet, are now no more than the intolerable witnesses to a dead spirit. These sanctuaries stifling with elegance, or on the other hand with the follies of “Peasant Art,” are an offense. We have acquired a taste for fresh and and clear daylight.
Eyes which do not see Our epoch is fixing its own style day by day. It is there under our eyes—Eyes which do not see. seeingstyle
The problem of the house has not yet been stated The lesson of the airplane is not primarily in the forms it has created, and above all we must learn to see in an airplane not a bird or a dragon-fly, but a machine for flying; the lesson of the airplane lies in the logic which governed the enunciation of the problem and which led to its successful realization. When a problem is properly stated, in our epoch, it inevitably finds its solution. The problem of the house has not yet been stated. problems
At the Green Mosque In Broussa in Asia Minor, at the Green Mosque, you enter by a little doorway of normal human height; a quite small vestibule produces in you the necessary change of scale so that you may appreciate, as against the dimensions of the street and the spot you come from, the dimensions with which is is intended to impress you. Then you can feel the noble size of the mosque and your eyes can take its measure. You are in a great white marble space filled with light. Beyond you can see a second similar space of the same dimensions, but in half-light and raised on several steps (repetition in a minor key); on each side still a smaller space in subdued light; turning round, you have two very small spaces in shade. From full light to shade, a rhythm. Tiny doors and enormous bays. You are captured, you have lost the sense of the common scale. You are enthralled by a sensorial rhythm (light and volume) and by an able use of scale and measure, into a world of its own which tells you what it set out to tell you. 112. Entrance Transition doors
Poems of an Indian summer To build one's house is very much like making one’s will. When the time does arrive for building this house, it is not the mason’s nor the craftsman’s moment, but that moment in which every man makes one poem, at any rate, in his life. And so, in our towns and their outskirts, we have had during the last forty years not so much houses as poems, poems of an Indian summer, for a house is the crowning of a career. Rand HillJapanese Death PoemsEach ruler commissioned his own gardenThe Abode of Fancy melancholyhomedeathpoetry
A grave and noble beauty An architecture of our own age is slowly but surely shaping itself; its main lines become more and more evident. The use of steel and reinforced concrete construction; of large areas of plate glass; of standardized units (as, for example, in metal windows); of the flat roof; of new synthetic materials and new surface treatments of metals that machinery made possible; of hints taken from the airplane, the motor-car or the steamship where it was never possible, from the beginning, to attack the problem from an academic standpoint—all these things are helping, at any rate, to produce a twentieth-century architecture whose lineaments are already clearly traceable. A certain squareness of mass and outline, a criss-cross or “grid-iron” treatment with an emphasis on the horizontals, an extreme bareness of wall surface, a pervading austerity and economy and a minimum of ornament; these are among its characteristics. There is evolving, we may begin to suppose, a grave and classical architecture whose fully developed expression should be of a noble beauty. beauty