Visualizing Minimalist Design

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.

“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

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

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

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.

“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

“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

“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.”