symbols
An icon is a symbol equally incomprehensible in all human languages
An icon is a symbol equally incomprehensible in all human languages. There's a reason why humans invented phonetic languages.
Ducks and decorated sheds
A duck is a building whose confirmation is a complete symbol or icon. A decorated shed is a building to which symbols, often commonplace signs, have been attached.
BeOS Icons
The utter nothingness of being
Everything written symbols can say has already passed by. They are like tracks left by animals. That is why the masters of meditation refuse to accept that writings are final. The aim is to reach true being by means of those tracks, those letters, those signs - but reality itself is not a sign, and it leaves no tracks. It doesn’t come to us by way of letters or words. We can go toward it, by following those words and letters back to what they came from. But so long as we are preoccupied with symbols, theories and opinions, we will fail to reach the principle.
"But when we give up symbols and opinions, aren’t we left in the utter nothingness of being?"
Yes.
z-z-z
Words and Images
An Essay by René MagritteBook from the Ground: From Point to Point
A Novel by Bing Xu- z-z-z
Between the Words
An Artwork by Nicholas RougeuxMoby Dick.
Between the Words is an exploration of visual rhythm of punctuation in well-known literary works. All letters, numbers, spaces, and line breaks were removed from entire texts of classic stories...leaving only the punctuation in one continuous line of symbols in the order they appear in texts. The remaining punctuation was arranged in a spiral starting at the top center with markings for each chapter and classic illustrations at the center.
Unicode Arrows
A Fragment by Rachel Binx↬ welcome to the best part of the unicode spec ↫
APL386 Unicode
A Font by Adám BrudzewskyAPL font based on Adrian Smith's APL385 font with a fun, whimsical look, inspired by Comic Sans Serif.
APL (named after the book A Programming Language) is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson. Its central datatype is the multidimensional array. It uses a large range of special graphic symbols to represent most functions and operators, leading to very concise code. It has been an important influence on the development of concept modeling, spreadsheets, functional programming, and computer math packages. It has also inspired several other programming languages.
A lightbulb is not an idea
An Article by Ralph AmmerWith conventional placeholders, such as words, we can describe patterns for a large number of situations. On the other hand it is easy to fool yourself (and others) with words, since you can avoid to be specific. Any business meeting can confirm this.
When you draw something you are forced to be specific — and honest.
Our illustration of an “idea” from above is unconventional in the sense that it conveys specific original thoughts of what an idea is. It adds value to the words.
And that is the catch: The drawing must be unconventional to support the conventional words. We have to make sure not to use “words in disguise”. Take a common illustration for “idea” for example, which haunts flip charts all over the world: the lightbulb.
The lightbulb image works on a purely symbolic level, it only replaces the word “idea”. This image of a household item contains no original thought about what an idea is. While symbols like these work well as international replacements for words or icons to indicate a light switch for instance, they convey no nutritional value as illustrations — they are empty.
What's Wrong With This Model?
What's wrong with the rational model
- We Don’t Really Know the Goal When We Start
- We Usually Don’t Know the Decision Tree – We Discover It as We Go
- The Nodes Are Really Not Design Decisions, but Tentative Complete Designs
- The Goodness Function Cannot be Evaluated Incrementally
- The Desiderata and Their Weightings Keep Changing
- The Constraints Keep Changing
Deciding what to design
We Don’t Really Know the Goal When We Start
The most serious model shortcoming is that the designer often has a vague, incompletely specified goal, or primary objective. In such cases, the hardest part of design is deciding what to design.
I came to realize that the most useful service I was performing for my client was helping him decide what he really wanted.
Today, we recognize that rapid prototyping is an essential tool for formulating precise requirements. Not only is the design process iterative; the design-goal-setting process is itself iterative. Knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm. Therefore, goal iteration must be considered an inherent part of the design process.
Evaluating goodness
The Goodness Function Cannot be Evaluated Incrementally
The Rational Model assumes that design involves a search of the decision tree, and that at every node, one can evaluate the goodness function of several downward branches. In fact, one cannot in general do this without exploring all the downward branches to all their leaves, which is possible in principle, but leads to a combinatorial explosion of alternatives in practice.
Changing constraints
The Constraints Keep Changing
The explicit listing of known constraints in the design program helps here. The designer can periodically scan the list, asking, “Can this constraint now be removed because the world has changed? Can it be entirely circumvented by working outside the design space?”
They just don't work that way
Perhaps the most devastating critique of the Rational Model, although perhaps the hardest to prove, is that most experienced designers just don’t work that way.
“Conventional wisdom about problem-solving seems often to be contradicted by the behavior of expert designers. Empirical studies of design activity have frequently found ‘intuitive’ features of design ability to be the most effective and relevant to the intrinsic nature of design. Some aspects of design theory, however, have tried to develop counter-intuitive models and prescriptions for design behavior.” — Nigel Cross
We must outgrow it
Why all this fuss about the process model? Does the model we and others use to think about our design process really affect our designing itself? I believe it does. I believe our inadequate model and following it slavishly lead to fat, cumbersome, over-features products and also to schedule, budget, and performance disasters.
The Rational Model, in any of its forms, leads us to demand up-front statements of design requirements. It leads us to believe that such can be formulated. It leads us to make contracts with one another on the basis of enshrined ignorance. A more realistic process model would make design work more efficient, obviating many arguments with clients and much rework.
The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.