[eric_cc]

> I feel sorry for anyone that will think using tools equals doing design, because of the truly marvelous human experiences that they’ll miss, and that could never be replaced by the shallow pride of empty achievement.

What if you don’t give a shit about design and it’s a means to an end for a project that involves something different that you do care about?

[kbenson]

I think maybe how you are conceptualizing design and how the GP meant it are not in agreement, and if you came to agreement on what it meant you wouldn't really disagree about the point either.

For example, I think design, as they mean it, could be described as "how to get that thing we care about". The correct amount of design depends on how exacting the outcome and outputs needs to be across different dimensions (how fast, how accurate, how easy to interpret, how easy to utilize as an input for some other system). For generalized things where there's not exacting standards for that, AI works well. For systems with exacting standards along one or more of those aspects, the process of design allows for the needed control and accuracy as the person or people doing the work are in a constant feedback loop and can dial in to what's needed. If you give up control of the inside of that loop, you lose the fine grained control required for even knowing how far you are away from theoretical maximums for those aspects.

[pilgrim0]

Balancing requirements to achieve something you care about is doing design. I take that by “design” here you mean perhaps a particular interface or media, and you reckon that such element is not critical to your solution. If that’s the case then there’s no conflict at all. By reaching that conclusion you isolated what’s important and are correctly applying energy where it matters. This happens a lot in design, where producing or perfecting media interfaces is not necessary.

[apsurd]

> what if you don't give a shit about design and it's a means to an end…

the parent's point is that it doesn't work that way. The point is self reinforcing. Design is not a thing. it's the earned scars from the process. Fine to disagree but it reinforces the point.

[idle_zealot]

> What if you don’t give a shit about design and it’s a means to an end for a project that involves something different that you do care about?

Thank you for so succinctly demonstrating the problem with using AI for everything. You used to have to either care enough to do the design yourself or find someone who cared and specialized in that to do it for you. Now you quickly and cheaply fill in the parts you don't personally care about with sawdust, and as this becomes normalized you deprive yourself and others from discovering that they care about the design part. You'll ship your thing now, and it'll be fine. The damage is delayed and externalized.

I won't advocate against use of new technology to make yourself more productive, but it's important to at least understand what you're losing.

[eric_cc]

> You used to have to either care enough to do the design yourself or find someone who cared and specialized in that to do it for you.

Or worse, you gave up because you did not have the time to learn the skill or the money to hire somebody. In this case, your dream just died.

[SiempreViernes]

Who says the world where dreams went unrealised is the worse one?

If Grok didn't create the fake nudes users were dreaming about but couldn't create with Photoshop,

would my headstone crumble down?

As "intel" dashboards stay a dream,

the Hollywood wind's a howl

As photos are just still

The Kremlin's falling

As Einstein is not wrong

Radio 4 is static

[TeMPOraL]

> You used to have to either care enough to do the design yourself or find someone who cared and specialized in that to do it for you.

You think most UI/UX designers, or the artists creating slop for content marketing spam factories for the past decades, cared? Some, maybe. Most probably had higher ambitions, but are doing what actually pays their bills.

It's similar to software developers. Most of those being paid to code couldn't care less, they're in there for the fat paycheck; everyone else mostly complains the work is boring or dumb (or worse), but once you have those skills, it makes no economic sense to switch careers (unless, of course, you're into management, or into playing the entrepreneurship roulette).

[idle_zealot]

I think the more you industrialize a process, the more those involved become cogs (or get replaced with actual or metaphorical cogs in a machine). This is fine, even desirable, for anything we can produce en masse and apply quality control to. I do not mind that my rivets and screws are not artisanal. We figured out how to make a useful and reliable widget and can churn them out on an industrial scale no problem. I do not see the value in doing the same with software. We already get mass-production for free because the product is bytes. Why are we industrializing the process of making millions of variations of the same thing? Surely the effort would be better spent finding the "screw" of software, perfecting it, and making it trivial for users to accomplish whatever task they want without having to generate the gaps between with untested code. I want modularity and better design, not automated design.

[jimbokun]

I do think they cared.

The paychecks weren’t great. Everyone was offering to pay designers with “exposure”. If they didn’t innately care about the field they would have done something more lucrative.

[switchbak]

Man so much of this thread is full of such high minded philosophizing, it's like we're debating wine instead of talking about interfaces for doing things.

Like, maybe I just want to make an interface to configure my homemade espresso dohickey, do I have to wear a turtleneck and read Christopher Alexander now? I just wanted a couple buttons and some sliders.

We don't all have to be experts in everything, some people just need a means to an end, and that's ok. I won't like the wave of slop that's coming, but the antidote certainly isn't this.

[SiempreViernes]

Why do you want sliders when a config file would do the same just fine?

It's true that design theory writing is annoyingly verbose and intangible, but that doesn't make it wrong. Give someone a concrete language spec and they will not really know how it feels to use the language, and even once they do experience its use they will not be able to explain that feeling using the language spec. Invariably the language will tend to become intangible and likely very verbose.

But to answer your question: no, it's of course perfectly serviceable to just copy the interface others have created, and if the needs aren't exactly the same you can just put up with the inevitable discomfort from where the original doesn't translate into the copy.

[dwb]

Don’t be so anti-intellectual, there’s enough of that around. A simple problem is going to have a small set of simple design solutions; the philosophising readily admits that. Nothing’s getting in your way.

[switchbak]

I’m not being anti-intellectual, I’m being anti-elitist and anti-obfuscation.

It’s not the science and intellect I take issue with, engineering has plenty of that. It’s the art-adjacent navel gazing post modern bullshit I don’t like.

[dwb]

Well I think that art is good, thinking about design is good, that using a couple of terms that aren’t immediately clear to you isn’t “obfuscation”, and that postmodernism can be a useful analytical lens. Seeing the world only through science and engineering (as useful as they can be when applied well) is cold, dead, and sad.

[switchbak]

Well, I think that typically 90% of engineering is bullshit, that 90% of everything is almost always bullshit, and that 90% of the high minded nonsense you're talking about can be tossed with no loss whatsoever.

The other 10% of the design world? Actual useful, and can help create truly better things. And typically offered honestly because there really is something of substance being shared. To be clear: there can be tremendous value in the design world.

And nice false dichotomy there - if someone disagrees with the snooty extravagances of the design world, then they only care about science and engineering. That is not what I said, and your twisting of my statements is either a shallow read or disingenuous.

[dwb]

I can only read as deep as what is written. I have a low opinion of anyone who dismisses “snooty extravagances” of any field – it’s incurious and disrespectful. Either admit you don’t know enough to engage, or read up and engage on the substance.

[jimbokun]

Then no design is taking place.

[skeeter2020]

Jobs has entered the chat and has some strong words for you...

[nekooooo]

how nihlistic