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  55. choice 8
  56. cities 51
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  58. Cleary, Thomas 8
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  64. commonplace 11
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  73. Coyier, Chris 4
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  100. Drucker, Peter F. 15
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  106. Eliot, T.S. 14
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  111. ethics 14
  112. euphony 38
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  120. flaws 10
  121. Flexner, Abraham 8
  122. food 16
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  124. Fowler, Martin 4
  125. Franklin, Ursula M. 30
  126. friendship 6
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  132. Garfunkel, Art 6
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  135. goals 9
  136. Gombrich, E. H. 4
  137. goodness 12
  138. Graham, Paul 37
  139. graphics 13
  140. Greene, Erick 6
  141. Hamming, Richard 45
  142. happiness 17
  143. Harford, Tim 4
  144. Harper, Thomas J. 15
  145. Hayes, Brian 28
  146. heat 7
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  148. Herbert, Frank 4
  149. Heschong, Lisa 27
  150. Hesse, Herman 6
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  153. Hofstadter, Douglas 6
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  156. Hoyt, Ben 5
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  161. Huxley, Aldous 7
  162. hypermedia 22
  163. i 18
  164. ideas 21
  165. identity 33
  166. images 10
  167. industry 9
  168. information 42
  169. infrastructure 17
  170. innovation 15
  171. interaction 10
  172. interest 10
  173. interfaces 37
  174. intuition 8
  175. invention 10
  176. Irwin, Robert 65
  177. Isaacson, Walter 28
  178. Ishikawa, Sara 33
  179. iteration 13
  180. Ive, Jonathan 6
  181. Jackson, Steven J. 14
  182. Jacobs, Jane 54
  183. Jacobs, Alan 5
  184. Jobs, Steve 20
  185. Jones, Nick 5
  186. Kahn, Louis 4
  187. Kakuzō, Okakura 23
  188. Kaufman, Kenn 4
  189. Keith, Jeremy 6
  190. Keller, Jenny 10
  191. Keqin, Yuanwu 8
  192. Ketheswaran, Pirijan 6
  193. Kingdon, Jonathan 5
  194. Kitching, Roger 7
  195. Klein, Laura 4
  196. Kleon, Austin 13
  197. Klinkenborg, Verlyn 24
  198. Klyn, Dan 20
  199. knowledge 29
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  203. Kuma, Kengo 18
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  225. meaning 33
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  230. metrics 19
  231. microsites 49
  232. Miller, J. Abbott 10
  233. Mills, C. Wright 9
  234. minimalism 10
  235. Miyazaki, Hayao 30
  236. Mod, Craig 15
  237. modularity 6
  238. Mollison, Bill 31
  239. morality 8
  240. Murakami, Haruki 21
  241. music 16
  242. Müller, Boris 7
  243. Naka, Toshiharu 8
  244. names 11
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  246. nature 51
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Making & Creating

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  • 104. Site Repair

    Problem

    Buildings must always be built on those parts of the land which are in the worst condition, not the best.

    Solution

    On no account place buildings in the places which are more beautiful. In fact, do the opposite. Consider the site and its buildings as a single living ecosystem. Leave those areas that are the most precious, beautiful, comfortable, and healthy as they are, and build new structures in those parts of the site which are least pleasant now.

    Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein & Sara Ishikawa, A Pattern Language
    1. ​​Einmal Ist Keinmal​​
    2. ​​Repair​​
    3. ​​But then the knoll was gone​​
    4. ​​Composition and revision​​
    5. ​​Rethinking Repair​​
    • building
    • making
    • design
    • repair
  • Its place in the web of nature

    This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.

    Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein & Sara Ishikawa, A Pattern Language
    1. ​​Crafting repair​​
    • i
    • making
    • nature
  • Entropy

    Imperfect, handmade glass has virtues: these are irregularity, distinctiveness, and what the writer refers to vaguely as 'character'. The two sets of images for glassblowing are thus inseparable; only by understanding how something might be done perfectly is it possible to sense this alternative, an object possessing specificity and character. The bubble or the uneven surface of a piece of glass can be prized, whereas the standard of perfection allows no room either for experiment or for variation.

    Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
    • making

    There is only one way to be perfect. There are infinite ways to be good.

  • The way it has been made

    The internal structure of a work of art in metal can often throw as much, or more, light on its origin as can be derived from stylistic analysis. Moreover, the techniques employed can provide clues to the habits of mind of the people who originated them.

    …Perhaps the most important reason for structural studies of museum objects is that the intimate knowledge so derived as to the way in which an object has been made adds so greatly to the aesthetic enjoyment of it. Very often some detail and sometimes the whole of an effective design arises directly in the exploitation of the merits and the overcoming of the difficulties of a specific technique, in the reaction between the artist’s fingers and his material.

    The Interpretation of Microstructures of Metallic Artifacts
    • history
    • technique
    • making
    • objects
  • Follow the brush

    One of the oldest and most deeply ingrained of Japanese attitudes to literary style holds that obvious structure is contrivance, that too orderly an exposition falsifies the ruminations of the heart, that the truest representation of the searching mind is just to 'follow the brush.'

