age
Never any place I was meant to be
Supposing I found myself chasing another fly ball and ran head-on into a basketball backboard, supposing I woke up once again lying under an arbor with a baseball glove under my head, what words of wisdom could this man of thirty-odd years bring himself to utter? Maybe something like: This is no place for me.
This was never any place I was meant to be.
A timeless space
Our culture reveres youth, aspires to agelessness and is frightened by signs of age, wear and decay. As a consequence of this obsession, and the qualities of our man-made materials, contemporary environments have lost their capacity to contain and communicate traces of time. Our buildings often seem to exist in a timeless space without contact with the past or confidence for the future.
The complexity and the gray
One thing I assume of age is weariness.
Damned if I don’t get more tired every day.
Tired of what I do, following arcs like lobbed rocks — the inevitability of truth.But the complexity and the gray lie not in the truth, but in what you do with the truth once you have it.
Putting Thought Into Things
An Essay by Oliver ReichensteinBuilding structure requires serious listening, serious reflection, and serious imagination. All this requires experience, and no matter how experienced you are, it costs you. We spend our time and nerves to save users their time and nerves. Well-designed things give us the invaluable present of time. Well-designed products do not just save us time, they make us enjoy the time we spend with them. They make us feel that someone has been thinking about us, that a nice person took care of the little things for us. This is mainly why we perceive well-designed things as more beautiful the longer we use them, and the more used they become.
You're living in your very last house
A Song by Lo-Fang
Weighing up UX
Metrics come up when we’re talking about A/B testing, growth design, and all of the practices that help designers get their seat at the table (to use the well-worn cliché). But while metrics are very useful for measuring design’s benefit to the business, they’re not really cut out for measuring user experience.
Two levels of veto
At Clearleft, every staff member has two levels of veto on client work. You can say “I’m not comfortable working on this”, in which case, the work may still happen but we’ll make sure the resourcing works out so you don’t have anything to do with that project. Or you can say “I’m not comfortable with Clearleft working on this”, in which case the work won’t go ahead.
Our obedience to the king
Going back to the question of whether it’s ever okay to use a deceptive dark pattern, here’s what I think…
It makes no difference whether it’s implemented by ProPublica or Breitbart; using a deceptive dark pattern is wrong.
But there is a world of difference in being a designer who works at ProPublica and being a designer who works at Breitbart.
That’s what I’m getting at when I say there’s a danger to focusing purely on user experience. That focus can be used as a way of avoiding responsibility for the larger business goals. Then designers are like the soldiers on the eve of battle in Henry V:
For we know enough, if we know we are the kings subjects: if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.