I love this so freakin much. And it weirdly reminds me of how I learned design and development over 20 years ago: but having an idea in mind and cobbling together things to make it happen while learning along the way. During the era of product development where Process was highly valued I really struggled to explain the way I work because I was never formally trained. I'm excited for the next generation of designers; it's the current ones I'm more worried about.
Fearless experimentation. I wish the corporate world in Europe would learn from this. On the other hand, I also strictly am missing any thoughts on philosophy and aestehtics in your analysis of the future of design education.
I strongly believe we serve those rather than making things work fast. I am coding and designing and did my thesis on who it changed the role of designers in the digital age, yet from my last 10 years of industry experience, I find too often that actual design issues are not addressed and the purpose of a piece of software often is simply to collect souls, and make them continue using it.
The proposed process your describe is the one of neo-liberal disruption driven start up industries and I would not advice to abuse university education for this. Teaching people critical thinking that provides social change is not done by quick iterations and hyper fast deliveries.
Looking at the latest aattempts of pixelfed and mastodon or blue sky, their design is a copy of the horrible addiction mechanism built into social media apps from the get go. Substack by the way suffers the same falacy.
But of course from a job perspective, this makes sense, if your goal is to built minions for the new age. And yes I know from an American perspective success and paying of student loans is crucial, but does this strategy equip people with the adequate tools to challenge the status quo or simply grease the wheels built to alienate us. Just as the tools reduce peer interactions.
That said, I use them too heavily when prototyping. But I put huge gaps the discovery process to reflect, jump back to paper or penpot (time to truth alternatives to figma and co.) And read up on the potential corporate ties of the tools I am implementing. considerations lkke this will stick in the core of the software for years and are hard to easily remove. This is design decisions i don't want to leave to opinionated AIs run by psychopathic technocrats with a more and more openly communicommunicated fascination for autocrazy and fashism. It's as simple as that.
Using react instead of vanilla Javascript, your example, yes it is easier to do a tracking ar ap with ninantic and their powerful data based location apis, but at the cost of privacy and independence. Your are tied to them beyond the prototype phase if you use tools like this.
Design to me is a means to an end. What you have described is a machine that has a sole purpose but to regobble the crap of a failed conception of what digital products are.
This is a fantastic read, Carly 😀. Your insights really hit home. I recently wrote about the importance of understanding codebases, especially now with the surge in copy-pasting code. As a software developer, I've noticed a common misconception—people assume we spend most of our time writing code. But in reality, the bulk of our work is reading it. ✍️https://open.substack.com/pub/leeleecode/p/the-unfair-edge-of-iterative-code?r=ppqnu&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I love this so freakin much. And it weirdly reminds me of how I learned design and development over 20 years ago: but having an idea in mind and cobbling together things to make it happen while learning along the way. During the era of product development where Process was highly valued I really struggled to explain the way I work because I was never formally trained. I'm excited for the next generation of designers; it's the current ones I'm more worried about.
such a good and needed report/insight. Thanks for doing it!
Love everything you're sharing, Carly!
Thanks, Joey!
As someone recently said to me the other day, "Just SHIP IT!!"
This is fascinating! Thanks for sharing
Fearless experimentation. I wish the corporate world in Europe would learn from this. On the other hand, I also strictly am missing any thoughts on philosophy and aestehtics in your analysis of the future of design education.
I strongly believe we serve those rather than making things work fast. I am coding and designing and did my thesis on who it changed the role of designers in the digital age, yet from my last 10 years of industry experience, I find too often that actual design issues are not addressed and the purpose of a piece of software often is simply to collect souls, and make them continue using it.
The proposed process your describe is the one of neo-liberal disruption driven start up industries and I would not advice to abuse university education for this. Teaching people critical thinking that provides social change is not done by quick iterations and hyper fast deliveries.
Looking at the latest aattempts of pixelfed and mastodon or blue sky, their design is a copy of the horrible addiction mechanism built into social media apps from the get go. Substack by the way suffers the same falacy.
But of course from a job perspective, this makes sense, if your goal is to built minions for the new age. And yes I know from an American perspective success and paying of student loans is crucial, but does this strategy equip people with the adequate tools to challenge the status quo or simply grease the wheels built to alienate us. Just as the tools reduce peer interactions.
That said, I use them too heavily when prototyping. But I put huge gaps the discovery process to reflect, jump back to paper or penpot (time to truth alternatives to figma and co.) And read up on the potential corporate ties of the tools I am implementing. considerations lkke this will stick in the core of the software for years and are hard to easily remove. This is design decisions i don't want to leave to opinionated AIs run by psychopathic technocrats with a more and more openly communicommunicated fascination for autocrazy and fashism. It's as simple as that.
Using react instead of vanilla Javascript, your example, yes it is easier to do a tracking ar ap with ninantic and their powerful data based location apis, but at the cost of privacy and independence. Your are tied to them beyond the prototype phase if you use tools like this.
Design to me is a means to an end. What you have described is a machine that has a sole purpose but to regobble the crap of a failed conception of what digital products are.
So the god is still there.but it's lingering in the clouds. Time to take of our Coachella sunglasses.
This is a fantastic read, Carly 😀. Your insights really hit home. I recently wrote about the importance of understanding codebases, especially now with the surge in copy-pasting code. As a software developer, I've noticed a common misconception—people assume we spend most of our time writing code. But in reality, the bulk of our work is reading it. ✍️https://open.substack.com/pub/leeleecode/p/the-unfair-edge-of-iterative-code?r=ppqnu&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web