I recently ran across this quote[1]:
*“When I started out in my career, design was seen as a necessary evil,
especially in relation to technology. It moved into this phase where all of
the sudden people saw design as a corporate identity thing, like ‘all of
our products need to look alike.’ In the early 1990s, it moved into
innovation for innovation’s sake. And then there started being this shift,
driven somewhat by Apple, where people began to understand that design was
what made them want your technology to be part of their lives."*
- Robert Brunner, industrial designer who worked for many years at Apple
and now runs his own design studio.
It really struck me as relevant to the changes we have seen/hope to see at
the foundation, w/r/t design's role.
Have a nice weekend all,
Josh
[1] -
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/what-apple-thought-t…
Josh Clark on design principles for addressing flaws in machine learning.
(via waxy.org)\
"The answer machines have an overconfidence problem. It’s not only a
data-science problem that the algorithm returns bad conclusions. It’s a
problem of presentation: the interface suggests that there’s one true
answer, offering it up with a confidence that is unjustified.
So this is a design problem, too. The presentation fails to set appropriate
expectations or context, and instead presents a bad answer with
matter-of-fact assurance. As we learn to present machine-originated
content, we face a very hard question: how might we add some productive
humility to these interfaces to temper their overconfidence?
I have ideas."
https://bigmedium.com/speaking/design-in-the-era-of-the-algorithm.html
Yours,
Chris Koerner
Community Liaison - Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation
I have been using Things for 8 years (Except for a year I spent in the
wilderness when I searched for a personal todo app that could also be a
shared team app as well).
It was always the best native experience on Apple platforms - they won an
Apple design award, but they were always slow to update (Another reason I
attempted to look elsewhere). Personally, it was also the most “natural”
todo app I have used. It fits my mental model extremely well with a light
but not onerous GTD model.
Last month they released version 3… and it’s absolutely amazing. The amount
of care that went into every UI element, action and animation is simply
incredible.
I admittedly hesitated to buy it for a few days as it is one of the most
expensive suite of apps to buy, but I finally obught the iPhone app today
and was blown away.
This is the app that allows me to stay organized - so if you are in the
Mac/IPhone ecosystem, I can’t recommend it enough. But even if you don’t
want to buy it, I think it is worth watching videos one the UI or at least
buying the iPhone version to play with it and study the UI.
One last thing, it is on sale right now. So if you are tempted you may want
to grab it soon.
https://culturedcode.com/things/
--
Corey Floyd
Engineering Manager
Reading
Wikimedia Foundation
cfloyd(a)wikimedia.org