Home and your misanthropic tail lights
What stuck with me, what I’m contemplating, and one question worth asking
What stuck with me in January-March 2024
Nobody Is Home
By Luke Burgis
In this post, Luke Burgis recognizes something innate that reminded me of a conversation I had with a colleague a few weeks ago. My colleague said something that better articulated what I’d been chewing on: “Most people just want you to care. About them, about their problems, about the work they're doing.”
Luke’s resolution? “We should never assign work that we don’t have time to thoughtfully engage with.”
I think this also applies to how we design the way we work with people in the first place. The human touch matters.
Framing things: a personal essay
By Ben Strak
“It is easy to forget, or get distracted from the fact, that design is a form of research. We do not know in advance what will work and how exactly. We can prepare ourselves with all manner of frameworks and heuristics and references but at a certain point we just have to sit in the presence of the thing we are making and see what is and isn’t working. In my mind at least, ‘trusting the process’ isn’t so much the business of sticking to an approved sequence of activities but instead this steady and regular act of contemplation. The cultivation and practice of learning from what you’re doing, as you’re doing it.
I am frequently struck when mentoring junior designers by how headlong a rush the work feels. One thing after the other and no pause to consider what has been discovered before the next activity has already begun.
Work in other words, that would benefit from stepping back and framing things for a little while, before beginning again.”
The emphasis is mine. I believe that this applies to most work, not only design work.
Turn the Lights Back On
By Billy Joel
I stumbled on Billy Joel’s latest song and haven’t stopped listening to it since. I also found the music video mesmerizing.
A $5,600 tail light repair?
This piece examines how integrating systems and adding complexity has rendered cars nigh unfixable. Two things stood out to me. First, in many cases, the technologists creating features create them because they are exciting to create, not necessarily because they make life better.
Second, there’s an assumption that “occasions for the exercise of judgment and skill by individual human beings—such as holding a hand brake while feathering the clutch on a hill, or simply requiring a driver to turn his head to check a blind spot, or learn how to back up a trailer—should be eliminated whenever possible. People, in other words, are the weak link.”
I’m spotting this assumption everywhere now. And I find it unsettling.
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What I’m contemplating
I took a trip recently. As someone who dislikes everything about travel, I’m generally absorbed in surviving the experience, but in this case, I was left ruminating on how marvelous it is that one can do something like travel several states over in a mere matter of hours, get around without owning a mode of transportation, and order food they like directly to their door.1
I’m also wondering how we can ask someone else to turn around their work overnight, but when someone asks us to do that, it’s offensive. Why there’s a Harry Potter movie marathon on cable every time I travel. Where the line is between getting to know the people you serve and psychologically profiling them in a manner that’s skeevy.
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One question worth asking
How often do you forget to eat because you’re so engaged in what you’re doing?
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The marvel in no way causes me to want to travel more frequently.