I don’t believe in Zoom fatigue An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org It’s not Zoom fatigue, it’s Zoom whiplash. It’s a hunch. I can’t prove this. The trick to get around this is to move smoothly up and down the gradient of social interaction intensity, never dropping below a basic floor of presence: the sense that there are other people in the same place as you. Instead of having two modes, “in a call” and “on my own,” we need to think about multiple ways of being together which, minimally, could be: In a video call In an anteroom to a video call, hearing the sound of others In a doc together On my desktop but with the sense that colleagues are around And the job of the designer is to ensure that their software ensures the existence of these different contexts, instead of having the binary on-a-call/not-on-a-call, and to design the transitions between them. communicationworktransitionssoftware
The surprising effectiveness of writing and rewriting An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org The act of writing the first draft creates new “essential data” that feeds the imagination and makes possible figuring out the second draft. Or: In your head, ideas expand until they max out “working memory” – and it’s only be externalising them in the written word that you have capacity to iterate them. Or: Good writing necessarily takes multiple edits, and the act of writing and act of rewriting are sufficiently different that performing both simultaneously is like rubbing your tummy and patting your head. The McDonald’s Theory of Creativity writingthinkingiteration
Primitive design An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org I want it to feel intuitive I want any new features to be platform features, not one-offs. And the second of those is weird, right? It’s like sketching out a toy spaceship, having a list of rules about play, and attempting to simultaneously invent the shape of the Lego brick. That’s platform design I suppose. Redesigning a newspaper will mean bouncing between comps and style guides, designing both. Inventing the iPhone user interface will have seen apps and app paradigm evolving together. Co-Evolution of Problem and Solution Spaces in Creative Design designsystemsmaking
Micromorts A Definition by Matt Webb interconnected.org There’s a standard way to understand the relative danger of any activity. A micromort is "a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death." For example: skydiving is 8 micromorts per jump running a marathon: 26 micromorts 1 micromort: walking 17 miles, or driving 230 miles Generally being alive averages out at 24 micromorts/day. deathchance
Four years of noting down my favourite words An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org I like words, and I note down ones that catch my eye as we cross paths. Sometimes I read over the list, random access style, just to remind myself of forgotten thoughts. Each word is a bookmark into a little cascade of concepts in my brain. So because I’d like to keep these words somewhere I can find them in the future, I’m putting them here. Storm Doris Mimecom Cloudbleed Athleisure Cromwell H7N9 Trappist-1 ... (+448) wordseuphonycollections
Clues for software design in how we sketch maps of cities An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org Given there’s an explosion in software to accrete and organise knowledge, is the page model really the best approach? Perhaps the building blocks shouldn’t be pages or blocks, but neighbourhoods roads rooms and doors landmarks. Or rather, as a knowledge base or wiki develops, it should - just like a real city - encourage its users to gravitate towards these different fundamental elements. A page that starts to function a little bit like a road should transform into a slick navigation element, available on all its linked pages. A page which is functioning like a landmark should start being visible from two hops away. The Image of the City urbanismcitiessoftwareunderstanding
Social Attention: a modest prototype in shared presence An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org My take is that the web could feel warmer and more lively than it is. Visiting a webpage could feel a little more like visiting a park and watching the world go by. Visiting my homepage could feel just a tiny bit like stopping by my home. wwwsocializing
Ancient magicians as innovation consultants An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org The Codex Justinianus (534 AD), being the book of law for ancient Rome at that time, banned magicians and, in doing so, itemised the types: A haruspex is one who prognosticates from sacrificed animals and their internal organs; a mathematicus, one who reads the course of the stars; a hariolus, a soothsayer, inhaling vapors, as at Delphi; augurs, who read the future by the flight and sound of birds; a vates, an inspired person - prophet; chaldeans and magus are general names for magicians; maleficus means an enchanter or poisoner. I happen to have spent my career in a number of fields that promise to have some kind of claim to supernatural powers: design, innovation, startups… It’s not hard to run through a few archetypes of the people in those worlds, and map them onto types of ancient magician. Those like Steve Jobs (with his famous Reality Distortion Field) who can convincingly tell a story of the future, and by doing so, bring it about by getting others to follow them – prophets. Inhaling the vapours and pronouncing gnomic truths? You’ll find all the thought leaders you want in Delphi, sorry, on LinkedIn. Those with a good intuition about the future who bring it to life with theatre, and putting people in a state of great excitement so they respond – ad planners. Haruspex. Those who have the golden mane of charisma: enchanters. Startup founders. People with a great aptitude for systems and numbers, who can tell by intuition what will happen, from systems that stump the rest of us. We call them analysts now. MBAs. Perhaps the same aptitude drew them to read the stars before? Mathematicus. Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview magicinnovation
Hints towards a non-extractive economy An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org There’s a movement called the circular economy which is about designing services that don’t include throwing things away. There is no “away.” A non-extractive economy is going to look very different to today’s economy. These points feel opposed somehow but they are part of the same movement: With CupClub, it’s all about infrastructure. With the battery-free Game Boy, it’s untethered from infrastructure: once manufactured, no nationwide electricity grid is required to play. We’ll need better tools to track and measure. There will be new patterns for new types of services. New technologies to build new products. New language. So it’s fascinating seeing the pieces gradually come together. Introduction to Permaculture economicsrecyclinginfrastructure
