The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply.
This is the reason a Nintendo console never has the fastest chips or the beefiest specs of its generation; instead, its remixes components in an interesting and generative way. Think of the Gameboy’s monochrome screen, the Wii’s motion controller, the Switch’s smartphone form.
[Gunpei Yokoi] is talking about reliability and predictability, in performance and supply alike. He wants the components to be boring, so their application can be daring.
This visualization takes the current New York Times Best Sellers list for combined print and e-book fiction and scales each title according to the demand for its e-book edition at a collection of U.S. public libraries, selected for their size and geographic diversity.
This is a kind of manifesto about the difference between liking something on the internet and loving something on the internet.
It’s also an experiment in a new format: a “tap essay,” presenting its argument tap by tap, making its case with typography, color, and a few surprises.
Engineers seem to have a clear, if usually implicit, model of the process of design. It is usually an orderly model of an orderly process as the engineer conceives it.
The notion that the design process should be modeled as a systematic step-by-step process seems to have first developed in the German mechanical engineering community.
Herbert Simon independently argues for design as a search process in The Sciences of the Artificial. He was motivated to lay out a strictly rational model of design precisely because such a model was a necessary precursor to automating design. His model remains influential even if today we recognize the "wicked problem" of original design as one of the least promising candidates for AI.
In software engineering, Winston Royce independently introduced a seven-step Waterfall Model to bring order to the process. In fact, Royce introduced his waterfall as a straw man that he then argued against, but many people have cited and followed the straw man rather than his more sophisticated models. Even if ironically, Royce's seven-step model must be considered one of the foundational statements of the Rational Model of Design.