The short form has been an interesting challenge. It’s one thing to explain your position from every angle, at exhaustive length. It’s something different to boil it down while worrying, with every sentence and caveat you cut, that it’ll be taken out of context, or the obvious exceptions thrown back in your face on Ye Internete. But the hope is that this format — and I think we were right to choose it — will make Things We Think more actually useful. The hope is that short, provocative nuggets will spark your own thinking and force you to make up your own damn mind.
Exactly.
I’m sometimes mistaken for a developer instead of a designer because of my interest in software, but I’m mainly interested in software because of how it serves — and sometimes influences — design.
Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.