![\"Twitter](\"https://cdn.substack.com/image/twitter_name/w_36/berkun.jpg\")
Friday, October 11 2019 and banging this out at lunchtime and it is true that some of you may have seen via other channels that I have made an indulgent purchase and I shall write more of that on Monday, sorry, just going to tease you about it because I want everyone, not just you paying lot, to get to see it.
Here’s a few things that got my attention this week, and some notes on why. This is supposed to be a “short” one, but I guess we’ll see about that.
On big-D-design:
I’m not a “Designer”, so Scott Berkun’s tweet
about two kinds of design — design for sale and design for use — was the first time I’d heard of Victor Papanek. Papanek’s is an important distinction to me that is easily forgotten when we (yeah, I know, I’m not specifying “we”) talk about user-centered design.
There’s the slight evolution when a team might need to remember that, for example, internal users are just as valid as external users.
But I think the big thing is that you can’t say you’re “designing for user needs” without explicitly acknowledging that you’re also designing for marketing needs or growth needs, or you’re in some sort of special case where you have unlimited money.
Or even not that at all - someone, someone is going to have a need that at best case is complementary to what we might think our users are, but in reality is at the very least divergent or worst, orthogonal. If you did map out some kind of hierarchy of needs then yes, your user might admit to wanting whatever you’re providing to stick around and be sustainable, so in this world, you might need to charge money for that. But if you’re not charging money, and if you’re in the surveillance capitalism business? Then you have a whole bunch of unstated user needs. We’re past time for being explicit about them.
On treating IT like plant and machinery:
The City of Chicago’s mayor announced that the city’s Department of Innovation and Technology will be merged into the Fleet Management department. Look, I want to be understanding and positive about this. But this just sets off all of the “omg, someone’s about to treat technology just like plant and machinery” alarm bells in my head and... it’s just not that? I mean, some parts of tech are a bit like plant and machinery are a bit like that, but there are other bits of “technology” and “innovation” that are... wildly not like plant! I guess it might be interesting to think of commodity SaaS as “plant and machinery”. But otherwise, the gamut of technology and innovation is quite wide, and especially at one end, their dimensions are quite unmapped and unknown!
I just don’t easily understand how there’s a good (viable? useful? successful?) management or bureaucratic structure that can encompass this type of diverse need. And, if it’s true that this is being done because there just might be a $1 million cost saving, then... shaking head emoji.
Code playgrounds:
Bare Bones Software is shipping a regex pattern explorer into this version of BBEdit and I am reminded that Microsoft’s Excel (and other spreadsheets, I guess) are ultimate REPL code explorers that people don’t think are code explorers because they allow direction manipulation of data. This is a continuing thread of So Many People Are Developers Because They Use Excel To Do Thing.
Just stop with technology, please:
The Verge reports that Linksys’ mesh routers can now detect motion using Wi-Fi, which you can turn on with a free 90-day trial, or pay for it through a month or annual subscription. Now, my question here is: can you turn this off? I mean, I get that you can pay to turn it on. But we’re at the point now where MIMO mesh routers (multiple-in-multiple-out) that work because they have a bunch of transmit/receive antennae and ridiculous processing power to manage them all in realtime “happen to” be able to do motion detection. Can Linksys reassure you that your wifi system *isn’t* doing this? How would you know? Would you have to physically turn off the wifi... in a system designed to deliver wifi? My gut feeling is that this is just one of those things where if you have a general purpose computing system and you hook it up to radios, you just end up with this and you have to actively prioritize and decide to *not* do it, or figure out a way to support not doing it. As ever, the press release from Linksys talks about all the wonderful things you could do with this because “the software also senses movement throughout the house, which may aid in remote care for the elderly, while providing the user with great peace of mind.”
Let me just shout this: HOW WOULD AN ABUSIVE PERSON USE THIS?! Oh wait, it’s really obvious how an abusive person would use this, especially if there is (or appears to be) no physical indication on any of the units that motion detection is turned on. Jesus Christ, people.
A nice person does a bunch of hard work about their health:
My friend Leonard has posted a summary of his 1 year Personal Health Intervention and they are amazing. There was one time, a few years ago where everything about my life was in sync enough for me to get into an exercise and diet habit for about 6 months and I lost about 40 pounds / 18 kg and it was stupendously transformative. I’d also that a significant amount of my depression since then has been down to the knowing that it was possible for me to make such changes in my life, and feeling like every single day I’ve been failing to live up to that period. Yeah: I’m talking to my therapist about it. Still.
