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Putting this here for me; maybe you need it too.
The best revenge is to refuse their values. To embody the kind of living — free, colorful, open — they want to snuff out.
So when they dehumanize, you humanize.
When they try to fracture and divide people, you connect with people.
When they try to curtail the freedom to associate, you gather.
When they try to make it harder to speak your mind, you find your voice.
When they try to make you cynical, you double down on hope.
In summary, “The best revenge… is to live well, richly, [and] together”.
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The cynicism our current moment inspires appears to be, regrettably, universal. For millennials, who watched the better-world-by-design ship go down in real time, it’s hard-earned. We saw the idealist fantasy of creative autonomy, social impact, and purpose-driven work slowly unravel over the past decade, and are now left holding the bag. Gen Z designers have the same pessimism, but arrived at it from a different angle. They’re entering the field already skeptical, shaped by a job market in freefall and constant warnings of their own obsolescence. But the result is the same: an industry full of people who care deeply, but feel let down.
I still believe in good design. Everything is designed (intentionally or not), but little is designed well. I have a soft spot in particular for graphic design since that is where I started my career.
I hope what we’re seeing is a fallow period leading into a regroup where graphic designers, in particular, can re-propose their economic worth in a world where AI has trended visual design to the mean. But it’s hard to say that will happen because culture has gone through long periods of accepting mediocre design before. It may happen again and AI, while enabling it, won’t be the core reason it happens.
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When I heard Hayes describe how his phone buzzes in his pocket whenever there is breaking news, I was actually shocked. Do people really allow their devices to interrupt them on a random reinforcement schedule? I mean, no wonder the internet makes people go crazy.
People do; and it does.
Like Cory, I aggressively manage my notifications and have a fairly similar hierarchy to him. I’m slightly more permissive about what can silently appear on my notifications screen, but in general, a few messaging apps are the only apps that can vibrate my phone (who would ever turn on sound for notifs?!) or even show banners when I am in a different app. And certainly nothing like email, news, or other opt-in content gets through. If I am curious about what is in my work email, I intentionally check it.
But I hate algorithmic feeds. To explain why, I should explain how much I love non-algorithmic feeds.
This related, but separate part of his piece is worth reading all on its own. Feeds consume our attention and why would we not also aggressively and intentionally curate what we allow ourselves to see in them, similar to notifications?
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Social networking and media should have always been temporal. These should be thoughts and creations you’re okay with letting go of into the wind. Social platforms are a distribution channel at best, and a mechanism to garner some notice. Some apps have leaned into this: messages that disappear or vanish, time-boxed content, and auto-deletion.
Not everything is worthy of archival. In many instances, you’d even cringe at something you wrote ten, or even a year ago.
If you told someone that in the future we would be recording every conversation in public spaces and allow total strangers to read and refer to those conversations, indefinitely, I think most of us would agree that that future sounds like a dystopian hellscape. Yet this is most social media today. As Naz says in this excellent piece, “Not everything is worthy of archival”.
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Sometimes, that pause before ordering a second burger isn’t judgment. It’s a kind of latent wisdom. Sometimes, the social constraints we’re so eager to shed are the very things keeping us from our worst impulses.
As a designer, I love friction. Friction acts as a constraint and sets the outer bounds of what can be accomplished in an experience. Social constraints help inform the norms that guide us in our day-to-day.
To use another analogy, if we design a road to increase the throughput of cars, some drivers will immediately take advantage of the reduced friction by driving faster. As those drivers drive faster, others around them tend to respond by increasing their speed as well, until the throughput of the road once again reaches a place where the friction in its design is noticeable—usually through car crashes and violence against pedestrians or other non-car road users.
The next frontier of digital design can’t just be about making things easier. It has to be about understanding when friction serves a purpose.
Friction is often a feature; not a bug.
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No one actually wants software. We just want to get things done. Sometimes software helps. Often it gets in the way.
In my corporate design spaces right now there is a lot of talk of “designing for AI”, but I’m not sure anyone knows what that means yet. This piece by Cory Etzkorn does a good job of trying to articulate the problem at-hand.
