Love Sean Voisen calling the design/develoment hand-off a “pencils down” moment:
This division of labor between design and engineering, reinforced by the need for special training in a vast array of tools, creates a problem commonly known as “designer-developer hand-off,” this awkwardly artificial moment when it’s supposedly pencils down on design, and time for developers to open their code editors and start building.
Also, this is me (and many other folks I’ve had the immense joy of working with during my career):
Hybrid design/programming tools such as Flash have previously birthed an entire generation of immensely creative humans who—to this day—fail to slot cleanly into a specific discipline.
Sean has a great article here on the “randomness” of computers generally, with this observation on AI:
generative AI, too, can act as a force for homogenization. Nothing any model produces is truly random. After all, generative AI is only novel insofar as its training data allows, which means it can only “remix” that which it has already “seen” in the past. It feels novel to us because none of us has seen nor read the entirety of the Internet.
blogging is as much about human relationship as it is about the content. I read other bloggers because I care about what other humans think about topics I also find of interest. It is exactly this human impression, and the uniqueness thereof, that I am after when I read others’ blogs. I’m not interested in reading what machines have to say;
I think this also articulates why I don’t love most corporate blogs: the individual voice is lost and subsumed by the group (corporate) voice. What I’m really after is the individual point of view.
smartphone ownership is often a deciding factor for access to many cultural experiences, or at the very least, a differentiator in the level of service one now receives in a multitude of commercial interactions.
As someone with older parents who are increasingly ostracized from society because of their inability (and also unwillingness) to operate a smartphone, this is spot on.
As smartphone-oriented infrastructure continues to seep into everyday life, it begets ever-greater dependence on smartphone technology, and thus ever-greater dependence on the producers of this technology. Those who cannot afford smartphones, or those who simply choose to live without smartphones, find themselves increasingly excluded from full participation in society, often with no viable alternative. Like with the automobile, we may soon become locked into this way of being. Perhaps we already are.
the character of one’s writing, especially in early drafts, includes the character of the physical artifact, which, when produced with an industrial machine like a computer, is otherwise homogenized and destroyed.
Agree. There is something beautiful and inimitable about your own handwriting.
In our rush to digitize the world, we often underestimate the value of the patina, subtle imperfections, and otherwise visible history of the physical objects we choose to digitize. And in the process of digitization, we both erase that history and then fail to recreate it.
we need not always minimize ourselves to accommodate our devices