    Jun'ichirō Tanizaki & Thomas J. Harper, In Praise of Shadows
    1. ​​The Age of the Essay​​
    2. ​​Game feel​​
    • writing
    • art
    • making

    From Thomas J. Harper's afterword.

  • v0.crap

    I couldn’t seem to convince my writers that I was genuinely ok working with a super rough first draft — i.e., that I’d harbor no hidden judgment about their intelligence, commitment, or excellence at their craft.

    So I came up with a new word. “Just give me a v0.crap.” (Pronounced “version zero dot crap”.)

    v.0.crap works because it’s attuned to the psychology of the situation. It’s punching through our innate desire not to “look bad”, plus years of corporate conditioning that tells us not to share less-than-polished work. It’s easier for people used to delivering exceptional work to feel they’ve exceeded the goal of “crap”; they can sit comfortably in “good enough for the current purpose.”

    Courtney Hohne, The monkey, the tiger beetle and the language of innovation
    blog.x.company
    1. ​​Writing, Briefly​​
    • quality
    • ideas
    • writing
    • making
  • The discoveries you make in the making

    Style is an expression of the interest you take in the making of every sentence.
    It emerges, almost without intent, from your engagement with each sentence.
    It's the discoveries you make in the making of the prose itself.

    Where ambiguity rules, there is no "style"—or anything else worth having.

    Pursue clarity instead.
    In the pursuit of clarity, style reveals itself.

    Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing
    1. ​​The idea grows as they work​​
    2. ​​Four principles​​
    3. ​​Expressing ideas helps to form them​​
    • style
    • clarity
    • making
  • Expressing ideas helps to form them

    If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.

    Paul Graham, The Age of the Essay
    www.paulgraham.com
    1. ​​The situation talks back​​
    2. ​​Writing is one way to go about thinking​​
    3. ​​The discoveries you make in the making​​
    • making
  • Between the two spaces

    It is widely accepted that creative design is not a matter of first fixing the problem and then searching for a satisfactory solution concept; instead it seems more to be a matter of developing and refining together both the formulation of the problem and ideas for its solution, with constant iteration of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation processes between the two “spaces” – problem and solution.

    Nigel Cross & Kees Dorst, Co-Evolution of Problem and Solution Spaces in Creative Design
    • design
    • making
    • iteration
  • The game discovering itself

    We like to think about this process as the game discovering itself over time. Because as iterators, rather than designers, it’s our job to simply play the game, listen to it, feel it, and kind of feel out what it seems to want to become - and just follow the trails of what’s fun.

    Seth Coster, Crashlands: Design by Chaos
    www.youtube.com
    1. ​​What the prototype tells you​​
    2. ​​Follow the fun​​
    • design
    • making
    • iteration
  • The act of creation

    What I suggest has usually happened [during the act of creation] is this: the artist has glimpsed something: he has seen, perhaps fleetingly and indistinctly, some particular relation or quality of visible features which had previously been disregarded, and which impressed itself on him by its beauty. By means of making a work of art he then seeks as it were to fix isolate and concentrate what he has seen.

    No one has ever succeeded in demonstrating in principle how this is done, but done it is; and when we see it done we find it hard to understand why it should have been so intensely difficult to do.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    • making
    • seeing
  • No more than a sketch

    The quality of a musical performance depends on the performers as much as on the score. The performers are said to be interpreting the score, but in fact they are adding intention of their own to those of the composer, recognizing that no score can in practice ever fully express the intentions of a composer, that it can never be more than an indication, a sketch; and no designer can in practice ever produce more than a sketch.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    1. ​​The work is what it means​​
    2. ​​The meaning of music​​
    • design
    • making
  • I'm reminded of their faces

    Mrs. Shimada is very cheerful, and Mr. Shimada is very intelligent; he is able to perceive things objectively, and discern what is precious. I get the sense they live critically, evaluating what is important. Keeping these characteristics in mind, I think about what kind of plan should be provided, in what proportions, and in what kind of house—to best suit these people. I'm constantly reminded of their faces as I prepare the plans. I'm always thinking about human happiness. If it doesn't make you happy, I don't think it's worth building.

    Akinori Abo, Kigumi House
    • making
    • happiness
    • architecture
  • The patience of a craftsman

    Here there is no mastery of unnameable creative processes, only the patience of a craftsman, chipping away slowly; the mastery of what is made does not lie in the depths of some impenetrable ego; it lies, instead, in the simple mastery of the steps in the process, and in the definition of these steps.

    Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
    • making
    • craft
    • patience

    On the process of making a Samoan canoe.

  • So that its destruction cannot begin

    If you ask, “Why is Thekla’s construction taking such a long time?” the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer, “So that its destruction cannot begin.”

    Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
    1. ​​Why We Build the Wall​​
    • making

    Cities & The Sky 3

  • Some secret stirring in the world

    There is some secret stirring in the world,
    A thought that seeks impatiently its word.

    Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Mind of the Maker
    • euphony
    • making
  • Embracing the mess

    Design is non-linear. At Figma, we often talk about “embracing the mess,” and that really means leaning into the chaos and complexity that makes the design process what it is. Even once you have the seedling of an idea, you need to explore and iterate, then pull back and evaluate to see what’s working and what’s not. Sometimes you’ll scrap an idea after a brainstorm session, and other times you’ll get pretty far with a concept, but still need different perspectives and input to move forward.

    Yuhki Yamashita, A Q&A with Figma's VP of Product
    1. ​​The Design Squiggle​​
    • design
    • making
    • iteration
  • Less, but better

    There must be millions less of things, less words, less gestures, less of everything. But every word and every gesture will become more valuable. If we can put it all into perspective we will need less things as a result.

    Sophie Lovell & Dieter Rams, Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible
    1. ​​Omit needless words​​
    2. ​​To be truly simple​​
    • making
    • restraint
    • production
    • waste
    • minimalism
  • Tracing paper into palimpsest

    Image from understandinggroup.com on 2021-03-04 at 9.12.20 AM.jpeg

    Kahn's preferred medium was charcoal. He liked to use the side of his hand to rub out the thing he was drawing in order to draw it over, and over again.

    Turning the tracing paper into a palimpsest; where some trace of each previous marking is still there, only blurred out and faded back by Kahn's rubbings-out and re-renderings, so that in what he made there is also the record of how it was made.

    Charcoal on trash collected over time acting as ersatz animated film recording how Kahn's ideas developed.

    Dan Klyn, Ruins, Rub-outs, and Trash
    understandinggroup.com
    • making
  • Blueprints

    Blueprints lead to the making of things that are abstract, not always based on reality. Once something becomes abstract, it breeds disconnectedness — separation and the inability to connect with our surroundings. People buy houses from blueprints, but then don't like the actual house: "What on earth is this? I had no idea it was going to be like this...etc."

    Christopher Alexander, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth
    1. ​​Maps and observation​​
    2. ​​The preliminary sketch​​
    • making
    • design
  • Freedomless freedom

    The beauty of kasuri is received as a gift. As long as the laws of nature are upheld, the beauty of kasuri remains intact. This demonstrates the curious principle that the artisan is deprived of technical freedom but works in the freedom of nature.

    In this sense, kasuri can be said to be created in a state of freedomless freedom.

    Yanagi Sōetsu, The Beauty of Kasuri
    • freedom
    • constraints
    • nature
    • making
  • From body to body

    During the design process, the architect gradually internalizes the landscape, the entire context, and the functional requirements as well as his/her conceived building: movement, balance and scale are felt unconsciously through the body of the observer, the experience mirrors the bodily sensations of the maker. Consequently, architecture is communication from the body of the architect directly to the body of the person who encounters the work, perhaps centuries later.

    Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses
    1. ​​In the walls and mosses​​
    • making
    • design
    • time
    • communication
  • Modularity

    One of the most pervasive features of these buildings is the fact that they are “modular.” They are full of identical concrete blocks, identical rooms, identical houses, identical apartments in identical apartment buildings. The idea that a building can - and ought - to be made of modular units is one of the most pervasive assumptions of twentieth-century architecture.

    Nature is never modular. Nature is full of almost similar units (waves, raindrops, blades of grass) - but though the units of one kind are all alike in their broad structure, no two are ever alike in detail.

    The same broad features keep recurring over and over again. And yet, in their detailed appearance these broad features are never twice the same.

    Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
    • nature
    • architecture
    • making
    • details
    • modularity

    On traditional cultures and their building processes, Alexander expands this view:

    Each building was a member of a family, and yet unique.
    Each room a little different according to the view.
    Each tile is set a little differently in the ground, according to the settling of the earth.

  • Holistic and prescriptive technologies

    Holistic technologies are normally associated with the notion of craft. Artisans, be they potters, weavers, metal-smiths, or cooks, control the process of their own work from beginning to finish. Using holistic technologies does not mean that people do not work together, but the way in which they work together leaves the individual worker in control of a particular process of creating or doing something.

    The opposite is specialization by process; this I call prescriptive technology. Here, the making or doing of something is broken down into clearly identifiable steps. Each step is carried out by a separate worker, or group or workers, who need to be familiar only with the skills of performing that one step. This is what is normally meant by "division of labor".

    Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology
    1. ​​That which requires caring​​
    • craft
    • process
    • making

    In this sense, the modern agile software shop has more in common with an industrial-era factory than a carpenter's workshop or mechanic's garage.

  • Skill vs. knowledge

    We should say that anybody has skill enough to build a good dry-stone wall but that few know how to design one, for the placing of the stones is a matter of knowledge and judgment, not of dexterity.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    • making
    • knowledge
    • skill
  • More real than living man

    He will watch from dawn to gloom
    The lake reflected sun illume
    The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom
    Nor heed, nor see, what things they be;
    But from these create he can
    Forms more real than living man.

    Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
    1. ​​The Nature and Aesthetics of Design​​
    • making
  • The Idea

    The design is thus the mental formulation, which Sayers calls “the Idea,” and it can be complete before any realization is begun. Mozart’s response to his father’s inquiry about an opera due to the duke in three weeks both stuns us and clarifies the concept.

    For most human makers of things, the incompletenesses and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation. Thus it is that writing, experimentation, “working out,” are essential disciplines for the theoretician.

    Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Design of Design
    1. ​​Everything has been composed​​
    • making
  • Needs more love

    He held the phone to his chest, looked at me, and simply said, “Needs more love.” He pushed the portfolio back across his desk, smiled warmly, and shooed me out of his office.

    I still think about this advice, and what exactly he might have meant when he said my work needed more love. At the time, I took it to mean that I should improve my craft, but I’ve come to realize that he was speaking of something more fundamental and vital. My work was flat, because it was missing the spark that comes from creating something you believe in for someone you care about. This is the source of the highest craft, because an affection for the audience produces the care necessary to make the work well.

    Frank Chimero, The Shape of Design
    • beauty
    • making
  • We have been given a standard

    We have been given a standard to use. It is there, handy daily: things as they are, or Nature itself. This makes good sense, the only sense really—Nature should be our model.

    Donald Richie, A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics
    • nature
    • making
  • Process vs. product

    ...more concerned with process than with product, with the actual construction of a self than with self-expression.

    Donald Richie, A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics
    • design
    • identity
    • making
  • The categories of good

    We need to turn to a fresh page. We can do so simply by asking—though the answers are anything but simple—what the process of making concrete things reveals to us about ourselves. Learning from things requires us to care about the qualities of cloth or the right way to poach fish; fine cloth or food cooked well enables us to imagine larger categories of 'good'.

    Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
    • making
  • The narrative of its making

    Getting things in perfect shape can mean removing the traces, erasing the evidence, of a work in progress. Once this evidence is eliminated, the object appears pristine. Perfection of this cleaned-up sort is a static condition; the object does not hint at the narrative of its making.

    Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
    • making
  • A pattern of understandings

    The clock has no finished design and it has been made without any careful drawings or mathematical calculations. The pieces are only made if I can hold their details in my head as I make them, without reference to any set of external measures. I do make rough sketches of some parts as a path to understanding them, but never use these during the making of the parts. The clock gradually grows through trial and error and lots of physical work with metal, but out of this has come a set of principles of making that were not clear to me before doing the clock. I have finally realized that what I am actually making is a pattern of understandings of the process of making rather than the things that are actually being made. — Richard Benson

    Richard Saul Wurman, Understanding Understanding
    • making
    • craft
  • What's the difference?

    I well remember an occasion in 1962 when in a remote Iranian village I asked a blacksmith famous for his superior penknives to tell me the difference between iron and steel. “What’s the difference?” he replied. “What’s the difference between an oak tree and a willow — they have different natures and one must adapt to them.” He did not accept the suggestion that some material absorbed from the fire’s charcoal might have something to do with it, and he would not have understood a word of any lecture I could have given him on diffusion, crystal structure, and phase transformations; yet he could make a good knife and I could not.

    Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure
    • making
  • Reproduction

    The success of a mechanic’s, or a machine’s, reproduction of a thing depends on his, or its, sensitivity to whatever qualities are important, just as the skill of the designer lies in the proper appreciation of surface qualities in terms of structure and shape variation that come from the intended means of production.

    Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure
    • making
  • Flurry and lapse

    "The process in creating that kind of canvas was like—what?—10 percent action and 90 percent ass scratching. First you prepared yourself, cleaning up and arranging your palette and tools, sweeping the floors, and then finally, when you were ready, you faced the empty white expanse of white canvas and made your first stroke."

    Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
    • intent
    • creativity
    • making
  • Oil

    Irwin even disdained artificial products when polishing the wood frame, confining himself solely to the natural oils of his hands, his forehead, the sides of his nose, and so forth.

    Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
    • making
  • Perfection

    It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.

    Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars
    • perfection
    • design
    • simplicity
    • making
  • 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
    .

    Dan Klyn, What Good Means
    • function
    • making
  • 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?

    Dan Klyn, What Good Means
    • goodness
    • making
  • A Search for Structure

    A Book by Cyril Stanley Smith
    mitpress.mit.edu
    1. ​​Apologia​​
    2. ​​Grain Shapes and Other Metallurgical Applications of Topology​​
    3. ​​Structure, Substructure, and Superstructure​​
    4. ​​The Interpretation of Microstructures of Metallic Artifacts​​
    5. ​​Matter versus Materials: A Historical View​​
    1. ​​Results of a search​​
    • making
    • material
    • craft
    • style
  • The Timeless Way of Building

    A Book by Christopher Alexander
    www.patternlanguage.com
    1. ​​Mind of no mind​​
    2. ​​The quality without a name​​
    3. ​​An objective matter​​
    4. ​​Bitterness​​
    5. ​​The most precious thing we ever have​​
    1. ​​Some emptiness in us​​
    2. ​​Deliberate acts​​
    3. ​​No kind​​
    4. ​​patternsof.design​​
    5. ​​A Pattern Language​​
    6. ​​Non-architects​​
    7. ​​The Side View #17: Susan Ingham & Chris Andrews​​
    8. ​​The usages of life​​
    • architecture
    • making
    • building
    • urbanism
    • beauty
    • construction
    • zen
  • The Design of Design

