1. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
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  3. Abo, Akinori 9
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  7. Alexander, Christopher 135
  8. Alexander, Scott 5
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  10. Ammer, Ralph 6
  11. Anderson, Gretchen 7
  12. anxiety 9
  13. Appleton, Maggie 5
  14. Aptekar-Cassels, Wesley 5
  15. Arango, Jorge 4
  16. architecture 110
  17. art 86
  18. Asimov, Isaac 5
  19. attention 17
  20. Auping, Michael 6
  21. Aurelius, Marcus 14
  22. Bachelard, Gaston 12
  23. Baker, Nicholson 10
  24. beauty 58
  25. Behrensmeyer, Anna K. 7
  26. Bjarnason, Baldur 8
  27. Blake, William 5
  28. blogging 22
  29. body 11
  30. Boeing, Geoff 7
  31. boredom 9
  32. Botton, Alain de 38
  33. Brand, Stewart 4
  34. Bringhurst, Robert 16
  35. Brooks, Frederick P. 22
  36. Broskoski, Charles 6
  37. brutalism 7
  38. building 16
  39. bureaucracy 12
  40. Burnham, Bo 9
  41. business 15
  42. Byron, Lord 14
  43. Cagan, Marty 8
  44. Calvino, Italo 21
  45. Camus, Albert 13
  46. care 6
  47. Carruth, Shane 15
  48. Cegłowski, Maciej 6
  49. Cervantes, Miguel de 7
  50. chance 11
  51. change 16
  52. Chiang, Ted 4
  53. childhood 6
  54. Chimero, Frank 17
  55. choice 8
  56. cities 51
  57. Clark, Robin 3
  58. Cleary, Thomas 8
  59. Cleary, J.C. 8
  60. code 20
  61. collaboration 18
  62. collections 31
  63. color 23
  64. commonplace 11
  65. communication 31
  66. community 7
  67. complexity 11
  68. connection 24
  69. constraints 25
  70. construction 9
  71. content 9
  72. Corbusier, Le 13
  73. Coyier, Chris 4
  74. craft 66
  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
  82. culture 13
  83. curiosity 11
  84. cycles 7
  85. Danielewski, Mark Z. 4
  86. darkness 28
  87. Darwin, Will 10
  88. data 8
  89. death 38
  90. Debord, Guy 6
  91. decisions 10
  92. design 131
  93. details 31
  94. Dickinson, Emily 9
  95. Dieste, Eladio 4
  96. discovery 9
  97. doors 7
  98. Dorn, Brandon 11
  99. drawing 23
  100. Drucker, Peter F. 15
  101. Duany, Andres 18
  102. Eatock, Daniel 4
  103. economics 13
  104. efficiency 7
  105. Eisenman, Peter 8
  106. Eliot, T.S. 14
  107. emotion 8
  108. ending 14
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  110. Eno, Brian 4
  111. ethics 14
  112. euphony 38
  113. Evans, Benedict 4
  114. evolution 9
  115. experience 14
  116. farming 8
  117. fashion 11
  118. features 25
  119. feedback 6
  120. flaws 10
  121. Flexner, Abraham 8
  122. food 16
  123. form 19
  124. Fowler, Martin 4
  125. Franklin, Ursula M. 30
  126. friendship 6
  127. fun 7
  128. function 31
  129. games 13
  130. gardens 26
  131. Garfield, Emily 4
  132. Garfunkel, Art 6
  133. geography 8
  134. geometry 18
  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
  147. Heinrich, Bernd 7
  148. Herbert, Frank 4
  149. Heschong, Lisa 27
  150. Hesse, Herman 6
  151. history 13
  152. Hoffman, Yoel 10
  153. Hofstadter, Douglas 6
  154. home 15
  155. Hoy, Amy 4
  156. Hoyt, Ben 5
  157. html 11
  158. Hudlow, Gandalf 4
  159. humanity 16
  160. humor 6
  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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  201. Kramer, Karen L. 10
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  203. Kuma, Kengo 18
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  206. life 59
  207. light 31
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  209. love 26
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  211. Lupton, Ellen 11
  212. Luu, Dan 8
  213. Lynch, Kevin 12
  214. MacIver, David R. 8
  215. MacWright, Tom 5
  216. Magnus, Margaret 12
  217. making 77
  218. management 14
  219. Manaugh, Geoff 27
  220. Markson, David 16
  221. Mars, Roman 13
  222. material 39
  223. math 16
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  225. meaning 33
  226. media 16
  227. melancholy 52
  228. memory 29
  229. metaphor 10
  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
  247. networks 15
  248. Neustadter, Scott 3
  249. Noessel, Christopher 7
  250. notetaking 35
  251. novelty 11
  252. objects 16
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  256. Ott, Matthias 4
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  260. patterns 11
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  324. skill 17
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  326. Smith, Cyril Stanley 29
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  328. Smith, Rach 4
  329. socializing 7
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  331. software 68
  332. solitude 12
  333. Somers, James 8
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  335. sound 14
  336. space 20
  337. Speck, Jeff 18
  338. spirit 10
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  342. Ström, Matthew 13
  343. style 30
  344. Sun, Chuánqí 15
  345. symbols 12
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  348. Sōseki, Natsume 8
  349. Tanaka, Tomoyuki 9
  350. Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō 15
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  360. Tolkien, J.R.R. 6
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  365. truth 15
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progress

