Visualizing Minimalist Design

“In design for emergence, the designer assumes that the end-user holds relevant knowledge and gives them extensive control over the design. Rather than designing the end result, we design the user’s experience of designing their own end result.

“Imagination will define the future in a world where the infrastructure has already been built. This means the competitive advantage driving business skills of tomorrow likely won’t be technical, won’t be software engineering, AI, or data-science, or anything like that. Instead, it’ll be those with the imagination to piece a myriad of components to... See more

Design for Emergence is…

* …open-ended and permissionless. Resulting designs are often surprising, something the original designer could have never imagined.

* …context-adabtable. The end-user can integrate their local or contextual knowledge

* …composable. It provides a basic ‘language and grammar’ that’s easy to learn and employ, but can also exte... See more

how design has become mass user-centered, driven by rules of optimization, efficiency and engineering.

Paul compares Netflix and Disney: Netflix built the infrastructure – streaming, recommendation engines,…. – and thereby created a very data- and engineering-driven internal culture. Disney, on the other hand, is all about imagination, creative ideas and intellectual property - and it just had to plug into the infrastructure that Netflix already bui... See more

“The primary technique used by designers in these spaces is to simply remix the dominant patterns and trends created by popular tech companies, ensuring their work appears as stylistically sophisticated and elegant as the work they’re emulating, regardless of what kind of product they’re designing and for whom. A podcast app and a banking app and a... See more

“The packaging of all moving images as equitable content “has created a situation in which everything is presented to the viewer on a level playing field, which sounds democratic but isn’t,” Scorsese continues. “If further viewing is ‘suggested’ by algorithms based on what you’ve already seen, and the suggestions are based only on subject matter or... See more

The main difference between for example user-centered design (“There are only two industries that call their customers 'users': illegal drugs and software”) is that in design for emergence the user has control. Design is sort of decentralized.

we’re about to see a shift away from this design paradigm to what is known as design for emergence.