‘JACK IN TO THE GRID:
Rock Paper Shotgun had a piece about Acer’s Thronos which is marketed as a “gaming chair” but the RPS team are right to describe Thronos as looking “like a legit naval gun turret with a malign consciousness”. It’s three 144Hz monitors connected to a reclining, haptic enabled seat (Amongst other books, I am looking forward to reading more about ‘haptics in Gibson’s follow-up to The Peripheral, of which I see SOME PEOPLE have started to receive advance copies). Now, this is marketed as a “gaming chair” and if you clicked through and looked at the article, then you’d probably call it a “rig” and depending on your exposure (intentional or not) to science fiction, “core gaming” and cyberpunk, you might call it a “rig” and it might look like something Neo would strap in to in order to ‘jack in to the Matrix or whatever consensual hellish algorithmic hallucination we find ourselves in this week. But my brain does not like working like that, instead my brain imagines these as the evolution of the Standing Desk and rows and rows of people using these Thronos Gaming Chairs to write Electron apps or, even more amusingly, write requirements in Microsoft Word and Excel 365, upload them to Sharepoint and have Microsoft Teams open on one of the three monitors. Acer Thronos gaming chairs are for gaming, yes, but imagining a mundane Enterprise Business use for these things with the corresponding “Is your WebEx working? No? Ugh, I wish we could use Zoom” and Windows Update notifications is *hilarious* to me.
Government is hard:
There’s a good Code for America blog post about how what people think are techno..cratic? solutions to things (“how can we help renters afford water?”) are actually really difficult and not resolveable within, say, the span of a West Wing episode. (Spoilers: or even, say, the span of an entire season.)
The pull-quote to pay attention to here is that the problem has “nothing to do with technology and everything to do with policy making”, because implementation requires you to make some really hard and difficult decisions about how to achieve your intent. I’d almost uncharitably say that legislation is the easy way out for cowards because it lets you say We Want People To Have Nice Things and then you chuck it over the wall (as it were) and let someone else worry about the fact that Wanting People To Have Nice Things is fuck-all useful when it’s your job to Actually Figure Out Who Can Get Nice Things And Then Deal With The Fallout When Not Everyone Can Have Nice Things But Thanks For Promising Them To Everyone Anyway.
Efficient layout of data structures on physical media to reduce latency:
Is how I would describe the interesting-to-me bit of how Wired’s piece as part of Sony’s PlayStation 5 PR onslaught included this bit about the SSD in the forthcoming games console. It’s about how the storage needs of a console SSD may not be entirely too big because there’s a whole bunch of duplication of media assets. I remember a long time ago when games started coming out on CDs that laying out data on disc was a Thing because seek times and transfer times were so high. So you’d potentially lay out assets in duplicate locations so they’d be near your read head at the right time. The example in the Wired piece is, I think, having common objects included in the storage layout eg for each level if you still need to stream them in and don’t have enough RAM. (Narrator: We never have enough RAM). Turns out this practice didn’t stop when console games became installable because hard drives are still interminably slow, but SSDs *are* much faster. So maybe less duping of data on console SSDs.
CUBES:
I liked this paper on Cubic Stylization, of 3D shape transfer of a regular Thing into a cuboid Thing and anyway, in the thread there are great videos of making a Cow cuboid and, you know, Consider A Spherical Cow.
ESRI and “AGILE” in the same sentence:
Dave Guarino noticed that in the Children of Men hellscape of California grappling with “de-energizing events”, PG&E, the responsible utility switched
from its custom map hosted on its own site to a commodity-SaaS'd one (ArcGIS online from ESRI) after its significant site downtime this week [tweet]
and saw this as a good example of how “if you have resilience needs, you may want to rely on someone else’s (much bigger) platform” to which I very much agree (and this is the bit where big, scaled, resilient commodity IT is a bit like plant and machinery) because PG&E is a power utility company and not a company that needs to maintain its own internet server infrastructure. But! I thought there might be some nuance here because while it is correct and true to shit on PG&E in general for the “de-energizing” situation, it does look a bit like a bit of a not-up-to-spec internal mapping service was rapidly switched over to a commodity SaaS, in what I would characterize as an uncharacteristic act of flexiblity and agility from a large bureaucratic organization. Dave has a good rejoinder to this which is that he’d put money on something like “well we already have ESRI contracts, we just never used this cloud map thing before” and that this speaks to the power of enterprise sales, and I don’t disagree with him. I mean, why not use the thing if it’s bundled there. I just think it’s an and. Oh, right, and the second thing: it’s amazing what some organizations might be able to achieve when the right crisis occurs. Just a shame it invariably seems to require a crisis.
