littlebigdetails A Blog by Floris Dekker littlebigdetails.com Little Big Details is a curated collection of the finer details of design. As Charles & Ray Eames put it: “The details are not the details; they make the product.” This is intended to be a source of inspiration. Created and curated by Floris Dekker. Alumni: Andrew McCarthy. Essential vs. nice to have detailsmicrositeswhimsydesign
The Thing-deadline calculus Now, I understand deadlines. I understand that the plane will take off whether or not I’m on it, or the importance of beating the holiday retail rush, or that "the show must go on". It is perfectly clear to me how people use timekeeping technology to coordinate social activity. It’s actually quite remarkable when you step back and look at it. But, over the years, I have observed that there is a difference between those examples and the ones around the delivery of Things, which tend to be completely arbitrary. When you wrap an arbitrarily complex endeavor up in a neat launch date, the goal seems to be more about coercing the people beneath you to absorb the overhead of all the details you left out—that or sweating it yourself. As a tool for coordinating human activity, I have come to believe that the Thing-deadline calculus is, considering more sophisticated alternatives, unnecessarily crude. Dorian Taylor, On the "Building" of Software and Websites Deadlines are bullshitNever enough timeDriving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroying mistake planningproducts