childhood
A crumpled drawing
A child is walking with a crumpled drawing in his hand. Someone asks him if the crumped drawing has a "name"...
"Every thing," he replies.
If children are transferred from a lively city street
In real life, what significant change does occur if children are transferred from a lively city street to the usual park or to the usual public or project playground?
In most cases (not all, fortunately), the most significant change is this: The children have moved from under the eyes of a high numerical ratio of adults, into a place where the ratio of adults is low or even nil. To think this represents an improvement in city child rearing is pure daydreaming.
Inheriting Froebel's Gifts
A Podcast by Kurt KohlstedtFroebel’s Gifts were meant to be given in a particular order, growing more complex over time and teaching different lessons about shape, structure and perception along the way. A soft knitted ball could be given to a child just six weeks old, followed by a wooden ball and then a cube, illustrating similarities and differences in shapes and materials. Then kids would get a cylinder (which combines elements of both the ball and the cube) and it would blow their little minds. Some objects were pierced by strings or rods so kids could spin them and see how one shapes morphs into another when set into motion. Later came cubes made up of smaller cubes and other hybrids, showing children how parts relate to a whole through deconstruction and reassembly.
These perception-oriented “Gifts” would then give way to construction-oriented “Occupations.” Kids would be told to build things out of materials like paper, string, wire, or little sticks and peas that could be connected and stacked into structures.
Walking lessons
A TweetLecturing Birds on How to Fly, from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile
If children started school at six months old and their teachers gave them walking lessons, within a single generation people would come to believe that humans couldn't learn to walk without going to school.
Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation
A Research PaperWe directly establish the importance of environment by showing that exposure to innovation during childhood has significant causal effects on children's propensities to invent. Children whose families move to a high-innovation area when they are young are more likely to become inventors. These exposure effects are technology-class and gender specific.
Problems With Agile UX
So that you can get feedback on it and make it better
Fascinatingly, one of the other big complaints people had about agile is no iteration. I don't understand how being in an agile environment makes people less iterative, but somehow that seems to be the case. And I think it's because people misunderstand and think that agile is just about putting features out faster, and not about the important part, which is getting something in front of users faster so that you can get feedback on it and make it better.
I'm sorry, I love engineers
People are afraid to let design have time to actually figure out the right thing to make, because "whatever will the engineers do?" – fuck you, there's plenty for the engineers to do. Go fix some technical debt. Go fix those 700 bugs that you de-prioritized or marked as won't fix because you're an asshole.
I'm sorry, I love engineers. I don't know why I'm yelling at them. But you know, there's plenty for the engineers to do. There's all sorts of cleanup. They can work on dev-ops stuff! They can work on their build process! Make it faster! I'm not worried about keeping the engineers busy. If you think that the only thing that engineers can do is build yet another stupid feature that nobody is going to use, then you're a garbage designer and you should quit.
...Happy 2020 everybody!