Obsolescence:
Via Johannes Klingebiel in my own personal miasma, this article from Gizmodo’s Paleofuture about obsolete technology (“What Technology Is Most Likely to Become Obsolete During Your Lifetime?” caught my eye because of the quote that Johannes pulled out from Peter Norton:
\"We call something obsolete when an innovation has made it useless. But does that really happen? The vacuum cleaner did not make the broom useless. The automobile did not make the bicycle useless.\"
which is stuck in my head that the concept of obsolescence is as much a marketing one as a real thing and so long as things are in use, they are not obsolete. Rarely is a thing completely and utterly replaced in a sort of tech genocide… a… techicide? Unless, of course, I guess trillion-dollar multinationals want it to happen. I mean, this is obvious to everyone talking about forced obsolescence, but it just helped me understand the idea in a different way. My mental model of forced obsolescence was more like the “ugh, Apple doesn’t let you replace the battery in your phone so you have to buy a new one”, and less this more nuanced idea that complete technological displacement simply does not occur.
Technology is jewellery is culture:
Via @juanbuis, itself via belong.io, I saw that asos is selling fake $9 airpods and I’ll just tag Venkatesh Rao in as this being full-on premium mediocre, but also I’m wondering if it’s significant in any way that the model on asos’ site is a dude and that the one thing we all know about wearing headphones is that it’s an unambiguous fuck off don’t talk to me leave me alone signal (or at least, it should be), so what happens when you see someone wearing fake airpods, do they still not want to be disturbed?
Something for later:
I had a nice conversation on the blue bird site with Rachel Coldicutt and Naomi Alderman about reaching that age where you just want technology to stop trying so hard and just, you know… back off a bit? Not everything in the world can be controlled and the sooner we realize this, the better. Just stop trying to optimize and manage everything. And then the conversation got into a bit of look is this just human insecurity coming across and then I had a bit about terrified men who hadn’t felt secure in their childhoods needing to make everything OK and tippity-top one hundred percent good and not understanding that it would be OK if not everything was OK, sometimes not everything can be OK and we just need to cope with that.
This was supposed to be a short one and instead I have just injected over 2,300 words into your inbox but let’s be clear, you did specifically ask for this so it’s all your fault, really.
I hope everyone has a good weekend, this has been some of the things that have caught my attention lately.
Oh, and: look, this isn’t some super secret paywall thing, if you liked something in this and want to forward it to someone or some people or whatever, then go for it: it’s not like there’s any way to stop you in a world with general purpose computing.
Best,
Dan
PS. Nah, I can’t resist it: I bought a restored Macintosh LC III, it has a 68030 processor at 40MHz, 36MB of RAM, a 160 MEGABYTE hard drive; I’ve got it connected to the internet and yes it’s running Hypercard. No I didn’t write this episode on it, but bits of Monday’s episode are already on it. Look:
![\"\"](\"https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F12caa5b7-e477-444d-81cb-e731cf2f41bc_800x600.jpeg\")
… and I’ve already put the work-in-progress novel on it. So there.
