[Verdex]

In the deep past, I considered design to be an industry full of poets and philosophers. I suspect I got this impression from home improvement shows where they bring in an interior decorator to toss throw pillows around. Then I ended up working with three high quality designers in a row.

At this point I consider the design industry to be cousins or even siblings to the software engineering industry. All those incomprehensible design decisions that pop up in popular software don't come from designers debating faux marx or freud in coffee shops at 3am. They show up from management and other stakeholders who at the 11th hour decide that suddenly everything has to be flat because they read something in a magazine.

The bad decisions are fought by designers tooth and nail and the fact that anything looks halfway descent at all is due to their herculean efforts. If anything they deserve more sympathy than we do because we can always retreat into low level communication protocols or type theory when we need to get the muggles off our backs. But everyone has an opinion on how that button looks.

This comes to mind: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell

[TeMPOraL]

Yes, this matches what I heard and saw when hanging around the designers I mentioned.

BTW, quoting from the penultimate panel of that excellent Oatmeal piece (which drives home just how similar are the experiences of designers and programmers):

> You are no longer a web designer. You are now a mouse cursor inside a graphics program which the client can control by speaking, emailing and instant messaging.

This gains a new meaning, or at least becomes an interesting parallel, with LLMs in the picture. Many of us - myself included - already use GPT-4 as, paraphrasing, "a keyboard inside an editor program, which you can control by instant messaging". Ignoring that diffusion models can spit out parts of the design wholesale, someone is bound to eventually hook GPT-4 up to Photoshop or Gimp and get a graphics program you can drive by texting it.

... just remembered, I think someone already did that to Blender, made easy thanks to Blender being able to eat Python code and spit out 3D graphics.

[Terr_]

Tangentially, earlier talk a "text-box interface" made me think of Blender's "type the name of the immediate action you know should be possible but can't quickly find in hierarchical menus" box--a feature also present in some IDEs--and I'd like to emphasize that those things are (A) totally different than all this AI stuff and (B) generally awesome.

[TeMPOraL]

Agreed. Unlike the AI stuff with its "empty textbox" problem, fast incremental search is capital-A Awesome! Pretty much my favorite UI paradigm ever, at least out of those that gained adoption after I started using computers.

The best incremental search UIs are those that respond near-instantly, and have a stable list of candidates that is (or at least feels like) being filtered, and not like every keystroke re-runs some search from scratch. Prime example, which made me love this UI paradigm, is Foobar2000 - even back in early 2000s, I could have hundreds or thousands of entries in the music library, and then I would type into the magic textbox and watch that huge list (or tree) get instantly trimmed with each keystroke.