Sixian

But at the grand narrative level, everybody is getting off the big turnpike, and there is not going to be a grand narrative slipstream for a while. But smaller scale narrative slipstreams — from family to city-scale — may still be viable.

There will be dust. There is always dust. By that I mean there is always time, and materiality, and decay. Decomposition and damage are inescapable. There is always the body, with its smears and secretions and messy flaking bits off. There is always waste and it always has to be dealt with, and shipping it out of sight overseas to the developing... See more

The Shape of Design is a map of the road where we dance rather than a blueprint of it. It strives to investigate the opportunities of exploring the terrain, and it values stepping back from the everyday concerns of designing. It attempts to impose a meaningful distance in order to find patterns in the work and assess the practice as a whole. One... See more

In practice, most of the valuable insights you will glean from a scaled-up dataset in a particular domain will come early on. More data just confirms those insights. Further, the number of insights that will matter enough for customers to pay you or choose you over other providers is typically small. So data scale can give you these early 1-3 key... See more

It's all dependent on human context. This is what we're starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a... See more

The web also needs diligent people so that the idea of what the web is and what it does remains legible to everyone. This applies to being able to read the systems and social environments the web creates so we know what’s real and what’s not, but the call for legibility should also humbly apply to writing legible code and designs systems that are... See more

The practice of assembling conflicts with most of the terminology we have in place for responsive design. Our words make it seem that we’re designing how elements break down, but really, we should be focusing on how they build up.