Visualizing Minimalist Design

“Curating [is] an act of generosity — you’re sharing what you love and what has inspired you. […] Algorithms, by definition, are based on calculations that treat the viewer as a consumer and nothing else.”

In order for design to transform business, it must first transform itself. It must leave behind the language and mindset of engineering. Get past scalability and extensibility. Systems and components. Agility and usability. Usefulness and seamlessness. Efficiency and friction. Data and metrics. Patterns and code.

performative design. Performative design ultimately reduces the practice of design from a wide range of creative, psychological, communication, and problem-solving skills to a narrow practice focused on the reproduction of popular styles and interfaces for the sake of feeling like and being perceived as a skilled designer.”

“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

“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

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

“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.

“…we spent over twenty years investing heavily in engineering as a driver of competitive advantage, which ultimately metastasized into where we are today: A world built by engineers.”