What the prototype tells you A Fragment by Matt Webb interconnected.org As soon as I make something, I think of the 100 things I want to have next. That’s why prototyping is good. You don’t need to have much imagination, you just listen to what the prototype tells you. The situation talks backCo-Evolution of Problem and Solution Spaces in Creative DesignThe Battle for the Life and Beauty of the EarthThe game discovering itself designmaking
aboutfeeds.com A Website by Matt Webb aboutfeeds.com Use feeds to subscribe to websites and get the latest content in one place. Feeds put you in control. It’s like subscribing to a podcast, or following a company on Facebook. You don’t need to pay or hand over your email address. And you get the latest content without having to visit lots of sites, and without cluttering up your inbox. Had enough? Unsubscribe from the feed. You just need a special app called a newsreader. This site explains how to get started. How would I improve RSS? rssbloggingmicrosites
Mutual appreciation A Fragment by Matt Webb interconnected.org To use slightly different terms, mutual appreciation is a healthy jealousy without envy – a drive to achieve the same but without wanting to take it from the other. The Small GroupScenius collaborationteamwork
How would I improve RSS? An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org My sense is that RSS is having a mini resurgence. People are getting wary of the social media platforms and their rapacious appetite for data. We’re getting fatigued from notifications; our inboxes are overflowing. And people are saying that maybe, just maybe, RSS can help. Re: How would I improve RSS?aboutfeeds.com rssblogging
Like, just a post complaining that screens should be better An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org It’s been 19 years since Pixar released Monsters, Inc. with all that CGI hair. Where are my hairy icons? Ones that get all long and knotted as the notifications number goes up. Why can’t I feel my phone? I found that paper from 2010 (when I was complaining about keyboards) about using precision electrostatics to make artificial textures on touchscreens. I should be able to run my thumb over my phone while it’s in my pocket and feel bumps for apps that want my attention. Touching an active element should feel rough. A scrollbar should *slip. Imagine the accessibility gains. But honestly I don’t even care if it’s useful: 1.5 billion smartphone screens are manufactured every year. For that number, I expect bells. I expect whistles. A Brief Rant interactionsoftwareinterfacesdevices
What Good Means An Article by Dan Klyn medium.com The center of the waySeductionWhat the material wants to beAsking yourself some questionsLosing meaning+1 More
The center of the way The advice I’ve received from those who are close to the center of this timeless way of building is to start small. Like with a piece of tile, or a tea tray. And to then imagine along with Christopher Alexander: What it would be like to live in a mental world where one’s reasons for making something functionally and one’s reasons for making something a certain shape, or in a certain ornamental way are coming from precisely the same place in you . functionmaking
Seduction “The classic pervasive seduction to designers is finding a solution instead of the truth.” — Richard Saul Wurman
What the material wants to be Part of how Lou Kahn made things be good was to ask the material what it wanted to do and be. He asked brick what it liked, and would get a different answer depending on the context for the building. In Dacca, the capital of Bangladesh, brick said it liked an arch. For the Korman House in Philadelphia, brick said it liked two giant fireplaces with a lintel between them for a doorway beneath and a balcony above. The material finds the right objectWe are working against the grain of the woodThe joy of the humble brick material
Asking yourself some questions All of the moves that we make in space will tend toward being in accord with this phenomenon of wholeness / beauty / life if we’re willing to bring the requisite level of care to the doing of our work. Alexander says that each of us possess the means for accessing this order within ourselves and — here’s where he loses most other architects and many in the so-called sciences in academia — he contends that what we’re connecting with inside of ourselves is an objective criterion for what good means. Applying the criterion is easy: you ask yourself some questions: With any action you might take with regard to placement, and with regard to the situatedness of things in space you ask yourself: does this move increase wholeness / beauty / life? Does the intervention you’re taking intensify the feelings of wholeness in you as the maker when you are performing the work? How does your work on this one part enhance what’s going on among wholes at the system level? goodnessmaking
Losing meaning The people who’ve proven that they can make very good individual products with the radical focus of a spotlight seem to be pushed ever further from making good ecosystems. Products are being made “consistent” with the application of so-called “design patterns,” and rather than bringing coherence to these various touch-points, the painting-on of interface standards and interaction patterns did something far less valuable. Rote consistency, in the way many seem to be going about it (Material Design being just one example), is at odds with making things be good. It simplifies what needs to remain complex. Always, when simplification is underway, meaning is being lost. complexitysoftware
Two coffee trays Show image 0 Show image 1 We speculate that the shop owners designed and built an initial quantity of these remarkable coffee trays, replete with what Alexander considers to be the fifteen geometric properties that correlate with wholeness / beauty / life. Then they got busy. And then they got successful. They needed more coffee trays, and our hypothesis is that somebody decided to simplify the trays to ensure they could be produced in the quantities and at the price that worked for their budget, within an urgent food-service timeline. The simplified tray fulfills every function the more complex tray does, with less fuss in manufacturing on account of having standardized its geometry. The simplified tray works, but isn’t alive. It lacks the gradients, local symmetries, levels of scale, contrast, and boundaries that are all present and accounted for in the tray that’s got wholeness / beauty / life. The tray with wholeness isn’t necessarily better than the simpler one. But it is good.