/ Un miocroblog che raccoglie link, note, estratti e immagini
La necessità dell’attrito e del disaccordo per una buona progettazione.
Not in the Figma file. Not in the pull request. In the friction between two people who care about different things and are forced to find a shared answer.
Il design system al tempo dell’AI. Il vincolo funziona se si trova e si capisce. Vale per gli agenti, vale per le persone.
Design systems fail when people don’t use them, don’t trust them, or can’t find what they need. AI adds another version of that problem. If an agent can’t discover the right component or doesn’t have enough context to use it correctly, it may generate something new.
Quando una mappa diventa uno schema. Da un libro sulle mappe ferroviarie britanniche.
Well-designed diagrams will have a sense of aesthetic balance between lines and typography. Their overriding imperative is to inform the passenger of the connections between destinations at a glance, rather than a slavish requirement to follow the topography.
Da un estratto di un libro della Taschen sulle moderne identità visive.
Olivetti’s unique corporate identity did not come about through following norms but through an expansive understanding of design.
Despite there being a number of breakthrough examples, most early corporate identities in the first half of the 20th century were based on the creative signature of an individual designer who produced, for example, posters, brochures and packaging in the same style. An important impetus in design history thus emerged with the approach of the Italian typewriter manufacturer Olivetti. In the early 1930s, Adriano Olivetti (1901-1960), the son of the company founder, established the principle of working with not just the best engineers but also the most innovative architects and product and graphic designers in Europe.
Documents and code are being generated faster than team members can review. You get the feeling that most people have stopped reading altogether.
We need to stop pretending that “the cloud” is a place. It’s not a place. It’s a promise—and promises are only as good as the entity making them. The web was supposed to be decentralized, resilient, a network of nodes that could route around damage. But in practice, we’ve spent the last decade centralizing our lives into a handful of walled gardens, each with its own exit strategy and its own definition of “forever.”
AI, università, lezioni ed esami.
I have a colleague who has completely embraced A.I. My understanding is that his course is much harder than it used to be, but students are allowed to use A.I. during exams. I see the motivation—A.I. is supposed to enhance our skills/productivity, so students should be expected to produce more—but I don’t want to create a situation where students are helplessly dependent on A.I. because they don’t have a solid grasp of the fundamentals.
AI come l’autocorrezione del nostro telefono.
I’ll say that the computing speed of today’s devices is fast enough to trick some people into thinking that such devices are doing more than just performing calculations. But this ‘understanding’ and ‘learning’ and ‘communicating’ are just a faster and sometimes more efficient autocorrect. Yes, the autocorrect you have on your phones and tablets and personal computers.
When you’re typing a message and you see your phone’s OS correctly suggesting the next word after the one you’re typing, that’s not intelligence. The phone doesn’t ‘get’ you. The phone doesn’t ‘know’ you. The system is making a prediction by calculating probabilities. The data sample it’s using for this prediction is everything you’ve typed on the phone since you bought it.
È una questione di calcolo, di computazione:
By the way, Large Language Models don’t even see those as words, but numbers, tokens.
It wasn’t artificial intelligence, it was computers that computed. It’s always been computers computing. We have more refined tools today, but that’s it.
Con l’AI stiamo assistendo all’ennesimo giro dello stesso ciclo: accesso facile, poi un nuovo soffitto sopra chi sa usarlo davvero.
Design tools followed the same arc. Figma lowered the floor of UI design — suddenly, anyone could open a canvas and move elements around. Design systems lowered it again. Templates lowered it further. Each step made the starting point more accessible. And each step produced a new professional layer above it — people who understood not just where the buttons were, but what they were actually for.
Sull’idea che "ciò che si vede è ciò che esiste".
The boom and recognition of information design, though, has not improved significantly the public understanding of design and data, of their specific qualities. Particularly, the implications of their constructed and interpretive – and potentially misleading – nature have received little attention. The assumption that “what you see is what is there” has remained dominant. Practitioners, for their part, have done little to shake it, generally aligning – implicitly or explicitly – with the idea that data and design are objective and transparent, and mostly focusing, in their discussion of information design, on usability or formal issues (Hall, 2011).
Sulle istruzioni agli agenti AI
Collaborative steering doesn't mean dumping every possible bit of design or development context into agent instructions. It's being precise about what matters because with AI agents today, the more you pile in, the less useful it gets.
And that's where expertise kicks in. Knowing the three to five things that actually matter, in what order, and how they need to be done, is the value add. It's the part you can't fake by playing a role you never trained for. And it's the part worth encoding for everyone else.
Un estratto di un intervento di Michael Bierut a Design Indaba dal titolo "How to Think Like a Designer".
No one secretly wants a new logo. They all want someone else's logo, or they want their old logo back.
(L’estratto viene da Daily Designer, un progetto di Arun Venkatesan, dove si raccolgono cose dette da noti e famosi designer.)
I CEO alle prese con il vibe-coding.
“Why don’t we just do what I did here?” is demoralizing. I get why you’re frustrated. Nothing seems to get done, regardless of all these wondrous advancements in AI. It trivializes all the actual work that needs to get done to produce something real and reliable. It dismisses people’s expertise and skills. You also don’t look good—you even look just a little worse.
Tra le tante cose che un browser riesce a intercettare del dispositivo che stai utilizzando c’è anche il livello di batteria.
Your browser kept your battery level back. Firefox removed this API entirely in 2016, after researchers proved it could be used to track a visitor across websites without cookies, without consent. The API still exists in the specification. It was simply hidden — from you, and from any page that might ask after it.
Anil Dash sulla NASA che usa ancora Flickr come archivio pubblico per le sue immagini.
The beautiful thing about communities and platforms like Flickr is that they remind us that not everything on the internet has to be ephemeral, not everything on the web has to be hyper-commercial. Sometimes a bunch of decent people can do a good thing for the right reasons, and the result of that work can persevere for decades.