    A Book by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
    www.goodreads.com
    1. ​​Design process models: A summary argument​​
    2. ​​The spiral model​​
    3. ​​A grossly obese set of requirements​​
    4. ​​Requirements proliferation​​
    5. ​​The architectural contracting model​​
    1. ​​Design System as Style Manual With Web Characteristics​​
    • design
    • software
    • architecture
    • making
    • style
  • The Nature and Art of Workmanship

    A Book by David Pye
    www.bloomsbury.com
    1. ​​That which requires caring​​
    2. ​​Mass production of variable products​​
    3. ​​From hands to machines​​
    4. ​​Employs nothing at all​​
    5. ​​What is Folk Craft?​​
    • design
    • making
    • craft
    • style
  • The Craftsman

    A Book by Richard Sennett
    yalebooks.yale.edu
    1. ​​The great teacher​​
    2. ​​The categories of good​​
    3. ​​For its own sake​​
    4. ​​The details of construction​​
    5. ​​The technology shelf​​
    • craft
    • making
    • material
    • style

    The intimate relations between problem solving and problem finding, technique and expression, play and work.

  • Inventing on Principle

    A Talk by Bret Victor
    worrydream.com
    • making
    • design
  • In Praise of Shadows

    A Book by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki & Thomas J. Harper
    www.goodreads.com
    1. ​​Things that shine and glitter​​
    2. ​​A naked bulb​​
    3. ​​The Japanese toilet​​
    4. ​​Empty dreams​​
    5. ​​Most important of all are the pauses​​
    1. ​​125 Best Architecture Books​​
    2. ​​Daylight should not tyrannize architecture​​
    3. ​​Deep shadows and darkness are essential​​
    4. ​​Lights and lamps​​
    5. ​​The gentle light of shoji screens​​
    • zen
    • darkness
    • light
    • material
    • making
  • A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams

    A Book by Michael Pollan
    michaelpollan.com
    1. ​​barnsoutbuildings​​
    2. ​​Here Be Dragons​​
    • architecture
    • nature
    • making
  • The Nature and Aesthetics of Design

    A Book by David Pye
    books.google.com
    1. ​​Any imaginable shape​​
    2. ​​Useless work on useful things​​
    3. ​​Presentable​​
    4. ​​The principle of arrangement​​
    5. ​​The minimum condition​​
    1. ​​More real than living man​​
    2. ​​That which requires caring​​
    3. ​​The informing idea of functionalism​​
    • design
    • aesthetics
    • making
    • style
    • craft
    • beauty
  • Einmal Ist Keinmal

    An Article by Dan Klyn
    blog.usejournal.com
    1. ​​Jacked in​​
    2. ​​Immer wieder​​
    3. ​​But what if it is?​​
    1. ​​104. Site Repair​​
    2. ​​66. Holy Ground​​
    3. ​​109. Long Thin House​​
    4. ​​135. Tapestry of Light and Dark​​
    5. ​​239. Small Panes​​
    • beauty
    • craft
    • making
    • design
    • architecture
  • Write the books you want to read

    An Article by Austin Kleon
    austinkleon.com
    401FA060-9ED9-4007-8C78-1C6586CC8FBA.jpeg

    A few nights ago, I was looking at the moon and I thought, “I’d like to read a cultural history of the moon.” I googled, and there it was. My friend Matt said, “Ideally, that is exactly how one should find everything they read…and write.”

    It’s really that simple. You find the books you want to read… and if you can’t find them, you write them.

    1. ​​Things Learned Blogging​​
    • intuition
    • creativity
    • desire
    • making
  • Stop Drawing Dead Fish

    A Talk by Bret Victor
    worrydream.com
    • interaction
    • making
    • touch
    • software
  • Background textures of work

    An Article by Lucy Keer
    lucykeer.com

    One thing I've been enjoying about working as a technical writer is that the minute-by-minute texture of the work feels right. Something about formatting text, faffing about with SVGs, trying to rewrite a sentence more clearly... it's just enjoyable in itself, and I feel at home with it.

    ...Working as a programmer was very much not like that. There's something in the rough vicinity of professional dev work that I do like, which I could probably label as 'iterative hobbyist tinkering with websites'. I like working on something with a strong visual component, and I like to be inside of a fast feedback loop, and I'm mostly interested in just somehow bodging through until it works. I'm not very interested in either the computer-sciencey side of programming — data structures, algorithms — or the software-engineerey side of making things run reliably at scale in a maintainable way. So maybe it's not surprising that the minute-by-minute texture of professional programming was just... kind of bad. Occasional fun bits when I got into something, but the background experience was not fun.

    • work
    • productivity
    • making

    What a great idea – work as material, tangible, textured.