In my more indie design spaces there is a lot of talk about whether or not LLM-based AI will be capable of meeting this need and how ethical a lot of the patterns we develop around it will be (or already are). Something to think about…
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Speaking of “magic” software, I really dislike “Magic Links”. I use a password manager and a link-based authentication flow not only circumvents it, but also requires me to open up an email client, retrieve a link, and manually use it to sign in. It’s a significantly longer process (with more friction) than allowing my password manager to fill in my credentials.
I’ve also been avoiding passkeys to-date because their implementations by various sites seem all over the place and “magic” in a high-friction way. Unknown “magic” is, well, bad magic. I don’t want to have to learn and understand the differences between how Amazon and GitHub—for example—treat passkeys, because right now they treat username/password/2FA authentication the same way.
Slightly later on, once the people running the website are convinced that passkeys really help with the user experience issues around magic links, they can prompt users to add passkeys after signing in, once every 90 days or so, or whenever they sign-in using the cross-device sign-in feature of passkeys
This flow proposed by Ricky Mondello makes the most sense to me and gives me a known path forward with passkeys without worrying about getting locked out of sites and services I currently have integrated in my password manager.
That said, I worry some sites will misinterpret “90 days” as 90 minutes (or some other nonsensical interval) that simply annoys everyone while providing no additional security or utility—looking at you, financial institutions :squinting_suspicious_eyes_emoji:
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There are so many products and services that people would want but are far too niche to be built and deployed in a profitable way. We’re starting to see very small services emerge, from research and consulting to career support and production shops, that are founded and led by just a few people, without the intention of ever scaling.
“[S]mall services emerge… led by just a few people, without the intention of ever scaling.” – this was my company even before AI and it was a good business. But it also wasn’t really a business because if I left or stopped working—poof—it’s gone. But if there had been a way to notably scale my income at the time without doing more work (or hiring), I would’ve tried it. Similarly, if there was a way to create a process around it that others could step into, that would’ve made it more valuable. It’ll be interesting to watch what happens here with AI.
Also:
In the era ahead, humans will crave more scarce, authentic, and offline experiences than ever before. We will crave small restaurant experiences with proud chefs. We will crave one-of-a-kind art infused with human story. We will crave theater and emotional films with deep meaning. We will crave shared experiences and live music. In the age of AI, there will be rampant demand for stuff that only humans can create.
I’ve said it before, but this is my hope. Reading about a business where AI drives everything, creates everything, communicates everything, and scales itself leaves me feeling… well, “bleh”. I think we’ll all be able to tell, to some extent. And in some business areas, we’ll be ok with the tradeoff for lower cost products (or faster service). But in other areas, many of us will a human touch.
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Nothing baffles me more than watching someone make a coffee order, ask for it “to go” only to sit at the cafe for an hour, later tossing their trash on the way out the door.
The pandemic absolutely helped normalized this and it breaks my brain. Five years after its onset and most coffee shops I frequent in LA have flipped their pre-pandemic default from re-usable containers to disposable trash. I even know a few that eliminated re-usable dishware entirely.
My rant wasn’t the point of Jen’s piece, but she touches on related themes:
My seemingly lifelong dedication to “economic mindfulness” has led to several everyday wares never appearing on my shopping lists
I love the term “economic mindfulness” – Jen has a great list of things she considers based on the physical and economic impact to her life, day-to-day.
We won’t solve systemic problems like climate change on a personal level, but one thing that I’ve never understood is the fatalistic take of, “well, I can’t make a difference, so changing my behavior isn’t worth it”.
People love flexibility and capitalism loves to hide the real costs of consumer decisions, but it might be helpful to realize we do not pay economically-realistic prices on many of the goods and services we consume.
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If the American government is slow-moving, it’s because rapid change is deadly when you’re talking about healthcare, social security checks, market regulations, food safety, or any of the other countless critical functions it performs. Those federal agencies are, quite simply, infrastructure. And as Deb Chachra showed in her excellent book, infrastructure is how a society invests in its future: in its ongoing economic, societal, and political stability.
In government, that infrastructure is built by laws, policies, and regulations. But regulations alone do not infrastructure make. Regulations require workers to become infrastructure: those workers who labor to understand new policies, how best to enact them, and then work to make them legible and understandable to the American public — and, yes, to enforce them. Without those federal workers, and their labor, these systems fall apart. And the architects of this assault on the federal workforce are keenly aware of that fact.
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For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American taxpayers.
Technology is political.
