Sporadic notes, thoughts, and scraps shared for remembering later
I have some side interests only obvious from my digital fingerprints if you look really closely. Some, tho, are almost invisible.
That said, here’s a clip of a video referencing a very different medium than I design in, but still resonated:
I like to make the most extreme thing in some certain way … and then bringing it back to more normal. You’ll feel if you’re making something really crazy, [and] you’ll notice [more easily] what’s happening and what’s going on in the design.
Something seems to have changed at Meetup.
The once essential service for connecting people together — which went into a steep decline after it began charging fees more than a decade ago — seems to be reawakened.
Recently, I’ve been getting invites to new events hosted by Meetup events I once belonged to. They are unfortunately not the sign of a community coming back together.
By way of example, one Toronto group formed around augmented reality is now hosting online-only (Pacific Timezone coded) sessions offering practice in navigating difficult conversations.A quick check finds the similar thing happening to a Montreal tech group and there are at least a few others like it.
Some are now hosted by the same “person,” so this might be a one-off, but I have my doubts. Regardless it’s a reminder of much of a graveyard the web has become, as well as there are always people will always find a way to exploit the remains.
Today is the middle of July.
Yesterday was a new moon, and this morning the sun was red with the haze of fire.
Soon I’ll kick-off a new phase myself.
New job, new routines, lots of changes.
This is just here to remind me later of how it all began.
This is has been saved in my reading list for a while, but finally started working through it. Not bad.
I think.
Haven’t built my own iOS app, but tempted to now try.
A few days ago, Garfield, the newspaper comic featuring the fat cat of the same name, turned 48. Seven years after his debut, he was famous enough to have an interactive “Touch Pulse” phone made in his likeness.1
Forty years after that, his remains, in telephone form were still washing up on the beaches of Brittany.
This is the story of the people his plastic presence has touched:
Worth reading the back story of that mini-doc, as well, to appreciate tale a bit more.
Technically, the second generation of a phone made to look like the napping cat. ↩
Jotting down a couple of hypotheses on how AI affects the practice of product design. They’re thoughts developed from real observation and exposure, salted with ideas from many others. Although not ground breaking, I felt it worth capturing to a least provide a reference point for myself to test or evolve from.
The benefit offered by the LLM is not that it can create code (or create a PRD, or a design, or a working prototype) it’s that it creates a medium in which experts from a variety of disciplines can collaborate on the actual object, not a model, through their own preferred toolkits.
A designer can manipulate shapes on a canvas that generates code the developer can iterate on in turn changing the shapes the designer is manipulating, all of it being informed by the business rules that can themselves by updated and change the environment, too. (An early term for this I used was a “Living PRD”)
Teams concurrently collaborate, reaching solutions sooner because there’s no handover; the outputs, and insights, are real-time.
The explicit intent of a design review (or any similar process) is to make the end result better. The implicit benefit, though, is in upleveling the team’s own skills. By actively exploring what is meets, misses, or exceeds a goal experts pass along they’re experience to non-experts.
The quality of everyone’s work improves. This is how to make space for those entering a practice to grow and learn.
Workable designs can easily be created by AI, and maybe they are better than those anyone else on the team might individually produce. Highlighting why the design, be it human- or AI-created, works helps reveal the underlying principles; stressing it to show where the design breaks, exposes the wisdom.
The knock-on effect is that these ceremonies, done well, remind people why they matter by highlighting the skills they each uniquely have to share.
As someone who assigned a keyboard shortcut to the interrobang (! + ?), I was happily to discover, via Keith Houston, another niche punctation: the quasiquote. Invented 82 years ago in a fanzine, the punctuation leveraged the ability to overstrike characters easily with a typewriter.
What I really love about it is how it introduces the idea of human fallibility into the myth of objective truth. Much of the work modern (post-WWII) journalism has been done to confirm the veracity of a quote. Anything words contained by quotation marks were words actually spoken (or at least presented legibly).
But what if you couldn’t capture the quote exactly, but were able to repeat it the gist of it accurately?
How would you treat that?
Most journalistic style guides say leave it unquoted. The quasiquote was invented to fix that. By combining a quote, and overstriking it with a hyphen, fanzines were able to share the essence of what was said in a way that kept the words flowing.
As zines (and everything else written) moved off of typewriters on to computers, the ability to overtype the punctation mark disappeared.
That said, Houston offered a path to its resurrection, and I was tempted to refine it further with more semantic markup.
Style rule:
<style>
q {
quotes: "“" "”" "'" "'";
}
q.quasi::before, q.quasi::after {
text-decoration: from-font line-through;
padding: 0 0.2rem;
}
</style>
HTML usage:
<p>Ned Brooks demonstrated to Keith Houston
<q class="quasi">the quasiquote wasn't a
flash in the pan</q></p>
Rendered as:
Ned Brooks demonstrated to Keith Houston
the quasiquote wasn't a flash in the pan