Ridwan Sanusi - Interaction Designer

Working as an experience designer at Amazon. This is a daily journal including notes and quotes from recent readings.
December 9, 2024

RECONSIDER

Part of the problem seems to be that nobody these days is content to merely put their dent in the universe. No, they have to fucking own the universe. It’s not enough to be in the market, they have to dominate it. It’s not enough to serve customers, they have to capture them.”

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November 13, 2024

Altered States of Consciousness

We live our lives and meet our challenges with the intellect, neglecting the opportunities that altered states offer. Maybe we just prefer the safety and predictability of the ordinary mind and the world of thought. We know what’s wrong intellectually but we feel stuck when it comes to getting relief.”

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November 13, 2024

Altered States of Consciousness

We live our lives and meet our challenges with the intellect, neglecting the opportunities that altered states offer. Maybe we just prefer the safety and predictability of the ordinary mind and the world of thought. We know what’s wrong intellectually but we feel stuck when it comes to getting relief.

We”

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November 12, 2024

Ram Dass — Here and Now — Ep. 259 — Altered States: American Psychological Association Address Part 1

altered states of consciousness”

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July 16, 2024

Six human skills that will future-proof your design career

Designers who focus on excellence, craft, and quality will thrive and rise to new heights to create unexpected designs that will redefine the height of the ceiling.”

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July 16, 2024

Six human skills that will future-proof your design career

Being blob-shaped means you evaluate the situation and shape-shift to do whatever needs to be done to get the best outcome for your goal.”

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July 16, 2024

Six human skills that will future-proof your design career

in the world of AI, a much more adaptive mindset would be that designers’ responsibilities would evolve to overlap with those more traditionally associated with product management or product ownership. With automation, the designed experience” will need to be more about the context and less about the pixels.”

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March 18, 2024

Agile software promises efficiency. It requires a cultural shift to get right

Agile developers work iteratively, creating functional software bit-by-bit and confirming that the result meets expectations before moving on to the next step in the roadmap.”

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March 18, 2024

Agile software promises efficiency. It requires a cultural shift to get right

Many programming teams follow the Agile Manifesto, a set of software-team management principles meant to improve quality and user happiness. Among those principles: Deliver value frequently, maintain a sustainable working pace, keep it simple, and regularly reflect and adjust your development practices to boost effectiveness.”

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March 18, 2024

The soul of software

An object cannot have a high bar of quality or soul if the creator did not put care into it. Whether it’s a software designer, Willy Wonka experience organizer, or filmmaker, you can tell if people don’t care about the quality of their work because it’s soul-less.”

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March 18, 2024

The soul of software

As designers, we’re taught early in our education to detach ourselves from the work. In critique, you shouldn’t take things personally because your work is not you. Though this is true, it’s also difficult for some designers to separate themselves from the work because of how they pour their soul into it. We should take big swings like Villeneuve did with Blade Runner 2049 for everything we create. We might fail, but if we put all our love into it, you might end up making something truly great.”

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March 18, 2024

The soul of software

All art and creative work is subjective, and I don’t expect everyone to love his style. What I think people all agree on is his craft is revealed through something that’s opinionated, expressive, and deliberate. One does not accidentally craft something.”

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November 20, 2023

Inversion: The Crucial Thinking Skill Nobody Ever Taught You

The Stoics believed that by imagining the worst case scenario ahead of time, they could overcome their fears of negative experiences and make better plans to prevent them”

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October 30, 2023

A Few Laws of Getting Rich

Never be so foolish as to believe that you are stirring up admiration by flaunting the qualities that raise you above others. By making others aware of their inferior position, you are only stirring up unhappy admiration, or envy, that will gnaw away at them until they undermine you in ways you cannot foresee.”

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October 30, 2023

Systems Thinking in Design: Shifting Our Mindsets

Thinking in systems can be overwhelming. Because everything in this world can be interconnected, it is very easy to get trapped in a rabbit hole in an attempt to map a system and to understand its dynamics. This is perhaps why systems thinking has relatively slow in gaining popularity in practical industry work, compared to the design thinking movement. It is easy to get stuck in the theoretical framework rather than just take the steps to apply it to work.”

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October 20, 2023

The Intellectual We Deserve ❧ Current Affairs

what’s new in it isn’t true, and what’s true isn’t new”

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October 20, 2023

The Intellectual We Deserve ❧ Current Affairs

Peterson’s answer is that people figure out how to act by turning to a common set of stories, which contain archetypes” that have developed over the course of our species’ evolution. He believes that by studying myths, we can see values and frameworks shared across cultures, and can therefore understand the structures that guide us.”

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October 20, 2023

The Intellectual We Deserve ❧ Current Affairs

A more important reason why Peterson is misinterpreted” is that he is so consistently vague and vacillating that it’s impossible to tell what he is actually saying.” People can have such angry arguments about Peterson, seeing him as everything from a fascist apologist to an Enlightenment liberal, because his vacuous words are a kind of Rorschach test onto which countless interpretations can be projected.”

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September 5, 2023

The Looking Glass: The Power of the Mindmeld

Explain the entire chain of So what’s

So what? Why should people care about your new idea?

Probably because it accomplishes useful, which the presenter should explain. This part is generally obvious.

Unfortunately, the explanation often sounds like this: So if we do hocus-pocus, this function will now be whizbammable! Then the presenter looks around the room excitedly, as if to say Isn’t that amazing?

