Independent designer and Conjunctured co-founder unabashedly sharing digital novelties.
It’s sometimes ridiculous the way “inbox zero” makes me feel better. I have a problem.
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Clarity:
and back to the blog :: three things we should do
After playing with how to think out loud / share / build community with all the tools we have at hand, I’ve come to this, the blog will get richer in content for thinking and sharing. I talk alot…
This sounds familiar…
Read my full post of this on my blog.Would you like a pocket-size device that reminded you of each appointment and daily event? I would. I am waiting for the day when portable computers can become small enough that I can keep one with me at all times. I will definitely put all my reminding burdens upon it. It has to be small. It has to be convenient to use. And it has to be relatively powerful, at least by today’s standards. It has to have a full standard typewriter keyboard and a reasonably large display. It needs good graphics, because that makes a tremendous difference in usability, and a lot of memory—a huge amount, actually. And it should be easy to hook up to the telephone; I need to connect it to my home and laboratory computers. Of course, it should be relatively inexpensive.
What I ask for is not unreasonable. The technology I need is available today. It’s just that the full package has never been put together, partly because the cost in today’s world would be prohibitive. But it will exist in imperfect form in five years, possibly in perfect form in ten.
—Donald A. Norman, The Design Of Everyday Things (1988)
I’ve had these pictures stuck in my head for the last few weeks. The left is a sketch Jack Dorsey made of his concept for Twitter back in 2006, and the right (if you don’t remember) is what Facebook looked like in 2005 when it was essentially a sloppy version of Friendster for students of a particular Ivy League college. When something hits such immense scale, it can be difficult to remember that it once existed as such a fleetingly simple, unmitigated idea. Some of the sharpest people the industry could muster (along with hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars) have been bought to bear to cultivate these technologies into their present forms. But those are effects, not causes.
Think about that the next time you sketch something on the back of an envelope.
Great point—I’ve been reminding myself lately to sketch as much as possible on the back of proverbial envelopes for the very reason you describe. I see the value in getting ideas out and not judging them, but as a designer (read: perfectionist) I get caught up in trying to make things look production-ready all the time. Iteration is key.
PS: I have the Stat.us picture favorited from Jack’s Flickr stream.