PPS. SEND NOTES I LOVE THEM
","body_text":"0.0 Sitrep\nFriday, October 11 2019 and banging this out at lunchtime and it is true that some of you may have seen via other channels that I have made an indulgent purchase and I shall write more of that on Monday, sorry, just going to tease you about it because I want everyone, not just you paying lot, to get to see it.\n1.0 Some things\nHere’s a few things that got my attention this week, and some notes on why. This is supposed to be a “short” one, but I guess we’ll see about that.\nOn big-D-design:\nI’m not a “Designer”, so Scott Berkun’s tweet\nScott Berkun\n@berkun\nPapanek described two kinds of design:\n\nDesign for sale: choices made to increase profits\nDesign for use: choices made to solve problems/improve things\n\nSometimes they overlap: a choice improves sale and use. But often a decision is made purely for one or the other.\n#design\n\n#ux\nOctober 10th 2019\n12\nRetweets\n53\nLikes\nabout two kinds of design — design for sale and design for use — was the first time I’d heard of\nVictor Papanek\n. Papanek’s is an important distinction to me that is easily forgotten when we (yeah, I know, I’m not specifying “we”) talk about\nuser-centered design\n.\nThere’s the slight evolution when a team might need to remember that, for example, internal users are just as valid as external users.\nBut I think the big thing is that you can’t say you’re “designing for user needs” without explicitly acknowledging that you’re\nalso\ndesigning for marketing needs or growth needs, or you’re in some sort of special case where you have unlimited money.\nOr even not that at all - someone, someone is going to have a need that at best case is complementary to what we might think our users are, but in reality is at the very least divergent or worst, orthogonal. If you did map out some kind of hierarchy of needs then yes, your user might admit to wanting whatever you’re providing to stick around and be sustainable, so in this world, you might need to charge money for that. But if you’re not charging money, and if you’re in the surveillance capitalism business? Then you have a whole bunch of unstated user needs. We’re past time for being explicit about them.\nOn treating IT like plant and machinery:\nThe City of Chicago’s mayor announced that the city’s\nDepartment of Innovation and Technology will be merged into the Fleet Management department\n. Look, I want to be understanding and positive about this. But this just sets off all of the “omg, someone’s about to treat technology just like plant and machinery” alarm bells in my head and... it’s just not that? I mean, some parts of tech are a bit like plant and machinery are a bit like that, but there are other bits of “technology” and “innovation” that are... wildly not like plant! I guess it might be interesting to think of commodity SaaS as “plant and machinery”. But otherwise, the gamut of technology and innovation is quite wide, and especially at one end, their dimensions are quite unmapped and unknown!\nI just don’t easily understand how there’s a good (viable? useful? successful?) management or bureaucratic structure that can encompass this type of diverse need. And, if it’s true that this is being done because there just might be a $1 million cost saving, then...\nshaking head emoji\n.\nCode playgrounds:\nBare Bones Software is shipping a\nregex pattern explorer\ninto this version of BBEdit and I am reminded that Microsoft’s Excel (and other spreadsheets, I guess) are ultimate\nREPL code explorers\nthat people don’t think are code explorers because they allow direction manipulation of data. This is a continuing thread of So Many People Are Developers Because They Use Excel To Do Thing.\nJust stop with technology, please:\nThe Verge reports that\nLinksys’ mesh routers can now detect motion using Wi-Fi\n, which you can turn on with a free 90-day trial, or pay for it through a month or annual subscription. Now, my question here is: can you turn this off? I mean, I get that you can pay to turn it on. But we’re at the point now where MIMO mesh routers (multiple-in-multiple-out) that work because they have a bunch of transmit/receive antennae and ridiculous processing power to manage them all in realtime “happen to” be able to do motion detection. Can Linksys reassure you that your wifi system *isn’t* doing this? How would you know? Would you have to physically turn off the wifi... in a system designed to deliver wifi? My gut feeling is that this is just one of those things where if you have a general purpose computing system and you hook it up to radios, you just end up with this and you have to actively prioritize and decide to *not* do it, or figure out a way to support not doing it. As ever,\nthe press release from Linksys\ntalks about all the wonderful things you could do with this because “the software also senses movement throughout the house, which may aid in remote care for the elderly, while providing the user with great peace of mind.”\nLet me just shout this: HOW WOULD AN ABUSIVE PERSON USE THIS?! Oh wait, it’s really obvious how an abusive person would use this, especially if there is (or appears to be) no physical indication on any of the units that motion detection is turned on. Jesus Christ, people.