I increasingly think AI has created a new cultural category: consumption experienced as production. You can spend hours prompting images, code, videos, stories, and ideas and feel intensely engaged throughout the process. It feels active rather than passive. But often what is happening is that you are consuming an endless stream of machine-generated novelty, customised precisely to your tastes.
The cultural challenge of AI may not be distinguishing human-generated content from AI-generated content. It may be distinguishing genuine authorship from highly personalised entertainment.
“For my part, I've always held the most important role of designers is fighting for the coherency, simplicity, and visual communication needed to humanize technology in a way that makes it work for people, not the other way around. New tools don't change this. New ways of working together do.”
Incoming Apple CEO John Ternus gave commencement speech at Penn Engineering School in 2024.
He does version of Steve Jobs “paint both sides of the fence even if other people don’t know” attention-to-detail story…about screws for the Cinema Dislay monitor:
“Here’s my first [advice]: the care that you put into your work really matters. My first project at Apple was the Cinema Display. It was a large desktop monitor. It had a beautiful clear plastic enclosure that was held together with some screws coming in from the back. These screws were made of stainless steel, and the head of every screw was machined to have a pattern of concentric grooves that shimmered like a CD when light moved across it. I should probably say, if some of you have never seen a CD before, you can ask your parents afterward.
At some point in my first year, I found myself at a supplier facility. I was far away from home, it was well past midnight. I was using a magnifying glass to count the number of grooves on the head of this screw, which, remember, lives on the back of the display. And I was arguing with the supplier because these parts had 35 grooves, they were supposed to have 25.
I distinctly remember stepping back for a minute and thinking to myself, “What the hell am I doing? Is this normal?” And I thought about it, and I realized it might not be normal, but it’s right. It’s right because I’d already spent months working on that product, and if you’re going to spend that much time on something, you should put in your very best effort. Maybe a customer notices, maybe they don’t, but either way, whenever I saw one of those displays on someone’s desk, it mattered to me to know that my teammates and I had considered everything about it and done the very best job we could.”
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H/T to @kevg1412 for flagging this: https://t.co/mXrkvpfMej
okay I guess I have to talk about Péter Magyar here.
Let me just start with saying, in a very unladylike way, that you guys seem to have zero clue what happened in Hungary in the last two years, you completely miss the point, and you're a disappointing bunch.
Let's go.
I asked the grocery-store girl where the imitation crab is, and she had no idea what I was talking about, and then I tried to explain it to her and realized I had no idea what I was talking about either.
It's becoming disturbingly possible that the only reason we raided Venezuela was so Pres. Trump could extort the Noble Prize from it's rightful laureate, and the only reason Pres. Trump is trying to tear NATO to pieces over Greenland is because Norway refused to give him the Nobel Prize in the first place.
There's no strategy. There's no doctrine. This is all just about Donald Trump's sense of insecurity and resentment toward those who don't think he's everything he thinks himself to be.
If you don't get why @kajakallas joked that given the state of the world, we should start drinking, here Tom Nichols' @RadioFreeTom latest article makes even this teetotaller think about it.
https://t.co/Z8vlWlhYUn
Most product feedback sucks. It's an immediate gut reaction: "Ooh, I love this!" or "Meh."
Want to get better at actually giving useful, actionable product feedback? Run yourself through these 7 questions.
1) What is the user journey to get here?
You can’t furnish a room if you don’t know how someone lives.
So learn the context: Who is the user? When do they use this product? Why? How did they arrive here, and what's on their mind?
Don't critique unless you know this.
2) What do we want users to feel and achieve here?
“If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.”
Let’s understand what a successful outcome looks like before we start lobbing feedback about the design.
3) How important is this page/experience?
In a perfect world, we make everything perfect.
In the real world, let's spend more collective energy on the stuff that really matters. More eyeballs? More high-stakes? = more thorough inspection of every detail.
4) What is our scope/timeline/team?
If speed is critical, let’s get the greatest bang for the least effort. If we have more time and people, then let's remove constraints (#7) and dream bigger. The "best" design differs according to the time/people/money you have.
5) For every proposed design change, am I confident it is better that what currently exists?
If no:
a) cut it
b) iterate on / improve the design
c) get more user feedback
d) A/B test it
6) What can we remove from this experience and have it work just as well?
When faced with a problem, we bias toward adding stuff to solve it rather than removing. So gut check if it's necessary.
7) If we could throw all our constraints away, would we still design it like this?
While we can't typically throw all constraints away (see #4), it's still worthwhile to ask because we accept some things as constraints (due to legacy, etc) when they really aren't.