The problem is, the presenter assumes the audience understands the So what? of whizbammability. Alas, the presenter assumes too much. The audience (especially if they are executives) are rarely thinking as much about hocus-pocus or whizbammability as the presenter.”

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September 5, 2023

The Looking Glass: The Power of the Mindmeld

Establish a shared foundation

Before you introduce a new room to the team’s architectural diagrams, you must make sure everyone had the same original plan in mind. It would not do for you to suggest let us add another floor but in your head, the original plan was a 2-story house and in your colleague’s mind, it was a 3 story house. So do the equivalent of showing the shared foundations before introducing your new idea.”

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September 5, 2023

The Looking Glass: The Power of the Mindmeld

If a team does not have mindmeld, it will instead reap pain — the entire spectrum from resentment to sloppy output, circular conversions to office politics.

If you are on a team and you do not sense everyone is on the same page, you need to make some noise about it.

I find this rolls off the tongue quite nicely: We do not have mindmeld.”

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September 5, 2023

The Looking Glass: The Power of the Mindmeld

If you and your team are trying to build something together, the same reality holds — you do not get anywhere unless people work towards the same goal, and ideally in a coordinated manner.”

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September 5, 2023

The Looking Glass: The Power of the Mindmeld

If you and your team are rowing a boat together, your boat does not get anywhere unless you all row in the same direction, and ideally at the same time.”

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August 29, 2023

Proof You Can Do Hard Things

But if we avoid hard things, anything mildly challenging will seem insurmountable. We’ll cry into TikTok over an errant period at the end of a text message. We’ll see ourselves as incapable of learning new skills, taking on new careers, and escaping bad situations. The proof you can do hard things is one of the most powerful gifts you can give yourself.”

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August 29, 2023

Proof You Can Do Hard Things

Our self-image is composed of historical evidence of our abilities. The more hard things you push yourself to do, the more competent you will see yourself to be. If you can run marathons or throw double your body weight over your head, the sleep deprivation from a newborn is only a mild irritant. If you can excel at organic chemistry or econometrics, onboarding for a new finance job will be a breeze.”

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August 29, 2023

Proof You Can Do Hard Things

The ability to do hard things is perhaps the most useful ability you can foster in yourself or your children. And proof that you are someone who can do them is one of the most useful assets you can have on your life resume.”

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July 6, 2023

A Guide to Building Design System Beyond Primitive Elements

Design systems should address these key principles to build complex components: discovery for composability, building for extensibility and driving consistent layouts.”

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July 6, 2023

Working with Templates | ServiceNow Developers

Pages based on an original template will have a consistent look and feel, regardless of where they are used.”

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July 6, 2023

Working with Templates | ServiceNow Developers

Use page templates to create pages more quickly. Without a template, a developer needs to create a page completely from scratch. With templates, a developer can either:

Use the original template: The developer needs to pass parameters to the page to match the experience. Copy template contents: The developer has full control over the contents of the page but starts with an existing layout and content.”

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July 6, 2023

If you have a complex project, follow Gall’s law” — or it will fail

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked,” Gall wrote. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.””

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July 4, 2023

Beyond design systems for interfaces: an megasystem of design systems

Every team might be using the same interface design system, but it doesn’t guarantee a harmonious, coherent and consistent overall experience within one product. Not every organisation has a team dedicated to ensuring user journeys and service-level experiences, or processes that enable teams to connect effectively to ensure the re-usability of different components of a user journey. Team members and product managers often self-organise and attempt to harmonise features, journeys and experiences. In organisation with several products (customer-facing, or internal-facing), experiences can also be wildly different between products despite adhering to the same interface design system.”

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May 5, 2023

The Four Stages of Life

Stage Two people get stuck because they feel as though they should always be doing more, doing something better, doing something new and exciting, improving at something. But no matter how much they do, they feel as though it is never enough.”

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May 5, 2023

The Four Stages of Life

Stage Four is important psychologically because it makes the ever-growing reality of one’s own mortality more bearable. As humans, we have a deep need to feel as though our lives mean something. This meaning we constantly search for is literally our only psychological defense against the incomprehensibility of this life and the inevitability of our own death. To lose that meaning, or to watch it slip away, or to slowly feel as though the world has left you behind, is to stare oblivion in the face and let it consume you willingly.”

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May 5, 2023

The Four Stages of Life

At some point we all must admit the inevitable: life is short, not all of our dreams can come true, so we should carefully pick and choose what we have the best shot at and commit to it.”

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May 5, 2023

The Four Stages of Life

These are the serial entrepreneurs” who are 38 and living with mom and still haven’t made any money after 15 years of trying. These are the aspiring actors” who are still waiting tables and haven’t done an audition in two years. These are the people who can’t settle into a long-term relationship because they always have a gnawing feeling that there’s someone better around the corner. These are the people who brush all of their failings aside as releasing” negativity into the universe or purging” their baggage from their lives.”

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September 7, 2021

Design Matters From the Archive: Seth Godin | Design Matters

One of the challenges so many of us have is that life is always uneven, and usually, when you’re in a slog, there’s someone around you you can look to, who’s not. But this is universal, and it’s been a slog. I don’t think many people are going to miss 2020, but it’s also been a chance to decide what’s important, and to lean harder into that stuff.”

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