Topic
design
- Two roads to longevity
The latest issue of Res Extensa draws parallels between the story of Ford and Rolls-Royce and Stewart Brand's framework of Low Road and High Road design, from How Buildings Learn. We have polar opposite philosophies o…
- Leuven Town Hall
Leuven Town Hall. Flemish Brabant, Belgium.
- Storehouses of history
As I was reading this article from Ted Gioia the other day, I noticed in this image he used a logo I recognized: This is Hollywood Boulevard from the 1930s. Notice the Kress Building on the far side of the street. It…
- patternlanguage.cc
I've been diving back into Alexander's A Pattern Language the past few days. As I was making notes in Obsidian, it occurred to me that APL, with its interlinked system of patterns, could be an interesting medium for b…
- Conversational Interfaces
Julian Lehr wrote an interesting post recently on the problems with conversational interfaces, with the fitting title "The case against conversational interfaces". Here's Julian: We keep telling ourselves that previou…
- Topographic Beauty
"Topographic beauties straight from old geography books", @egeberkina.
- We Did All This Discovery, Now How Do We Decide?
When capturing hundreds of problems during product discovery, we generate at least as many potential solutions. We can't build everything at once, so how do we decide what to tackle first? Ryan Singer has a suggestion…
- Materials and Mastery
In the latest Res Extensa, I explored how craftsmen build expertise through deep understanding of their medium. It starts with the nature and properties of their raw materials, then moves to the individual parts, asse…
- The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work
This latest issue of Res Extensa riffs on an idea from wiki-inventor Ward Cunningham: “Given what we’re trying to do now, what is the simplest thing that could possibly work?” In other words, let’s focus on the goal.…
- Places to Intervene in Systems
Gordon Brander explores Meadows's list of intervention points in systems, from her excellent book Thinking in Systems: All systems are fictions that we project onto our environment for our own instrumental purposes. T…
- Harpsichord
Diagram of a harpsichord. Arnault de Zwolle, c. 1430.
- Karahnjukar Hydropower Plant
The amazing spillway at Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Plant , Iceland. I can’t see brutalism without thinking of Dune. Upper image looks like Caladan.
- Oldsmobile Incas Concept Car
Oldsmobile Incas concept car, 1986. Resurrect the 80s concept car design language. This existed and they used a Ford Taurus in Robocop?
- Teatro Regio
Teatro Regio.) Turin, Italy. That lighting.
- Central Control Building Of A Solar Farm
The central control building of a solar farm in Karapınar, Turkey. Future site of an unnamed science fiction film location shoot.
- Charts On Design Christoph Labacher Interaction Designer
A collection of chart designs.
- Retrofuturism
Set the alarm.
- Moongates
We should build more moongates in our gardens and backyards. From Austin Tennell on X.
- The Magic City
The Magic City , by Russian artist Artur Skizhali-Veis.
- Film Poster Alts
Every standard mass-market film poster design is subpar. We can do so much better.
- Kowloon Walled City
Cross-section of Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City.
- Conversation Pits
Let’s return to conversation pits.
- Annihilation
The film adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation) took some liberties in the narrative. But Alex Garland’s vision on the world, the twisted melange of organisms, the shroom-trip in the Southern Reach — all spot on.
- Simplicity On The Other Side Of Complexity
My latest post on Res Extensa:
- Look Back Less
Jason Fried: A better path is to reflect forward, not backwards. Develop a loose theory while working on what's next. Appreciate there's no certainty to be found, and put all your energy into doing better on an upcomi…
- Masonry
Snake Bridge on Macclesfield Canal. Astbury Congleton, England. Bring back artisanal masonry.
- Naypyidaw
The barren highways of Naypyidaw. Don’t listen to the high modernists. You can’t will cities into existence.
- Arcology
Paolo Soleri's book Arcology is out of print and extremely hard to find. Luckily you can find it here online in its full visual glory. Makes me want to go back and play SimCity 2000.
