Philosophy
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What is a human life worth?
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1 min read
A few years ago, when he was in his mid-40s, Zell Kravinsky gave almost all of his $45 million real estate fortune to health-related charities, retaining only his modest family home in Jenkintown, near Philadelphia, and enough to meet his family’s ordinary expenses. After learning that thousands of people with failing kidneys die each year…
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Thought for Friday: Relax
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1 min read
Two researchers at Pace University here in New York compared results from dozens of studies of thousands of employees in 21 occupations to find which exhibit more stressors. Did fire fighters and police officers come out on top? No. Financial and business people did. We worry more about poor job fit, management problems, and work/home…
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Peter Rowe on design thinking
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1 min read
…design has often occupied an ambivalent position, being characterized as either a form of fine art or a form of technical science. From all perspectives, however, design appears to be a fundamental means of inquiry by which man realizes and gives shape to ideas of dwelling and settlement. Furthermore, design is a practical form of…
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Chuck Owen on design thinking
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1 min read
Design thinking, as a complement to science thinking, embodies a wide range of creative characteristics as well as a number of other special qualities of distinct value to decision makers. In advisory roles, properly prepared design professionals could make substantial contributions to a process now dominated by political and economic views…. I would nominate for…
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Dave Pollard on design thinking
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1 min read
…the rule set above is a mechanism for the intellectual process of intentional creation. It is much more than just imagination, or invention, or creativity, or project planning, though all of these are a part of it.
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Maeda’s simplicity blog
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1 min read
Mike Lee just told me about John Maeda’s new Simplicity blog (where John is coincidentally blogging about Mike.) While simplicity is a noble pursuit, we live in a complicated world and I was curious to know how Maeda could suddenly pounce on us with such a manifesto while surrounded by the complexity of work at…
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Alexander and Eisenman
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1 min read
Katarxis reprints this wonderful 1982 debate between Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman, Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture. Here’s Alexander being snarky: It’s very interesting to have this conversation. If this weren’t a public situation, I’d be tempted to get into this on a psychiatric level. This whole issue of Katarxis feels like a Christopher…
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Exposing Company-Customer Tension
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2 min read
Not long ago I wrote about balanced design, design that benefits both the company and the customer. There’s an evident tension between company and customer: companies want to do less, make more money, gather more information, etc. Customers want better products and services, spend less money, retain more privacy, etc. The two parties meet somewhere…
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Everyone’s punk rock band
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3 min read
The nice people at Amazon recently delivered a book on design history along with all-time quarterback from Death Cab for Cutie songwriter/frontman Ben Gibbard, a lo-fi homemade recording. Reading one while listening to the other is oddly complementary. Gibbard, playing simple and melancholy pop songs, self-reflexively sings of his relationship to his punk rock influences……
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Balanced design
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2 min read
In the past I’ve said that design is a conversation, a dialog that should be enjoyable for all parties. Last night at the NYC IA Salon we discussed a similar idea, where the designer creates something that either benefits the client, the customer, or both. For example, Bella mentioned how some desks at the U.S.…
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Conversational Design
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2 min read
Peterme-the-guru created a drum to beat, ‘Through my work, what I’ve observed is that the web is all about managing expectations . Setting expectations, and then fulfilling them. That’s it. You do that right, and you’re golden. The term I have right now for dealing with this is Explicit Design’ An excellent drum, one that…
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Dieter Rams: Ten Points
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1 min read
Dieter Rams: ‘I have distilled the essentials of my design philosophy into ten points.‘ Good design is innovative. Good design makes a product useful. Good design is aesthetic. Good design makes a product understandable. Good design is honest. Good design is unobtrusive. Good design is long-lasting. Good design is thorough down to the last detail.…
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an infinite number of small reversible steps
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1 min read
Stefano Mazzocchi’s email overfloweth with quotable wisdom: ‘It’s exactly like thermodynamics, where a infinite number of small reversible steps is more efficient than a small number of big but not-reversible steps.‘ ‘…good ideas and bad code build communities, the other three combinations do not. This is extremely hard to understand, it’s probably the most counter-intuitive…
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The Unböring Manifesto
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1 min read
http://www.unboring.com/ Form, function, and affordability. This is the key to IKEA’s philosophy. The egalitarian mindset seduces me. ‘For us, price is the magic ingredient. It divides the indispensable from the unattainable. And so we embrace a third dimension of furniture design – an affordable price.‘ Of course price point is always part of a proper…
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Complexity and Cars
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1 min read
Go read Haughey and come back. No really, go ‘head. It’ll just take a sec. Back? Interesting, right? That Niklaus Wirth quote is how I feel about ideas like emergence. It’s interesting, but trying to replicate them in a product isn’t necessarily desirable design practice. It’s just, interesting. Regarding the BMW, I used to drive…