\nA nice person does a bunch of hard work about their health:\nMy friend Leonard has posted a summary of his\n1 year Personal Health Intervention\nand they are amazing. There was one time, a few years ago where everything about my life was in sync enough for me to get into an exercise and diet habit for about 6 months and I lost about 40 pounds / 18 kg and it was stupendously transformative. I’d also that a significant amount of my depression since then has been down to the knowing that it was\npossible\nfor me to make such changes in my life, and feeling like every single day I’ve been failing to live up to that period. Yeah: I’m talking to my therapist about it. Still.\n‘JACK IN TO THE GRID:\nRock Paper Shotgun had a piece about\nAcer’s Thronos\nwhich is marketed as a “gaming chair” but the RPS team are right to describe Thronos as looking “like a legit naval gun turret with a malign consciousness”. It’s three 144Hz monitors connected to a reclining, haptic enabled seat (Amongst other books, I am looking forward to reading more about ‘haptics in Gibson’s follow-up to The Peripheral, of which I see SOME PEOPLE have started to receive advance copies). Now, this is marketed as a “gaming chair” and if you clicked through and looked at the article, then you’d probably call it a “rig” and depending on your exposure (intentional or not) to science fiction, “core gaming” and cyberpunk, you might call it a “rig” and it might look like something Neo would strap in to in order to ‘jack in to the Matrix or whatever consensual hellish algorithmic hallucination we find ourselves in this week. But my brain does not like working like that, instead my brain imagines these as the evolution of the Standing Desk and rows and rows of people using these Thronos Gaming Chairs to write Electron apps or, even more amusingly, write requirements in Microsoft Word and Excel 365, upload them to Sharepoint and have Microsoft Teams open on one of the three monitors. Acer Thronos gaming chairs are for gaming, yes, but imagining a mundane Enterprise Business use for these things with the corresponding “Is your WebEx working? No? Ugh, I wish we could use Zoom” and Windows Update notifications is *hilarious* to me.\nGovernment is hard:\nThere’s a good Code for America blog post about how what people think are techno..cratic? solutions to things (“\nhow can we help renters afford water\n?”) are actually really difficult and not resolveable within, say, the span of a West Wing episode. (Spoilers: or even, say, the span of an entire season.)\nThe pull-quote to pay attention to here is that the problem has “\nnothing to do with technology and everything to do with policy making\n”, because implementation requires you to make some really hard and difficult decisions about how to achieve your intent. I’d almost uncharitably say that legislation is the easy way out for cowards because it lets you say We Want People To Have Nice Things and then you chuck it over the wall (as it were) and let someone else worry about the fact that Wanting People To Have Nice Things is fuck-all useful when it’s your job to Actually Figure Out Who Can Get Nice Things And Then Deal With The Fallout When Not Everyone Can Have Nice Things But Thanks For Promising Them To Everyone Anyway.\nEfficient layout of data structures on physical media to reduce latency:\nIs how I would describe the interesting-to-me bit of how\nWired’s piece as part of Sony’s PlayStation 5 PR onslaught\nincluded this bit about the SSD in the forthcoming games console. It’s about how the storage needs of a console SSD may not be\nentirely\ntoo big because there’s a whole bunch of duplication of media assets. I remember a long time ago when games started coming out on CDs that laying out data on disc was a Thing because seek times and transfer times were so high. So you’d potentially lay out assets in duplicate locations so they’d be near your read head at the right time. The example in the Wired piece is, I think, having common objects included in the storage layout eg for each level if you still need to stream them in and don’t have enough RAM. (Narrator: We never have enough RAM). Turns out this practice didn’t stop when console games became installable because hard drives are still interminably slow, but SSDs *are* much faster. So maybe less duping of data on console SSDs.\nCUBES:\nI liked this\npaper on Cubic Stylization\n, of 3D shape transfer of a regular Thing into a cuboid Thing and anyway, in the thread there are great videos of making a Cow cuboid and, you know, Consider A Spherical Cow.\nESRI and “AGILE” in the same sentence:\nDave Guarino noticed that in the Children of Men hellscape of California grappling with “de-energizing events”, PG&E, the responsible utility switched\nfrom its custom map hosted on its own site to a commodity-SaaS'd one (ArcGIS online from ESRI) after its significant site downtime this week [\ntweet\n]\nand saw this as a good example of how “if you have resilience needs, you may want to rely on someone else’s (much bigger) platform” to which I very much agree (and this is the bit where big, scaled, resilient commodity IT\nis\na bit like plant and machinery) because PG&E is a power utility company and not a company that needs to maintain its own internet server infrastructure. But! I thought there might be\nsome nuance\nhere because while it is correct and true to shit on PG&E in general for the “de-energizing” situation, it does look a bit like a bit of a not-up-to-spec internal mapping service was rapidly switched over to a commodity SaaS, in what I would characterize as an uncharacteristic act of flexiblity and agility from a large bureaucratic organization. Dave has a good rejoinder to this which is that he’d put money on something like “\nwell we already have ESRI contracts, we just never used this cloud map thing before\n” and that this speaks to the power of enterprise sales, and I don’t disagree with him. I mean, why not use the thing if it’s bundled there. I just think it’s an\nand\n. Oh, right, and the second thing: it’s amazing what some organizations might be able to achieve when the right crisis occurs. Just a shame it invariably seems to require a crisis.