patterns
Dwelling in ritual
Rain Chains & Musical Drains
Intricacy, centering, sun, enclosure
Parks intensely used in generalized public-yard fashion tend to have four elements in their design which I shall call intricacy, centering, sun and enclosure.
The scale of resolution determines what is seen
The patterns of Truchet's tiles appear at first glance as variously shaped interlocked regions of black and white, the boundaries between the square tiles being submerged whenever the two regions flanking them have the same color, just as in a real floor the air or cement between the tile edges is not perceived—until one looks closely. The scale of resolution determines what is seen.
Fabric
And finally, the things which seem like elements dissolve, and leave a fabric of relationships behind, which is the stuff that actually repeats itself, and gives the structure to a building or a town.
Simple variations of the parts
Symmetry, indeed, has been grossly overemphasized in both art and science: its main value is in giving meaning to its absence, dissymmetry, without which there could be no hierarchy.
The eye is repulsed by complexity if no order is detected, but it can be delighted by repetition, translation, rotation, reflection, magnification, and other simple variations of the parts.
patternsof.design
A Website by Nick TrombleyDrawing pictures of cities
An Article by Noah SmithThis is a famous picture by the artist Imperial Boy (帝国少年), who works in the anime industry. I sometimes claim that the entire genre of solarpunk is simply a riff on this picture.
If it’s not just “trees on buildings”, where does the Imperial Boy picture get its magic? Looking at it carefully and trying to analyze what I like about it, I think that much of it is about architecture, and even more of it is about the use of urban space — about how the structures in the picture shape the kinds of things you’d do if you were there. For example, here are five things I like:
- Open, walkable multi-level retail
- River with low bank
- Walkable streets
- Varied architecture
- Shade
Collaborative Information Architecture at Scale
An Article by Brandon DornHere 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:
- Auditing. Begin by immersing yourself in existing content and encourage stakeholders to adopt a critical, audience-minded perspective of their content.
- Diagramming. Work with stakeholders to develop new conceptual categories that better serve audiences and organizational direction.
- Elaborating. Think through content in detail and test new categories against specific instances and edge cases.
- Producing. Prepare content teams for production using a shared database of new sitemap pages and editorial considerations that you’ve developed incrementally.
The design systems between us
A Talk by Ethan MarcotteIn the early days, design systems promised us more consistent interfaces, more collaborative teams, and improved shipping times. While they’ve certainly delivered on some of those fronts, they’ve introduced new challenges too. Let’s talk through what’s working well—and what could be working better—as we take a closer look at the systems between us and our work.
Web Brutalism, seamfulness, and notion
How a tool for sensemaking reconciles two distinct software design ideologies.
- Seamful vs. seamless
- Reveling in infrastructure
- The brilliance of notion
- How our understanding is working
Seamful vs. seamless
At the core of the Brutalist ethos is a tension between two philosophies that have been the topic of a long-standing debate in information design: the merits of “seamless” and “seamful” design, “seams” in this context taken to mean revelations of an object’s inner workings.
Designers typically take seamlessness as the de facto standard for our work, emphasizing clarity, consistency, simplicity, efficiency, reducing cognitive load. We seek to minimize distractions.
Yet what if we can achieve a clearer understanding by intentionally revealing how a system works?
Reveling in infrastructure
Hunstanton Secondary School (1954) in Norfolk, England, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson. Photo by Anna Armstrong (2011)
When the Smithsons placed the water heater for the Hunstanton Secondary School prominently above the school’s roofline, they weren’t just revealing the building’s infrastructure, they were reveling in it. What does it look like to do this on the web?
Of course there’s no single answer, because the web is simultaneously a physical and digital medium. It is material and it isn’t. It depends on how literally you interpret the question. But taking it somewhere in-between, seeing the web as primarily an information medium, we can ask the question a little differently: what does it look like to design something that is true to the material of digital information?
The brilliance of notion
This, I think, is the brilliance of Notion, and what makes it one of the best examples of “fidelity to digital information” that I’ve come across. The structure of the app reflects the structure of the web itself: digital content is purposefully formatted, like semantic HTML elements, and exists in a hierarchical structure (directories on the web, nested pages in Notion), yet can be linked and referenced to create a complex network of information. And pages in Notion reveal the structure of the information: when nesting a page within a page, the child page always displays on the parent page. There’s no way to create a child page that doesn’t display on a parent page, no way to obscure the structure of the information. The semantic structure of Notion reflects the semantic structure of the web itself.
How our understanding is working
The concept of seamfulness prompts designers to ask how an object can aid understanding and usage by showing its users what’s going on inside. How can we create what Mark Weiser, later revising his ideas of seamless design, calls “beautiful seams” — thoughtfully-crafted moments of revelation? Notion doesn’t show us how it’s literally working — the background processes constantly running to enable editing, collaboration, and the like. We don’t need to see our car’s engine to know it’s running. But it shows users how their understanding is working, how our ideas are structured, connected, and evolving.