  • Say yes and never do it

    A Quote by Mel Brooks
    www.newyorker.com

    You have some wonderful stories of basically getting away with stuff at the studios.

    I’d learned one very simple trick: say yes. Simply say yes…You say yes, and you never do it.

    That’s great advice for life.

    It is. Don’t fight them. Don’t waste your time struggling with them and trying to make sense to them. They’ll never understand.

    • management
    • work
    • making
  • Make Free Stuff

    An Article by Max Böck
    mxb.dev

    At its very core, the rules of the web are different than those of “real” markets. The idea that ownership fundamentally means that nobody else can have the same thing you have just doesn’t apply here. This is a world where anything can easily be copied a million times and distributed around the globe in a second. If that were possible in the real world, we’d call it Utopia.

    …Resource Scarcity doesn’t make sense on the web. Artificially creating it here serves no other purpose than to charge money for things that could easily have been free for all. Why anyone would consider that better is beyond me.

    • www
    • making
  • Makers and Making

    An Article by Alan Jacobs
    blog.ayjay.org

    The [Silmarils] are good; their making was at least potentially innocent; but afterward arose a lust for owning and controlling that led to great tragedy… The aspect of humanity which the elves represent most fully – both for good and ill – is the creative one.”

    And this is why “making” in and of itself is not the answer to our decadent moment. “Love of things, especially artificial things, could be seen as the besetting sin of modern civilisation, and in a way a new one, not quite Avarice and not quite Pride, but somehow attached to both” – and this is the Fëanor Temptation. It is in light of this temptation that I advocate repair, which is a mode of caring for what we have not made, but rather what we have inherited. We will not be saved by the making of artifacts — or from the repair of them, either; but the imperative of repair has these salutary effects: it reminds us of our debt to those who came before us and of the fragility of human constructs.

    1. ​​The Silmarillion​​
    2. ​​Rethinking Repair​​
    • repair
    • making
    • creativity
    • humanity
  • How I Build

    An Article by Pirijan Ketheswaran
    pketh.org

    In 2014, I wrote about my belief that design and engineering are best when tightly woven together. That’s truer now than ever.

    If I’m feeling confident, I’ll jump right into my text editor…From here, more functionality is added and the code is tweaked until the feature looks and feels right to me. Whether it’s something simple like this, or prototyping a new interaction like multi-connect, there’s no substitute for designing with real code.

    In rare cases when I have ideas or plans that I’m less confident about, it’s time to break out the paper, pens, and markers,

    Because the Kinopio interface elements and aesthetic are full-grown, I almost never use traditional design software anymore.

    • making
    • interaction
    • interfaces
  • Primitive design

    An Article by Matt Webb
    interconnected.org
    1. I want it to feel intuitive
    2. 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.

    1. ​​Co-Evolution of Problem and Solution Spaces in Creative Design​​
    • design
    • systems
    • making
  • Weinberg's Law

    A Quote by Gerald Weinberg
    quoteinvestigator.com

    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

    • programming
    • making
    • architecture
    • quality
  • How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

    A Research Paper by Andy Matuschak & Michael Nielsen
    numinous.productions
    Image from numinous.productions on 2021-11-05 at 8.05.31 AM.svg

    Conventional tech industry product practice will not produce deep enough subject matter insights to create transformative tools for thought.

    ...The aspiration is for any team serious about making transformative tools for thought. It’s to create a culture that combines the best parts of modern product practice with the best parts of the (very different) modern research culture. You need the insight-through-making loop to operate, whereby deep, original insights about the subject feed back to change and improve the system, and changes to the system result in deep, original insights about the subject.

    • making
    • thinking
    • tools
    • design
    • feedback
    • research
    • cognition
    • technology
    • software
  • When I was 22

    A Quote by Nicholas Ashe Bateman
    nofilmschool.com

    What's really challenging for me working on something on an idea level for close to 8 years, it's really hard to not look at yourself. The decision-making process includes a conversation with myself: sometimes I'm going to side with 2015 version of Nick, sometimes the 2017 Nick isn't the right guy for this, etc... So much of the process of making the movie has changed the movie. I really just tried to make the movie I wanted to make when I was 22. When I serviced that, it worked really well.

    1. ​​The idea grows as they work​​
    2. ​​The Wanting Mare​​
    • making
    • identity
  • Everything has been composed

    A Quote by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

    Everything has been composed, just not yet written down.

    1. ​​The Idea​​
    2. ​​Seventeen Years​​
    • making
  • Game feel

    An Article by Dave Rupert
    daverupert.com

    How do you make a game that’s fun? ...You have to focus on gameplay. In order for the final product to be fun and exciting, the core game play needs to be fun and exciting. The creator of Mario calls this 手応え (tegotae), which is often translated as “game feel”. To find this game feel, you need to build small prototypes around a single idea, play test them, and then follow the fun. Nintendo does this, indie game devs do this; this is the not-so-secret of the gaming industry.

