“Design” is now “Product” An Article by Dorian Taylor dorian.substack.com Design has very little to do with what tools or methodologies you use, or what your job title is, or what you have a degree in, or even anything like “creativity”; design is about your relationship to constraints. Rather: to what extent are you defining constraints rather than just obeying them? Design is about taking a universe of possibilities and converging onto exactly one outcome. Being handed a set of constraints which you treat like immutable laws of physics (because many of them are) and solving within that envelope is what engineering is. To wit: what most designers are doing most of the time is actually a form of engineering, and engineers are always doing at least some design. This is because genuine design—the power to define constraints—is a privileged political position within an organization, and not everybody can occupy it. In other words, the “seat at the table” comes first. Design is Steve Jobs infamously dropping an iPod prototype into his fish tank, pointing at the bubbles coming out and yelling at his staff to make it thinner. It doesn’t matter what your title is; Jobs is the designer in that scenario. Steve Jobs designengineeringconstraints
Navigation by shibboleth An Article by Dorian Taylor doriantaylor.com The inverse-chronological colly on the front page is exactly what I didn’t want to end up with. I have tried my damnedest to keep everything on this site as temporally neutral as I can make it. I even intentionally leave the dates off the documents. Temporality only matters if you’ve already read everything and you want to see what’s new or changed, like if you’ve subscribed to a feed. Which is exactly what that is on the front page. Reverse chronology bias bloggingtime
Skeleton, Organs, Circulation, Sinew, Skin An Article by Dorian Taylor I’m concerned with how I witness the work of user experience practitioners getting treated: like it’s just a set of motions toward a product’s all-important implementation, and one that we try to compress, due to its ostensible superfluity. Once the implementation is finished, the UX work appears to usually get discarded. Tracing the answer backThe UX coral reef ux
Design System as Style Manual With Web Characteristics An Article by Dorian Taylor doriantaylor.com In my opinion, what makes a designer competent is precisely their ability to credibly justify their conclusions. If you can’t do this as a designer—no matter how successful your results are—then neither I nor anybody else can tell if you aren’t just picking things at random. What I am proposing, then, is no less than to make a designer’s entire line of reasoning a matter of permanent record. On the surface is the familiar set of prescriptions, components, examples and tutorials, like you would expect out of any such artifact. Attached to every element, though, is a little button that says Why? You click it, and it tells you. The proximate explanation will probably not be very satisfying, so you click on the next Why? until you get to the end, at which point you are either satisfied with the explanation, or you aren’t. The Design of Design decisionsdesignsystemsstyle
On the "Building" of Software and Websites An Essay by Dorian Taylor doriantaylor.com I’m beginning to suspect that software, and more conspicuously the Web, is fundamentally the wrong shape for the archetype of the construction project. You are agreeing to make a ThingThe Thing-deadline calculusTrees and graphsContent as value The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the EarthHofstadter's Law softwarebuildingwwwconstruction
Agile as Trauma An Essay by Dorian Taylor doriantaylor.com The Agile Manifesto is an immune response on the part of programmers to bad management. Many a corner officeIntramural brownie pointsFeature factories agilemanagement
What 80% Comprehension Feels Like An Article www.sinosplice.com One of the major principles of extensive reading is that if a learner can comprehend material at 98% comprehension, she will acquire new words in context, in a painless, enjoyable way. But what is 98% comprehension? 98% comprehension95% comprehension80% comprehension readinglearninglanguageunderstanding
98% comprehension You live and work in Tokyo. Tokyo is a big city. More than 13 million people live around you. You are never borgle, but you are always lonely. Every morning, you get up and take the train to work. Every night, you take the train again to go home. The train is always crowded. When people ask about your work, you tell them, “I move papers around.” It’s a joke, but it’s also true. You don’t like your work. Tonight you are returning home. It’s late at night. No one is shnooling. Sometimes you don’t see a shnool all day. You are tired. You are so tired…
95% comprehension In the morning, you start again. You shower, get dressed, and walk pocklent. You move slowly, half- awake. Then, suddenly, you stop. Something is different. The streets are fossit. Really fossit. There are no people. No cars. Nothing. “Where is dowargle?” you ask yourself. Suddenly, there is a loud quapen—a police car. It speeds by and almost hits you. It crashes into a store across the street! Then, another police car farfoofles. The police officer sees you. “Off the street!” he shouts. “Go home, lock your door!” “What? Why?” you shout back. But it’s too late. He is gone.
80% comprehension “Bingle for help!” you shout. “This loopity is dying!” You put your fingers on her neck. Nothing. Her flid is not weafling. You take out your joople and bingle 119, the emergency number in Japan. There’s no answer! Then you muchy that you have a new befourn assengle. It’s from your gutring, Evie. She hunwres at Tokyo University. You play the assengle. “…if you get this…” Evie says. “…I can’t vickarn now… the important passit is…” Suddenly, she looks around, dingle. “Oh no, they’re here! Cripett… the frib! Wasple them ON THE FRIB!…” BEEP! the assengle parantles. Then you gratoon something behind you…