Two new articles were published recently in the excellent series about women designers of the 20th century. The first one if about Aino Aalto, the brilliant, award winning designer. The other one is about Mimi Vandermolen, which I found very fascinating since I never really thought about interior design for cars before.
There was a discussion while I was on a holiday between people who think we should stop adding features to the web for a while, and those who think that if we do so, the web will lose. Even if this discussion doesn’t really interest you, it’s an interesting read: many new features you may not have heard of yet are mentioned.
Johan Huijkman answers the question if accessibility is that easy, then why doesn’t everybody do it? by breaking the WCAG checklist down to four points: keyboard, semantics, screenreader and colour. If you make sure those are fine, your app is much more accessible.
There are some brilliant quotes in the article Design Machines, how to survive the digital apocalypse. And many, many painful truths. I was nodding all the time with a sad smile on my face while reading it. That Travis Gertz certainly knows.
The last few years I couldn’t help but think that all the real exciting things — when it comes to connected devices — have already happened. The first iPhone and Android phones were really exciting. All next versions were small improvements. I thought tablets were pretty exciting as well, but fewer people agreed with me. And I find all the other stuff that’s been released recently — glasses, watches — to be minor improvements; at most.
I just came back from a wonderful three week holiday. While I was enjoying the sun, the sea, and the food with my family, my server generated 231 new works of art:
Lang geleden heb ik eens voor een klant gewerkt die er op stond dat de white papers die ze aanboden alleen gedownload konden worden in ruil voor een e-mailadres. Ik heb heel erg mijn best gedaan om ze ervan te overtuigen dat een blog toch echt een veel prettigere manier is om kennis te delen. Tevergeefs. Het bedrijf vond dat het niet hoefde na te denken over gebruiksvriendelijkheid, want ze hadden namelijk een monopoly. Ik had die klant stante pede moeten ontslaan. Voor zulke klanten kún je geen goede producten maken. Maar helaas, ik was niet de baas. En niet veel later begon mijn eigen bedrijf zelf ook white papers in ruil voor een e-mailadres aan te bieden. Gelukkig vond ik niet lang daarna een nieuwe, veel betere baan.
There is this company that creates sunglasses that let some colourblind people see actual colours. Here’s a wonderful video of somebody who gets to try a pair of these glasses. He freaks out! Everything is so beautiful! If you don’t know what the movie is about you would think he was tripping.
Jenny Judge and Julia Powles argue that we need to look at the internet of things in a smarter way. In a similar way like Bauhaus used to look at things: when you look at it, it should be obvious what it does. It should be obvious what data is collected and where it goes, just like the Centre Pompidou in Paris. If we don’t start creating things in this manner, our basements will end up filled with huge piles of silly — but connected — crap. Or we end up in a world where all the things we use are owned by data hungry marketers and lawyers.
Digital product designers should not only think about the products they create, but also about what influence this software had on the world. If designers were the people who decided stuff, we would only have wonderful stuff and a site like Dark Patterns would cease to exist. But unfortunately we are not the (only) people who get to decide what’s been created, as we can see by all the evil cruft out there.
Yesterday I linked to this thought provoking article by Cennydd Bowles. I my description I only focused on dark patterns, but the article is about much more than that. It’s about the fact that we, the people who create digital stuff, stuff that everybody in the world might use, have an obligation to think about what our creations do to this world. In his excellent collection of links, Jeremy Keith mentioned this article with a similar topic that compares software to medicine and drugs. Definitely worth your time.
I once had a client who insisted on sharing their white papers only if the person interested would leave their e-mail address first. I tried very hard to convince them to simply publish their knowledge on a blog. To no avail. The company in question didn’t need to think about usability, they said, since they had a monopoly. I should have fired this client. If you want to fuck things up, do it without me. But unfortunately I was not the boss. Not much later the company I worked for started publishing white papers behind e-mail forms as well. And not long after that fact I switched jobs.
Maciej Cegłowski is one of my favourite writers on the web. You should all read each and every letter he’s written on his website. And take your time for it. He writes long blog posts. Very long at times. But very good. His recent series about earthquakes — part 1 and part 2 — are a good example. Fantastic. His blogposts are hilarious and painful at the same time.
Yesterday I retweeted a tweet by Trent Walton that praised an article that beautifully describes how much the web has changed. Hossein Derakhshan, the author of the article, was jailed in Iran for six years for writing blog posts. He came out a few months ago and didn’t just find a changed world, he found a changed web. At the time he was jailed, web logs were powerful. People used to visit blogs a few times a day to see if there were any updates. And updates meant either new, insightful (or infuriating) articles, or new comments. This was how political blogs worked, and it was also how the web community worked. This is how I learned my job. By following blogs and reading valuable comments.