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
The deeper unconscious intentions Some time ago, a friend insisted that people should not listen to practicing architects or read what they write. According to him, the lack of logic in our discourse, the incongruity of our words, and the overzealousness in readings brought about by the biographical revision of our work were of little value. In his book The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa approaches it from the opposite direction, but ultimately gives the same advice: The verbal statements of artists and architects should not usually be taken at their face value, as they often merely represent a conscious surface rationalization, or defense, that may well be in sharp contradiction to the deeper unconscious intentions giving the work its very life force. Smiljan Radić, No Objection to the Moon... The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses designart