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  • Most advanced yet acceptable

    There is an apparent reluctance among consumers to accept designs that are too radically different from what they claim to supersede, for when, for when familiar things are redesigned too dramatically the function they perform can be less than obvious and thus possibly suspect. Loewy summarized the phenomenon by using the acronym MAYA, standing for "most advanced yet acceptable."

    Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things
    • ux
    • progress
  • You can get anywhere from anywhere

    And if you can get anywhere from anywhere,
    You can start anywhere
    And end anywhere.
    There is no single necessary order.

    Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing
    • progress
    • ending
  • You need to make the step forward

    Throughout a racing season there is constant, relentless pressure on the designer to keep making design improvements. But there is a limit to what can be achieved with any car design, before a jump has to be made to basically a new design, an innovation. As Gordon Murray says, ‘Given the situation and the pressure at any one time, you do get to the brick wall...I mean you're doing all these normal modifications, you know you can't go any quicker, you need to make the step forward.’

    In the midst of the pressure, the fervour, the panic, he ‘used to get breakthroughs, I mean I used to get like suddenly a mental block's lifted.’

    Gordon Murray, Winning by Design: The Methods of Gordon Murray
    1. ​​The Structure of Scientific Revolutions​​
    2. ​​Mediocratopia​​
    • progress
  • To do something well you have to like it

    If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.

    Paul Graham, How to do what you love
    • pain
    • progress
  • If you can't beat the classics

    Choi: I love [this contemporary banana cream pie] because sometimes new presentations create that iconic or nostalgic thing, but then they don't taste like nostalgia. But this one tastes like a banana cream pie.

    Puck: So many young chefs today forget that food has to be delicious. If it's not delicious, why do it? If it's just interesting, you go once, that's it – "okay, I get it, but I don't want to go back."

    Choi: I hear you chef. That's what I teach my cooks. I say, "You can do anything you want, but if you can't beat a banana cream pie, then the banana cream pie still wins." In most cases they don't. They can't beat the original.

    Jon Favreau, Roy Choi & Wolfgang Puck, The Chef Show: Wolfgang Puck
    • food
    • nostalgia
    • progress
  • The Evolution of Useful Things

    A Book by Henry Petroski

    Here, then, is the central idea: the form of made things is always subject to change in response to their real or perceived shortcomings, their failures to function properly. This principle governs all invention, innovation, ingenuity.

    1. ​​Spike and spon​​
    2. ​​Shaped and reshaped​​
    3. ​​Form follows failure​​
    4. ​​Their wrongness is somehow more immediate​​
    5. ​​A small corner of the world of things​​
    1. ​​The evolution of devices​​
    • form
    • function
    • invention
    • progress
    • failure
  • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

    A Book by Thomas Kuhn
    1. ​​You need to make the step forward​​
    • science
    • philosophy
    • progress
  • The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge

    An Essay by Abraham Flexner
    press.princeton.edu
    1. ​​A curious fact​​
    2. ​​Roaming and capricious​​
    3. ​​Use​​
    4. ​​Freedom​​
    5. ​​The Institute for Advanced Study​​
    1. ​​The research agenda​​
    2. ​​The technology shelf​​
    • knowledge
    • learning
    • discovery
    • progress
    • experiments
  • The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.

    An Article by Matt Might
    matt.might.net
    Image from matt.might.net on 2020-12-22 at 11.20.16 AM.jpeg

    Imagine a circle that contains all of human knowledge.
    By the time you finish elementary school, you know a little.
    By the time you finish high school, you know a bit more.
    With a bachelor's degree, you gain a specialty.
    A master's degree deepens that specialty:
    Reading research papers takes you to the edge of human knowledge.
    Once you're at the boundary, you focus.
    You push at the boundary for a few years.
    Until one day, the boundary gives way.
    And, that dent you've made is called a Ph.D..
    Of course, the world looks different to you now.
    So, don't forget the bigger picture.
    Keep pushing.

    • knowledge
    • science
    • progress
    • research
  • Stepping stones in possibility space

    An Article by Gordon Brander
    subconscious.substack.com

    If we try to cross this lake by following only the stepping stones that lead toward our objective, we’ll soon get stuck. But what if we let go of our objectives? What if we focused on trying to find new stepping stones instead? This is novelty search. Instead of looking for something specific, you look for something new.

    Novelty search isn’t just random, it’s chance plus memory. Together, these ingredients do something interesting.