    1. ​​Follow the fun​​
    2. ​​Follow the brush​​
    • prototypes
    • making
    • games
  • The tools matter and the tools don't matter - Austin Kleon

    An Article by Austin Kleon
    austinkleon.com
    Image from austinkleon.com on 2021-10-06 at 12.37.15 PM.jpeg

    Though you might not think it from the comic, I’m actually sympathetic to questions about tools and process, as I myself am a kind of process junky. I love hearing about how other writers work.

    I’m also not someone who dismisses questions about tools with the line “the tools don’t matter.” In fact, I think tools matter so much that if you don’t talk about them correctly you can do some damage.

    ...What I love about John Gardner and Lynda Barry is that they believe that the tools you use do matter, but the point, for them, is finding the proper tools that get you to a certain way of working in which you can get your conscious, mechanical mind out of the way so that your dreaming can go on, undeterred.

    You have to find the right tools to help your voice sing.

    • tools
    • making
    • dreams
  • Designer, implementor, user, writer

    A Fragment by Donald Knuth
    dl.acm.org

    Thus, I came to the conclusion that the designer of a new system must not only be the implementor and the first large-scale user; the designer should also write the first user manual. The separation of any of these four components would have hurt TeX significantly. If I had not participated fully in all these activities, literally hundreds of improvements would never have been made, because I would never have thought of them or perceived why they were important.

    1. ​​Eating your own dog food​​
    • making

    From Software—Practice and Experience, Vol. 19: The Errors of TeX.

  • Jacob Leech, Digital Craftsman

    A Profile by Jacob Leech
    jacobleech.com
    Screenshot of jacobleech.com on 2021-09-27 at 11.37.21 AM.png

    I'm Jacob — a designer and coder who creates things with computers (Fig 1) 'Digital Craftsman' best describes my skill set.

    Digital projects thrive when designers understand how they will be built. Just as an architect understands how a structure is created, the same should be true on the web.

    1. ​​nicktrombley.design​​
    • craft
    • www
    • making

    I like this portfolio/profile page – Jacob does a great job articulating the unconventional position of being somewhere between the worlds of design and development. For a while my LinkedIn bio has read Digital Designer-Builder, but Digital Craftsman conveys the same idea. Maybe I'm just not ready to assume the label of "craftsman" for myself. I consider it instead a perpetual aspiration.

  • Designer + Developer Workflow

    An Article by Dan Mall
    danmall.me

    The way designers and developers work together today is broken. It’s too siloed and separate; “collaboration” is a fantasy that few enjoy.

    The state of advertising in the 1940s was similar. All of that changed when copywriter Bill Bernbach met art director Paul Rand. Their collaborative working style led to the birth of the idea of “the creative team,” the mutual respect and partnership between art director and copywriter that tended to yield unique results. Bob Gage, an art director that worked for DDB, the agency Bernbach co-founded, described it like this:

    “Two people who respect each other sit in the same room for a length of time and arrive at a state of free association, where the mention of one idea will lead to another idea, then to another. The art director might suggest a headline, the writer a visual. The entire ad is conceived as a whole, in a kind of ping pong between disciplines.”

    Isn’t that what we all strive for in our jobs? True collaboration with equals and partners? Ideas that build off one another? Why does this seem so far away for some of us?

    • collaboration
    • making
    • holism
    • advertising
    • creativity

    Original text arranged and truncated for brevity.

  • The saddest designer

    An Essay by Chia Amisola
    chias.blog

    I am tired of the premise that creation means productivity––especially in the laborious sense...Creation has become mangled with labor in a world that demands man to monetize all of their hobbies and pursuits. In return, it seems empty, almost sad, really––to be the designer spending weekends again on the screen.

    To tell you what I like to do in the weekends, I like to do the sad thing...The ‘good’ people tell you to detach your life from your workspace, but this summer, I think I’ve just realized how much I adore what I have the luxury of working on everyday.

    In the weekend, I make. I make not because it’s the only thing I have ever known, but because it’s the most certain way forward.

    1. ​​To see the fulfillment of the work​​
    2. ​​Your life adds up​​
    • making
    • identity
    • work
  • Enjoying the garden together

    A Quote by Brian Eno
    blog.ayjay.org

    And essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden. One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life.

    What this means, really, is a rethinking of one’s own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included.

    • creativity
    • music
    • making
    • art
    • gardens
  • Two types of work

    An Article by Jorge Arango
    jarango.com

    There are two types of work: growth work and maintenance work.

    Growth work involves making new things. It can be something big or small. In either case, growth work often follows a loose process.

    Maintenance work is different. Maintenance work involves caring for the resources and instruments that make growth work possible. This includes tools, but also body and mind.

    Maintenance is ultimately in service to growth. But effective growth can’t happen without maintenance. As with so many things, the ideal is a healthy balance — and it doesn’t come without struggle.

    • organization
    • information
    • making
    • work
  • 1,000 True Fans

    An Essay by Kevin Kelly
    kk.org

    To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.

    A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand of true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune.

