The vanishing designer An Article by Chuánqí Sun uxdesign.cc Visionary designers have lost their conceptual integrity to an industrial complex optimized for consensus, predictability, and short-term business gain. The rise of customer-obsession mantra and data-driven culture cultivated a generation of designers who only take risk-free and success-guaranteed steps towards the inevitable local maxima of design monotony. The same, the same, the sameDesign as an engineering problemThe heat death of designDesign with courage uxmonotonycraft
Beyond Artboards An Essay by Chuánqí Sun medium.com The Pursuit of Lossless Design-Development Handoffs. Can't developers just see?We are the ones who paved the pathUntil we get there processinterfacesdesign
Functional Prototyping. A Missed Opportunity in Web Design An Essay by Chuánqí Sun medium.com Prototyping allows engineers in various industries to “fail fast, fail cheap”, “select the best from the pool”, and “bring in the reality”. prototypessoftware
Don’t Be an Ostrich An Essay by Chuánqí Sun medium.com You just handed off a major redesign. Three months of research, twenty-seven major revisions, and hundreds cups of coffee have all culminated in this pinnacle of glory. It’s finally done! Except it’s not. It’s not, even after you have answered every single question the developers have about your red-line. It’s not, even after you have addressed all the technical constraints developers encountered during the implementation. It’s not, even after you meticulously documented all the patterns and styles into a library for reference and reuse. It’s not, because neither you nor the developers have talked to a real user. At the bottom of your heart, you are secretly wishing: My design looks great on paper, so let’s keep it on paper. You are an ostrich. Post-occupancy evaluation
A case against "pixel perfect" design An Essay by Chuánqí Sun uxdesign.cc I feel the push for the “pixel perfect” design has largely overlooked many of its practical, social, and ethical implications. We are working against the grain of the woodGood design is practical design
Design Discourse is in a State of Arrested Development An Essay by Khoi Vinh www.fastcompany.com [Designer News] is good, useful content, but most of it is written by designers themselves. Taken as a whole, it’s also a useful illustration of something vital that our industry lacks: balanced, insightful, independent writing that critically evaluates the profession. Starved for good journalism and criticismThe allure of clicks Undoing the Toxic Dogmatism of Digital DesignOne Designer's Response to Khoi Vinh's Complaint designcritique
Starved for good journalism and criticism Imagine for a moment if Kimmelman–or any architecture critic–was also a practicing architect, building enormous commissions for corporations at the same time he writes his columns. If this were the case, you’d probably come to one of two conclusions: either the writer in question was not a serious critic, or that the art form itself is not very serious. You might also stop to think how much poorer we would be without the contributions of his independent voice to the discussion of the craft. That is exactly the situation that the design profession finds itself in today. We are lucky to have designers actively sharing knowledge, but we’re starved for good journalism and criticism. architecturecritiquedesign
The allure of clicks If more of us, as designers, approach what we encounter on design aggregators every day in this way, perhaps we can begin to effect some structural change. By and large these sites are just as susceptible to the allure of clicks as the craft of design. But if we are more selective about what we consume, we may be able to encourage design publications to follow that lead by applying editorial judgment to what gets shared every day. consumption