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It’s a testament to Forest Service workers’ belief in the fundamental value of our jobs that so many of us stuck with it, even when cushier options presented themselves, even when our work so often felt invisible and unappreciated.
As someone with deep ties to a rural area of Colorado, where much (most?) of the land is National Forest, National Monument, National Park, or generally public and BLM-managed, I fear for the long-term affects of the cuts to the U.S. Forest Service and related agencies.
Public land is one of the most amazing things about the United States. And the work these folks do is so often worse than underrecoginzed: it’s completely invisible to most Americans. But we’ll miss it when it’s too late—when under-staffed park resources are damaged, when under-managed forests are polluted, and when nobody has been checking in on the public lands we use for agriculture, resource gathering, and recreation.
Assurances that we’ll all find other jobs before too long miss the point. We don’t necessarily want other jobs. We don’t want sympathy. We want our work, and the places we’ve done that work, to be recognized and valued.
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I try not to link to social media threads here, but sometimes that’s where the good stuff resides.
If you wanted to crawl into my head and do a better job of articulating my anxiety and muddy thoughts around how AI has changed (or might? (or will??)) the trajectory of my career, Kyle Hughes has done it.
Granted, it almost has to be business as usual because what other option is there? Either it won’t happen or we’ll be homeless.
Right, like do I stay in a job longer than I would have before because it feels “secure”? Do I pretend several CEOs (named and unnamed) haven’t put a giant target on my back and apply to work for their companies, hoping to eek a few more years of pay out before AI sends me off into the sunset? What’s the best course of action in an environment like this? It’s unknowable, in my opinion.
What do we tell students?
Oof, yeah, this. I have several friends with kids at the “considering college” age and I do not envy that calculus right now.
My brain plugged along for 30 years without ever having the passing thought that my value could be automated. In some ways, I physically can’t comprehend it.
Same. It’s one thing to watch a job move another country and see different humans take it on at a cheaper rate; that’s comprehensible. But to be told that you—and any other human who does what you do on the planet—simply won’t be needed in the near (maybe less than 12 months) future is just something else! And, twist: good luck finding a new career that isn’t also similarly affected.
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Around the world, there are many craftspeople who do what they do out of love. Many are not ambitious, but they love the pursuit of their craft, mastering technique and making something beautiful. They can work many years happily in the satisfaction of what they’ve made.
I’ve been thinking a lot about craft lately, so Sarah Clatterbuck’s piece caught my eye. I don’t want to ruin the close for you, but the gist is that working with inquisitive people who care not only about how things work, but why they work, and enjoy making those things goes a long way to enjoying one’s career (and improving one’s own craft).
I’ve often been lucky to work with such people, but what’s been taking up cycles in my brain lately is this: what happens to craft in a world of AI?
There is a lot of mundane in my job. A good chunk of it I would be happy to have AI take away, but some of that mundane is integral to a process where I get deep enough in the details to notice things that someone else wouldn’t have noticed. I have to because I am driven by the “how” and “why” questions of design and software engineering. And also by the empathy to consistently imagine the person who will ultimately use the thing I’m making, and what they will experience.
Even in the best scenario where AI simply lifts us out of the drudgery, I worry that something will be lost in the learning process that helped me develop what I consider to be a high level of craft in my work. What replaces that? What becomes the craft if the idea is all that is needed to execute? Is that good or bad? Or maybe something altogether new that I can’t think of?
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LA is a city that works. LA is a city that dreams. The people there—friends and family and so so many strangers—are ready to work, are ready to look out for each other, are ready to dream in a way that only LA can dream and build something better from the ashes.
Every sunset ends in darkness. But it sets up the sunrise of a new day.
What is there to say? I am safe and gratefully unaffected, physically, but I’m at a bit of a loss for words after the horrific fire events in the city this month.
I appreciate the way Dan Sinker finishes his piece. Most cities are places built on dreams, but that is maybe more true in LA than anywhere else in the world. It’s the city where its own industry brings those dreams to life. It’s a city where the winter sun slants in just the right way to cast a dreamlike quality on the most mundane task, making it beautiful. It’s a city that can’t really decide what it is architecturally or in layout and in that way is a city that makes space for everyone.
The last few weeks were indeed a darkness.
I’m breaking my self-imposed conceit for 3 Things this week because I needed more LA missives and you might too.