- Quality Without a Name
Karri Saarinen: Christoper Alexander opens his book Timeless Way of Building, that in order to build with a timeless way, we first need to find the “quality without a name”. What he is saying is that quality exists, i…
- Monthly Reading, August 2023
This post appeared in issue #36 of my newsletter, Res Extensa, where I write about the intersection of product design, bottoms-up systems, innovation, and what we can learn from the history of technology. I'd love it…
- Noise Factors vs. Control Factors
With product design, constraints are your friend. Great products emerge from teams able to differentiate between control and noise factors: things they can control vs. things they can't. Many teams are tempted to wast…
- 37signals Live Design Review
This is an interesting look into how an effective team works through the weeds of a product design review. I love how it shows the warts and complexities of even seemingly-simple flow of sending a batch email in an em…
- Cuttle.xyz
I recently was getting our Silhouette vinyl cutter back out, since Colette hasn't used it in a while. The software for the thing is still ancient and janky — hard to believe anyone uses it at all. But I found this new…
- When to Design for Emergence
Building products that address long-tail user needs (i.e. the wide variety of infrequent-but-sometimes-painful needs of specific users) requires somehow providing users an open-ended landscape to create a solution. It…
- Miter Spline Jig Design
On my to-build list, I want to make some simple floating picture frames for a few canvasses we have in the house. Those are simple enough to build, but I also want to add reinforcement splines to the mitered corners,…
- Architecture from Every Country
This was a fantastic thread from The Cultural Tutor — so simple, but had me on an epic Wikipedia / Google Maps rabbit hole. Some of my favorite examples: Las Lajas Shrine, Colombia Samtavisi Cathedral, Georgia Monaste…
- Notes on the Design of Everyday Things
Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things is essential reading for anyone that creates products. I've been doing a re-read of the most recent edition myself. I also ran across this excellent set of notes on the book…
- Scenes, Pattern Languages,and Nested Systems
Last week I picked up Scene and Structure on a recommendation I saw from Nat Eliason. I've seen him mention experimenting with writing fiction, which this book is about — the process of narrative structure, staging sc…
- Hard Edges, Soft Middle
Have you had that feeling of being several weeks into a project, and you find yourself wandering around, struggling to wrangle the scope back to what you thought it was when you started? It's an easy trap to fall into…
- Small Tools for Shaping
Ryan Singer shows his work through the process of shaping a new feature for a product he's building. This is a great detailed example of a process following the Shape Up philosophy. Looking over the virtual shoulder o…
- Roam CSS System
For the last few months I've been using Alexander Rink's Roam CSS system, which he's recently released out of beta. The Quattro theme he's developed is excellent, a look that models the iA Writer app for macOS. This s…
- 11:59 September 10
My friend and colleague Tim looks back on a Spatial Networks tradition on 9-11.
- Weekend Reading: A New Web, Future of Higher Ed, and a Ford Concept Car
🔗 A Clean Start for the Web Tom MacWright with some ideas for cleaning up ever-creeping morass of web technology: I think this combination would bring speed back, in a huge way. You could get a page on the screen in…
- RoamThemes
Roam's custom theme tooling is neat, but so far a bit too complex to want to fiddle with much. This browser extension makes browsing for and managing themes so much simpler.
- Synthetic A Priori
Basecamp's Ryan Singer has been doing this solo podcast on a lot of his favored topics, centered around product design. But he also branches into adjacent, related areas of systems, research, user experiences, and mor…
- A Nomenclature for Low-Code Users
The low-code "market" isn't really a market. Rather, I see it as an attribute of a software product, an implementation factor in how a product works. A product providing low-code capability says nothing about its inte…
- Why Figma Wins
The more I use Figma, the more convinced I become that their approach to design tooling is unique. The first impression I got slotted it mentally in with tools like Sketch, Moqups, and in some ways even Adobe Illustra…
- Weekend Reading: American Production, On Bikeshedding, and Glyphfinder
đźŹď¸Ź Why America Can Make Semiconductors But Not Swabs Dan Wang on American industrial production: Learning to build again will take more than a resurgence of will, as Andreessen would have it. And the U.S. should thin…
- Spatial Software for Enhancing Interactions
Software has multiple dimensions of elements and affordances, but the spatial dimension is underutilized most software outside of the gaming world. Designer John Palmer wrote this piece on how different types of appli…
- Practical Typography
An online book covering all things typography. From composition and individual type elements to formatting and layout. This is one for the bookmarks to reference in design processes.