    ...Stepping stones are also combinatorial. Each new stepping stone we discover expands our potential to find even more stepping stones. Collecting stepping stones is a luck maximization algorithm. By collecting and combining stepping stones, we might arrive at our destination by accident, or somewhere more interesting!

    • chance
    • knowledge
    • progress
    • novelty
    • evolution
    • invention
  • Stepping out of the firehose

    An Article by Benedict Evans
    www.ben-evans.com

    In 1800, if you’d said that you wanted something ‘made by hand’, that would be meaningless - everything was handmade. But half a century later, it could be a reaction against the age of the machine - of steam and coal-smoke and ‘dark satanic mills.’ The Arts and Crafts movement proposed slow, hand-made, imperfect craft in reaction to mass-produced ‘perfection’ (and a lot of other things besides). A century later this is one reason I’m fascinated by the new luxury goods platforms LVMH and Kering, or indeed Supreme. How do you mass-manufacture, mass-market and mass-retail things whose entire nature is supposedly that they’re individual?

    ...we keep building tools, but also we let go. That’s part of the progression - Arts and Crafts was a reaction against what became the machine age, but Bauhaus and futurism embraced it. If the ‘metaverse’ means anything, it reflects that we have all grown up with this now, and we’re looking at ways to absorb it, internalise it and reflect it in our lives and in popular culture - to take ownership of it. When software eats the world, it’s not software anymore.

    1. ​​Things that don't scale​​
    2. ​​Dark satanic mills​​
    • hypermedia
    • progress
    • society
    • technology
  • How do you know when your paintings are finished?

    A Quote by Gerhard Richter
    matthiasott.com

    When nothing disturbs me and I have no idea what to do more, what I could add or destroy. This is very surprising, often, when I’m painting, again and again, every day and it feels like it is never-ending […] and it will never become a good painting. And suddenly, it’s finished. Oh! Good. Thanks.

    1. ​​Painting With the Web​​
    • perfection
    • progress
    • ending
  • One Tenth of a Second

    An Article by Venkatesh Rao
    studio.ribbonfarm.com

    The details are fascinating, but the central argument — that the birth of modernity can be traced to a meta-crisis spawned by the 0.1s problem — is worth understanding and appreciating whether or not you’re a time nerd like me.

    There is no convenient leitmotif, comparable to the 0.1s problem, for our contemporary version of the rhyming conditions, but something very similar to the “tenth of a second crisis” is going on today. I suspect our Great Weirding too involves some sort of limiting factor on human cognition that we haven’t yet properly wrapped our minds around. It isn’t reaction time, but something analogous.

    • time
    • analogy
    • progress
    • cognition
  • Become a person who actually does things

    An Article by Neel Nanda
    www.lesswrong.com

    If there’s one thing you take from this post, let it be this: notice the next time you agonize over a choice, or pass up an opportunity. And ask yourself not “what is the right decision” but rather “which decision will get me closer to the kind of person I want to be”.

    • wisdom
    • choice
    • progress
  • Four stages of competence

    An Idea
    en.wikipedia.org
    Image from en.wikipedia.org on 2020-10-10 at 10.56.10 AM.png

    In psychology, the four stages of competence, or the "conscious competence" learning model, relates to the psychological states involved in the process of progressing from incompetence to competence in a skill.

    1. Unconscious incompetence
    2. Conscious incompetence
    3. Conscious competence
    4. Unconscious competence
    1. ​​Good design can copy​​
    • learning
    • skill
    • progress
  • Life-friendly design

    An Article by Ralph Ammer
    ralphammer.com
    Image from ralphammer.com on 2020-07-27 at 5.02.21 PM.gif

    I suggest that our industrial heritage has been an important preliminary stage. The next step is to carefully examine and implement design values that nurture our joy of life. Just like our “industrial design” illustrated our industrial values, a life-friendly design could express our biophilic values.

    This optimistic design approach differs from naive nostalgia or fear of extinction. There is no way back to nature but only forward to nature.

    • nature
    • industry
    • progress

    See also: Interaction design is dead. What now?


See also:
  1. knowledge
  2. science
  3. learning
  4. ending
  5. invention
  6. food
  7. nostalgia
  8. nature
  9. industry
  10. philosophy
  11. discovery
  12. experiments
  13. wisdom
  14. choice
  15. pain
  16. skill
  17. perfection
  18. research
  19. time
  20. analogy
  21. cognition
  22. ux
  23. form
  24. function
  25. failure
  26. hypermedia
  27. society
  28. technology
  29. chance
  30. novelty
  31. evolution
  1. Henry Petroski
  2. Jon Favreau
  3. Roy Choi
  4. Wolfgang Puck
  5. Ralph Ammer
  6. Thomas Kuhn
  7. Abraham Flexner
  8. Neel Nanda
  9. Paul Graham
  10. Gerhard Richter
  11. Matt Might
  12. Verlyn Klinkenborg
  13. Gordon Murray
  14. Venkatesh Rao
  15. Benedict Evans
  16. Gordon Brander