Advice for Young Scientists—and Curious People in General
““I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing of whether it is true or not.”
Richard Feynman famously said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” All scientists make mistakes sometimes. Medawar advises, when this happens, to issue a swift correction. To do so is far more respectable and beneficial for the field than trying to cover it up.”
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IT IS OBSCENE: A TRUE REFLECTION IN THREE PARTS | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow.
I have spoken to young people who tell me they are terrified to tweet anything, that they read and re-read their tweets because they fear they will be attacked by their own. The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.”
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How Four Tet Helped Madlib Make Something Totally New: A Solo Album
“Beyond his ability to find obscure loops, there’s an unpredictability to Madlib’s music that comes from his jarring beat shifts and strange sample flotsam. He never lets listeners settle too deeply into a groove, and Hebden made sure to preserve some of that chaos. “I was trying to get the best of both worlds in terms of it having these moments that are very universal that everyone can get their head around, and also having shocking moments,” Hebden said. “I didn’t want to water anything down or make it too polite.””
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My son, Dayyan (10 years old), designed a summer camp poster for his grandma’s school. When he showed it to me, I was surprised at his use of white-space and contrast. I told him it looked really great and that I loved it. The following morning, he showed me the poster again and told me this;
“so… I showed Zahra (sister, 6) yesterday. She told me the grass looked empty without kids playing on it. I think she’s right. So I updated the design with kids playing on the grass”
I couldn’t hold back my joy seeing the kinds of attitude in display. 🥰
#gratitude
Rdwn Sans V001. Uncompleted project, 2020
Spent about a whole day and a half some months ago trying to design this S on glyph. Just found this screenshot in my library and got a flashback of the pain (and fun) my hands and eyes went through.
Conceptual Metaphors for Designing Smart Environments: Device, Robot, and Friend
“While much of the research done on metaphors in user interface design has been focused upon the use of metaphors in the design of visual communication elements of the graphical user interface (GUI) and in understanding users’ mental models of such interfaces (; ; ), some researchers have pointed out the limitations of the desktop metaphor and proposed alternative metaphors (; ; ; ). They showed several dimensions (e.g. context, modality, materiality, and affordance) of alternative metaphors as a systematic strategy to emphasize a new interactive form which can be conceptualized with metaphorical mapping.”
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How To Be Successful
“I think the biggest competitive advantage in business—either for a company or for an individual’s career—is long-term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together. One of the notable aspects of compound growth is that the furthest out years are the most important. In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do.
Trust the exponential, be patient, and be pleasantly surprised.”
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Adam Grant: Rethinking Your Position [The Knowledge Project Ep. #112]
“Just because somebody is sure of an opinion does not mean they know what they’re talking about. And in fact, anybody who’s familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect will know that the more sure people of their opinions, the more hesitant we should be to listen to them.”
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I helped pioneer UX design. What I see today horrifies me
“Too many UX leaders have seen the field’s language and ideas co-opted and corrupted by outsiders who never knew or cared about the principles underlying the practices. We thought we were winning hearts and minds, but we were really setting ourselves up for exploitation, as businesses cherry-picked the bits of UX most compatible with their existing agendas and eschewed the parts that might lead to uncomfortable questions that could influence more than the color of a button on a screen.”
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I helped pioneer UX design. What I see today horrifies me
“Instead of challenging teams to stretch their thinking to address deeper and subtler user needs, product design practices have become increasingly less insight-driven. UX processes in many organizations these days amount to little more than UX theater, creating the appearance of due diligence and a patina of legitimacy that’s just enough to look like a robust design process to uninformed business leaders and hopeful UX recruits alike.”
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Undoing the Toxic Dogmatism of Digital Design
“For many, work-life is an endless series of compromises on the practice of design. We’re encouraged to do this — to adapt to the environment, to work within the constraints. Rarely though, do I see any practical advice on how to do that and maintain the integrity of the process or how to recognize when the standard process does not apply. So designers (and user researchers) often default to dogmatic, methodical recipes, with or without enough understanding of the principles that informed those methods to adapt them to the work at hand.”
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Undoing the Toxic Dogmatism of Digital Design
“The thing is, I can’t have an honest debate about this in any forum and have it result in a productive dialogue. It’s not a discussion most are interested in having. And that’s the problem. For many designers, the idea of letting go of an established tool or method in their arsenal, especially one they’ve staked their career on, is akin to saying they were wrong for ever using it in the first place and therefore putting their expertise into question.”
