supergee: (kerplop)
Design is an autoantonym, meaning both "clear thinking made visible" (Edward Tufte) and "prettiness with as little concession to the needs of users as possible." Today’s Horrible Example of the latter is a $41 million dollar library with three floors it can’t use.
supergee: (grandpa)
Don Norman (who wrote the book) on designing things better for us old folks. [Fast Company]
supergee: (cheshire)
Technical discussion of how the Web is becoming unreadable

Design

Jun. 10th, 2015 06:22 am
supergee: (wile4)
Scott Alexander shares one of my feelings. Yesterday he talked about "the kind of website I hate, with all the information carefully hidden away where it can’t interfere with the sleek design." Since design means two opposite things, I wish to propose terms to distinguish them. Nerd design enables users to see what the thing does and how to operate it. Arteest design appeals to other designers with subtlety, sleekness, understatedness, and other such qualities without pandering to the needs of the vulgar hordes who actually use the thing. The motto of nerd design is Edward Tufte's "Good design is clear thinking made visible." The motto of arteest design is "But that would be telling."
supergee: (smiley)
Design is an autoantonym, with two opposite meanings, like oversight and sanction. As Edward Tufte says, good design is clear thinking made visible, but the good design that wins awards is elegant and "clean" and totally unresponsive to the wants and needs of the people using it, like a cabinet where you can't tell which protrusions open drawers and which do nothing without actually pulling on them. My current unfavorite is the tiny box in the upper right-hand corner of the screen on my desktop computer that closes the window, immediately adjacent to the tiny box that changes the window size, even though there is plenty of room for reasonable-sized ones. Oh, well, at least it doesn't kill children.

*Thank you, Randall Garrett

Autoistic

Jan. 22nd, 2012 06:26 am
supergee: (sign)
Design, like oversight and sanction, is an autoantonym: It means two opposite things. There's design as "clear thinking made visible" [Edward Tufte] and there's creating elegantly simple objects that win awards from other designers while making as few concessions as possible to the suckers who have to use the device. Here's how design in the second sense can make cars more lethal.

Thanx to [livejournal.com profile] andrewducker

ETA: As the article makes clear, good design is also clear thinking made tangible.

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Arthur D. Hlavaty

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