    • art
    • making
    • fame
  • When we were all together in-person

    A Quote
    www.theverge.com

    “We believe that in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future,” said Deirdre O’Brien, senior vice president of retail and people, in a video recording viewed by The Verge. “If we take a moment to reflect on our unbelievable product launches this past year, the products and the launch execution were built upon the base of years of work that we did when we were all together in-person.”

    • collaboration
    • work
    • making
  • Poioumenon

    A Definition
    en.wiktionary.org

    A specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation (sometimes the creation of the story itself).

    1. ​​Bo Burnham: Inside​​
    • literature
    • making
    • art
    • self-reference
  • How am I doing, wonder?

    A Quote by Louis Kahn
    understandinggroup.com

    Form comes from wonder. Wonder stems from our 'in touchness' with how we were made. One senses that nature records the process of what it makes, so that in what it makes there is also the records of how it was made. In touch with this record we are in wonder. This wonder gives rise to knowledge. But knowledge is related to other knowledge and this relation gives a sense of order, a sense of how they inter-relate in a harmony that makes all things exist. From knowledge to sense of order we then wink at wonder and say How am I doing, wonder?

    1. ​​Ruins, Rub-outs, and Trash​​
    • form
    • curiosity
    • knowledge
    • order
    • understanding
    • making
  • The care and feeding of software engineers (or, why engineers are grumpy)

    An Article by Nicholas Zakas
    humanwhocodes.com

    We do say “no” very quickly, not just to designs, but to everything. That led me into thinking about the psychology of software engineers and what makes us the way we are.

    • software
    • making
    • process
  • Are We Really Engineers?

    An Essay by Hillel Wayne
    www.hillelwayne.com
    • engineering
    • programming
    • making
    • building

    Are software engineers "real" engineers? Wayne talks to a number of crossovers – ex-engineers turned developers – to explore the hotly debated question.

  • 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.

    1. ​​The situation talks back​​
    2. ​​Co-Evolution of Problem and Solution Spaces in Creative Design​​
    3. ​​The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth​​
    4. ​​The game discovering itself​​
    • design
    • making

    Writing here about experiments in virtual presentation / video conferencing software.


See also:
  1. design
  2. craft
  3. architecture
  4. style
  5. nature
  6. creativity
  7. work
  8. beauty
  9. art
  10. software
  11. iteration
  12. identity
  13. material
  14. building
  15. knowledge
  16. writing
  17. process
  18. zen
  19. interaction
  20. repair
  21. quality
  22. programming
  23. collaboration
  24. www
  25. tools
  26. i
  27. restraint
  28. production
  29. waste
  30. minimalism
  31. skill
  32. patience
  33. details
  34. modularity
  35. intent
  36. perfection
  37. simplicity
  38. function
  39. goodness
  40. darkness
  41. light
  42. touch
  43. aesthetics
  44. urbanism
  45. construction
  46. time
  47. communication
  48. ideas
  49. freedom
  50. constraints
  51. engineering
  52. clarity
  53. form
  54. curiosity
  55. order
  56. understanding
  57. music
  58. gardens
  59. literature
  60. self-reference
  61. fame
  62. organization
  63. information
  64. euphony
  65. holism
  66. advertising
  67. intuition
  68. desire
  69. happiness
  70. seeing
  71. dreams
  72. prototypes
  73. games
  74. thinking
  75. feedback
  76. research
  77. cognition
  78. technology
  79. systems
  80. history
  81. technique
  82. objects
  83. interfaces
  84. humanity
  85. management
  86. productivity
  1. Christopher Alexander
  2. David Pye
  3. Richard Sennett
  4. Dan Klyn
  5. Cyril Stanley Smith
  6. Murray Silverstein
  7. Sara Ishikawa
  8. Frederick P. Brooks
  9. Jr.
  10. Donald Richie
  11. Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
  12. Thomas J. Harper
  13. Lawrence Wechler
  14. Robert Irwin
  15. Bret Victor
  16. Matt Webb
  17. Austin Kleon
  18. Sophie Lovell
  19. Dieter Rams
  20. Frank Chimero
  21. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
  22. Nigel Cross
  23. Kees Dorst
  24. Italo Calvino
  25. Percy Bysshe Shelley
  26. Ursula M. Franklin
  27. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  28. Richard Saul Wurman
  29. Paul Graham
  30. Seth Coster
  31. Juhani Pallasmaa
  32. Michael Pollan
  33. Courtney Hohne
  34. Yanagi Sōetsu
  35. Hillel Wayne
  36. Verlyn Klinkenborg
  37. Nicholas Zakas
  38. Louis Kahn
  39. Brian Eno
  40. Kevin Kelly
  41. Jorge Arango
  42. Yuhki Yamashita
  43. Thomas Lovell Beddoes
  44. Chia Amisola
  45. Dan Mall
  46. Akinori Abo
  47. Jacob Leech
  48. Donald Knuth
  49. Dave Rupert
  50. Nicholas Ashe Bateman
  51. Andy Matuschak
  52. Michael Nielsen
  53. Gerald Weinberg
  54. Pirijan Ketheswaran
  55. Alan Jacobs
  56. Max Böck
  57. Mel Brooks
  58. Lucy Keer