From Mike Davidson’s very personal “47 Years Later, the Palisades Disappeared Overnight” –
When my dad explained what he was doing, he would point northeast to the hills behind us and tell us that if the winds didn’t die down, the fire miles in the distance would come towards our tiny little house and there would be trouble. As a small child, I don’t actually remember being scared about any of this. Every year there was a fire, the smoke was always so far away and so barely visible that it just seemed like anything else in life at the time. And besides, dads are superheroes to their children, so of course there was no danger.
And Snap CEO/Founder, Evan Spiegel, on the company’s official blog (Snap, née Snapchat, is headquarterd in Santa Monica), “Dear Los Angeles, I Love You” –
We are not the first community to face a megafire. We will not be the last. But we will use our strength, our ingenuity, and our love to create again and anew. Our city of great artists will add a new layer of paint to this beautiful canvas we call home.
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A coworking space is not a community. A subscriber list is not a community. A hundred one-on-one coffees is not a community—that’s just a practice. Now when those coffees recur, or we begin to host meetups, or those folks begin sharing resources with each other… then we might be onto something. Just as friendship requires an ongoing investment and repeatedly showing up—so does a community.
I’m still processing the election (as I’m sure many of us are). I appreciated Carly’s call to intentionally build community. Would more dinner parties in 2024 have changed the outcome of an election? I doubt it, but I don’t think it would have hurt.
Start where you are, with what you have, with who you know. Build slowly and intentionally.
Connecting with people will be an intention for me in the coming year.
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On the same theme as my own reflection on the election, friend Naz Hamid has written a piece that’s well worth your time. A brief excerpt:
“The feeling of disbelief is a privilege.
“I’m not surprised. Disappointed and angry, yes. But not surprised. I’ve experienced racism enough times in this country and gone through a lengthy process with immigration to know what this country truly is. Ironically, the racism I’ve experienced has occurred in cities. And despite being heightened to it when traveling through smaller parts of this country, I haven’t knowingly experienced it. The racism is here, in our backyards.
“But this country is unlike any other. There are good people here, aiming to truly make the world a better place.”
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“If the purpose of a system is what it does, and we don’t like what it does, then we have to change the system. And we change the system by making everyone involved, especially those in authority, feel urgency about changing the real-world impacts that a system has.”
Yes, yes! 🤌🏼
And this follow-on:
“In my own life, I’ve found the greatest reluctance to embrace this idea, and strongest rejection of its obvious truth, comes from the politically moderate, centrist-leaning suburban folks that I grew up around and spent the first decades of my life amongst.”
To be an unwitting systems observer (how I feel, not Anil’s term) is to be virtually incapable of seeing the way the systems around us define our lives and experience. It’s at the core of a recent article, and his experience of indifferent moderatism in the suburban core resonates significantly with my own experience growing up in the suburbs. When the systems are built for you, you tend to think of them as natural and immutable in the way a religious person might just assume their perfect deity deigned them to be so.
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we build meaning in our lives and this speech by John W. Gardner nails it:
“You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something.”
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Scott Belsky’s newsletter is worth the subscribe. I wanted to particularly call out his commentary on “collapsing the talent stack”. This tracks with how I also imagine AI will affect the design/product industry. We will see less niched titles doing micro tasks and more generalists. I’m not saying this is bad or good (I can make arguments in both directions), but business is going to expect increasingly-more from those of us that help craft product interfaces and feature roadmaps.
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This piece is already several month’s old, and it may not age well, but I suspect some element of the “snake eats tail” effect is unavoidable at both a technical and (more importantly) cultural level. Yes, everything is a remix, but what if the remix is increasingly limited, boring, and factually inaccurate?
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Lake Powell was always a fools errand. It hasn’t been at capacity in decades, and only rarely since its inception. It’s time to let it go and allow nature to restore the beautiful canyons and indigenous cultural sites that have long been covered.
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Heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. Please give it a read.
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Excellent reporting from Alissa Walker. It wouldn’t take much for most of us to substitute trips by any other mode for a few of our car trips, but the problem is that we think we don’t need to.
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Anxy’s Masculinity Issue is my first exposure to Anxy and it’s beautifully assembled.
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Recommended to me by my sister, this book gave me a fresh perspective on the Four Corners region of the American Southwest and the ancestors of the indigenous Puebloan peoples.