Los Angeles had a rail network, decimated it, and is slowly trying to rebuild it. I’m all for it, but I wish we would put a lot more weight behind BRT and use that to quickly rebuild the transit network LA deserves, backfilling with rail as the funding becomes available.
But when it turned out to be a deeply ruminative, unabashedly anti-fascist show with lavish production design and a recurring fixation on supply chains, it’s like it was crafted specifically to appeal to me personally.
I thorougly enjoyed Andor. And I’m by no means a Star Wars fan—I like it, but good stories need to stand on their own with excellent production quality and this one does.
Anil has collected a bunch of amazing “behind-the-scenes” videos on the people who helped craft the world of Andor.
The vibes are real and the lines are fuzzier than they’ve ever been, but there is still a communication gap between design and development—AI won’t solve it; it’ll help in some areas and exacerbate it in others. Excellent piece by Naz.
The asymmetry between designer and developers is an interesting one. In my experience, designers build more of a bridge to developers because of wanting to communicate better with them. Designers start to code (sometimes as a forcing function) because they want to prototype and bring their designs to life quicker — no longer static and in turn opening their design and development possibilities. Developers might not return this in kind as they can build functional products without deep design knowledge or interfaces can be constructed using UI frameworks and libraries. Engineers are less pressured to become designers. They are paid more to specialize. Their bridge is to collaborate closely with design rather than to become a designer.
This tracks with my experience. And if you look at the tech industry as a whole, it’s more rare and notable that a founding team includes a designer, but it’s almost required of a founding team to have an engineer.
While AI tools may bridge the divide between design and development by filling in missing context, I’m uncertain if this technological solution addresses the underlying communication problem — especially in an industry already stretched thin by time and resource constraints.
Unfortunatley, I see a lot of folks papering over the gap under the assumption that AI will effectively be able to do both jobs. If it can design and it can build the design, there’s no gap to worry about anymore… right?? (I suspect there will still be a gap to worry about.)