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  28. blogging 23
  29. body 11
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  31. books 6
  32. boredom 9
  33. Botton, Alain de 38
  34. Brand, Stewart 4
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  37. Broskoski, Charles 6
  38. brutalism 7
  39. building 16
  40. bureaucracy 12
  41. Burnham, Bo 9
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  43. Byron, Lord 14
  44. Cagan, Marty 8
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  48. Cegłowski, Maciej 6
  49. Cervantes, Miguel de 7
  50. chance 11
  51. change 17
  52. Chiang, Ted 4
  53. childhood 6
  54. Chimero, Frank 17
  55. choice 8
  56. cities 51
  57. Cleary, Thomas 8
  58. Cleary, J.C. 8
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  60. Coelho, Paulo 31
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  62. collections 31
  63. color 23
  64. commonplace 11
  65. communication 31
  66. community 7
  67. complexity 11
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  69. constraints 25
  70. construction 9
  71. content 9
  72. Corbusier, Le 13
  73. Coyier, Chris 4
  74. craft 67
  75. creativity 59
  76. crime 9
  77. Critchlow, Tom 5
  78. critique 10
  79. Cross, Nigel 12
  80. Cross, Anita Clayburn 10
  81. css 11
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  83. curiosity 11
  84. cycles 7
  85. Danielewski, Mark Z. 4
  86. darkness 28
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  88. data 8
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  90. Debord, Guy 6
  91. decisions 10
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  93. desire 6
  94. destiny 6
  95. details 31
  96. Dickinson, Emily 9
  97. Dieste, Eladio 4
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  100. Dorn, Brandon 11
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  102. dreams 8
  103. Drucker, Peter F. 15
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  105. Eatock, Daniel 4
  106. economics 13
  107. efficiency 7
  108. Eisenman, Peter 8
  109. Eliot, T.S. 14
  110. emotion 8
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  115. euphony 38
  116. Evans, Benedict 4
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  123. features 25
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  128. Fowler, Martin 4
  129. Franklin, Ursula M. 30
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  138. goals 9
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  140. goodness 13
  141. Graham, Paul 37
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  165. i 18
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  176. intuition 9
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  178. Irwin, Robert 65
  179. Isaacson, Walter 28
  180. Ishikawa, Sara 33
  181. iteration 13
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  183. Jackson, Steven J. 14
  184. Jacobs, Jane 54
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  234. Miller, J. Abbott 10
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  236. minimalism 10
  237. Miyazaki, Hayao 30
  238. Mod, Craig 15
  239. modularity 6
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  343. style 30
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  345. symbols 12
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  348. Sōseki, Natsume 8
  349. Tanaka, Tomoyuki 9
  350. Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō 15
  351. taste 10
  352. Taylor, Dorian 16
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  360. Tolkien, J.R.R. 6
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  365. truth 15
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decisions

Close
  • Towards a crap decision

    You have a thing. You would like to improve said thing. So, you ask a bunch of people what they think, giving more weight to those with relevant expertise. It’s a time-tested strategy.

    The pitfall here is that if the participants are aware of each other’s contributions, they will almost always automatically switch to consensus-building instead of providing their honest feedback. Worst case scenario: the bandwagon effect gathers steam and drives you toward a crap decision.

    Baldur Bjarnason, On online collaboration and our obligations as makers of software
    • collaboration
    • decisions
  • Adding up to hair-brained

    I have for myself come to the point where I say that people or groups or governments make the decisions that make sense to them, even if they look totally hair-brained to me.

    My task then is to figure out the constellation of forces, the pushes and pulls, that in fact do add up to that hair-brained decision-making. Then we can go into the next iteration and say, "What can we do about the balance of the push and the pull that seems to result in totally non-constructive decisions?"

    Ursula M. Franklin, Every Tool Shapes the Task
    • decisions
    • rationality
  • It was all change until the very last second

    Every work of literature is the result of thousands and thousands of decisions.
    Intricate, minute decisions—this word or that, here or where, now or later, again and again.
    It's the living tissue of a writer's choices,
    Not the fossil record of an ancient, inspired race.

    Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing
    1. ​​A concept of style​​
    • decisions
    • craft
  • Tracing the answer back

    I submit that the materials that form the precursors to a product’s implementation have considerable value on their own.

    My vision is that I will be able to ask a question as mundane as one about the wording of a single button, and trace the answer all the way back to the overarching business strategy to see that it makes sense.

    Dorian Taylor, Skeleton, Organs, Circulation, Sinew, Skin
    • decisions
  • Art and science

    "What the artist does is essentially the same as the scientist. In other words, what you do when you start to do a painting is that you begin with a basic idea, a hypothesis of what you're setting out to do. Then it's just a million yes-no decisions. You try something in the painting, you look at it, and you say, 'N-n-no.' You sort of erase it out, and you move it around a little bit, put in a new line; you go through a million weighings. It's the same thing in science, the only difference in the character of the product."

    Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
    • science
    • decisions
    • choice
  • The complexity and the gray

    One thing I assume of age is weariness.
    Damned if I don’t get more tired every day.
    Tired of what I do, following arcs like lobbed rocks — the inevitability of truth.

    But the complexity and the gray lie not in the truth, but in what you do with the truth once you have it.

    Rian Johnson, Knives Out
    • truth
    • life
    • age
    • decisions
  • The management strategy that saved Apollo 11

    An Article by Matthew Ström
    matthewstrom.com

    In 1969, the people in charge of Apollo 11 trusted a 23-year-old engineer in a back room of mission control to make one of the most consequential decisions of this decade-defining mission. And they did so in seconds, without deliberating or debating.

    Next time you’re faced with a decision, ask yourself: how can this decision be made on the lowest level? Have you given your team the authority to decide? If you haven’t, why not? If they’re not able to make good decisions, you’ve missed an opportunity to be a leader. Empower, enable, and entrust them. Take it from NASA: the ability to delegate quickly and decisively was the key to landing men on the moon.

    1. ​​Central planning gives poor results​​
    2. ​​Beware SAFe, an Unholy Incarnation of Darkness​​
    • management
    • decisions
    • trust
  • Goodbye, Google

    An Article by Douglas Bowman
    stopdesign.com

    Without a person at (or near) the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of Design, a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions. With every new design decision, critics cry foul. Without conviction, doubt creeps in. Instincts fail. “Is this the right move?” When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.

    Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

    • design
    • decisions
    • data
  • Collaborative Information Architecture at Scale

    An Article by Brandon Dorn
    www.viget.com

    Here I describe an approach for defining new information architectures for large organizational websites managed by many stakeholder groups.

    Broadly speaking, there are four general phases to the approach:

    1. Auditing. Begin by immersing yourself in existing content and encourage stakeholders to adopt a critical, audience-minded perspective of their content.
    2. Diagramming. Work with stakeholders to develop new conceptual categories that better serve audiences and organizational direction.
    3. Elaborating. Think through content in detail and test new categories against specific instances and edge cases.
    4. Producing. Prepare content teams for production using a shared database of new sitemap pages and editorial considerations that you’ve developed incrementally.
    1. ​​Half of design is facilitation​​
    1. ​​The Ladder of Abstraction​​
    2. ​​A Pattern Language​​
    • decisions
    • organization
    • patterns
    • analytics

    The process Dorn describes here reminds me a lot of Alexander's process for developing a pattern language. Also uses Airtable, which is an automatic win in my book.

  • 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 You click it, and it tells you. The proximate explanation will probably not be very satisfying, so you click on the next until you get to the end, at which point you are either satisfied with the explanation, or you aren’t.

    1. ​​The Design of Design​​
    • decisions
    • design
    • systems
    • style

See also:
  1. design
  2. science
  3. choice
  4. truth
  5. life
  6. age
  7. management
  8. trust
  9. systems
  10. style
  11. organization
  12. patterns
  13. analytics
  14. craft
  15. rationality
  16. data
  17. collaboration
  1. Dorian Taylor
  2. Lawrence Wechler
  3. Robert Irwin
  4. Rian Johnson
  5. Matthew Ström
  6. Brandon Dorn
  7. Verlyn Klinkenborg
  8. Ursula M. Franklin
  9. Douglas Bowman
  10. Baldur Bjarnason