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Undoing the Toxic Dogmatism of Digital Design
“Let’s take a look at a staple of UX and service design work — the journey map. We love making them. The storytelling potential of a well-constructed journey map is immense. It is a highly effective workshop facilitation tool. It produces a nice artifact for external communication afterward. But if I’m truly honest with you, in my gut, I know that the majority of them don’t help do more than tell the most surface-level story of limited user paths. And an inaccurate story at that.”
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How to get promoted
“Third, while you shouldn’t take performative rituals at face value, you must still perform them— enthusiastically and with gusto. In countries like Japan, Russia, and parts of Eastern Europe, to successfully work with someone you must drink with them. Drinking is a trust building ritual and a mechanism to signal that you are part of the in-group. No drinking, no promotion. In corporate America the lion’s share of this signaling is done through proselytizing management technologies. Going to meetings, talking about KPIs, OKRs, collaboration, Agile— all are shibboleth to signal you’re part of the in-group, in the same way drinking is an in-group signal in other parts of the world. No shibboleth, no promotion.”
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How to get promoted
“Marx thought that to be fulfilled, humans must feel a connection to the end result of their work. For example, a carpenter feels satisfaction when he finishes a chair or a table. But in an industrialized society people no longer feel this connection, which robs them of the fulfillment. He called this phenomenon”estranged labor“. One way to think about people who are attracted purely to wealth and status is that under these same conditions they don’t feel estranged. They’ve either eradicated this feeling in themselves long ago, or never felt it in the first place.”
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Things I wish I knew earlier when I started building products
“The sum of all constraints. Here is one of the few effective keys to the Design problem: the ability of the Designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible; his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints. Constraints of price, of size, of strength, of balance, of surface, of time, and so forth. Each problem has its own peculiar list.
Charles & Ray Eames”
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The Making of an Organization-Changing UX Strategy
“Smart design leaders realize decision makers already know how to make strategic business decisions. Instead of forcing them to understand design, UX design leaders need to learn how the organization’s business leaders think about strategy. They need to talk about their UX strategy in terms of how the decision makers already think. The language of a UX strategy needs to be the language of business strategy.”
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In these very unusual times, I have found solace in the meditative power of the pen tool. Especially since I don’t care about the output. I just keep doing shit for no reason.
Woke up this morning and did some quick type exercise. Will probably finish it later today.
Playing around with icons again in Figma last night. There’s something relaxing about doing this. Maybe the constraints of the keylines, the constraints of lines and shapes. I should spend some more time on it.
How To Be Successful
“Most people do whatever most people they hang out with do. This mimetic behavior is usually a mistake—if you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you will not be hard to compete with.”
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How To Be Successful
“You don’t want to be in a career where people who have been doing it for two years can be as effective as people who have been doing it for twenty—your rate of learning should always be high. As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results.”
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Black Designers: Missing in Action (1987)
“When examined from the parents’ perspective, their attitudes are a little easier to understand. In many instances, extreme financial sacrifices are made by black parents to meet the educational needs of their children. With the investment substantial and the sacrifice intense, parents feel justified in insisting upon the desired result: assurance of success and security in their children’s futures. They therefore prefer educations that lead toward “safe” mainstream professions.”
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From Gut to Plan: The Thoughtful Execution Framework
“Even though it’s crucial to leverage as much data and insights as possible when framing the problems and opportunities you should tackle, it’s unrealistic to assume that you should know everything before moving forward. Different companies and teams have different levels of access to data and research, and not having enough insights available is a common situation. Think of alternative ways of gathering quick insights. Benchmark similar products or run a quick expert evaluation on your product. If you have the possibility, you can also run learning experiments on your product that provide you with additional insights. It’s also perfectly fine to use your gut when framing opportunities, but do it consciously and check if your assumptions were actually true.”
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From Gut to Plan: The Thoughtful Execution Framework
“MVPs typically leave out delightful elements that aren’t necessary to the functionality of the experience but can have a great impact on the desirability of the product. That’s why it is important to remember to optimize the MVPs further to ensure high quality throughout your product.”
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On Design Thinking
“Design means something even broader now. Sometime around World War II, it came to mean making things that “solve problems.” With the influence of mid-century global social movements and the rise of digital technology, it began to mean making things that are “human-centered.” And as of recently, design doesn’t have to involve making things at all. It can just mean a way of thinking.”
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Maastricht
Quick trip to Maastricht to shed some of the work off the mind and change the views a bit. Covid-19 puts a limit to the kind of adventures to have but it was fun all the same.
6 Things I Learned Interviewing Design Leaders From the Valley’s Top Companies
“Unlike art, design has a very clear success and failure state. It’s not simply an expression, it’s the rendering of intent to solve a problem that the designer sees and understands.”
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