\nObsolescence:\nVia\nJohannes Klingebiel\nin my own personal miasma, this article from Gizmodo’s Paleofuture about obsolete technology (“\nWhat Technology Is Most Likely to Become Obsolete During Your Lifetime\n?” caught my eye because of the quote that Johannes pulled out from Peter Norton:\n\"We call something obsolete when an innovation has made it useless. But does that really happen? The vacuum cleaner did not make the broom useless. The automobile did not make the bicycle useless.\"\nwhich is stuck in my head that the concept of obsolescence is as much a marketing one as a\nreal thing\nand so long as things are in use, they are not obsolete. Rarely is a thing completely and utterly replaced in a sort of tech genocide… a… techicide? Unless, of course, I guess trillion-dollar multinationals want it to happen. I mean, this is\nobvious\nto everyone talking about forced obsolescence, but it just helped me understand the idea in a different way. My mental model of forced obsolescence was more like the “ugh, Apple doesn’t let you replace the battery in your phone so you have to buy a new one”, and less this more nuanced idea that complete technological displacement simply does not occur.\nTechnology is jewellery is culture:\nVia @\njuanbuis\n, itself via\nbelong.io\n, I saw that\nasos is selling fake $9 airpods\nand I’ll just tag Venkatesh Rao in as this being full-on premium mediocre, but\nalso\nI’m wondering if it’s significant in any way that the model on asos’ site is a dude and that the one thing we all know about wearing headphones is that it’s an unambiguous\nfuck off don’t talk to me leave me alone\nsignal (or at least, it should be), so what happens when you see someone wearing\nfake airpods\n, do they still not want to be disturbed?\nSomething for later:\nI had a\nnice conversation\non the blue bird site with Rachel Coldicutt and Naomi Alderman about reaching that age where you just want technology to stop trying so hard and just, you know… back off a bit? Not everything in the world can be controlled and the sooner we realize this, the better. Just stop trying to optimize and manage\neverything\n. And then the conversation got into a bit of\nlook is this just human insecurity coming across\nand then I had a bit about terrified men who hadn’t felt secure in their childhoods needing to\nmake everything OK and tippity-top one hundred percent good\nand not understanding that it would be OK if not everything was OK, sometimes not everything can be OK and we just need to cope with that.\nThis was supposed to be a short one and instead I have just injected over 2,300 words into your inbox but let’s be clear, you did specifically ask for this so it’s all your fault, really.\nI hope everyone has a good weekend, this has been some of the things that have caught my attention lately.\nOh, and: look, this isn’t some super secret paywall thing, if you liked something in this and want to forward it to someone or some people or whatever, then go for it: it’s not like there’s any way to stop you in a world with general purpose computing.\nBest,\nDan\nPS. Nah, I can’t resist it: I bought a restored Macintosh LC III, it has a 68030 processor at 40MHz, 36MB of RAM, a 160\nMEGABYTE\nhard drive; I’ve got it connected to the internet and yes it’s running Hypercard. No I didn’t write this episode on it, but bits of Monday’s episode are already on it. Look:\n… and I’ve already put the work-in-progress novel on it. So there.\nPPS. SEND NOTES I LOVE THEM","raw_format":"html","source":"import","summary":"This October 2019 newsletter touches on design philosophy, institutional mismanagement of technology, and the ethics of feature creep across seemingly unrelated topics. The common thread connecting these pieces is a frustration with how technology gets developed and deployed without proper consideration of its actual impacts—whether that's design choices that prioritize sales over user needs, Wi-Fi routers gaining surveillance capabilities without meaningful user consent, or bureaucratic structures that treat innovation like fleet maintenance. Woven through the critiques are moments of appreciation for thoughtful work, like a friend's documented health transformation and tools that genuinely facilitate creative problem-solving.","reading_minutes":13,"links":[{"url":"https://twitter.com/berkun/status/1182347625296621568?s=20]","normalized_url":"https://twitter.com/berkun/status/1182347625296621568","domain":"twitter.com","anchor_text":"Scott Berkun @berkun Papanek described two kinds of design:\n\nDesign for sale: choices made to increase profits \nDesign for use: choices made to solve problems/improve things\n\nSometimes they overlap: a choice improves sale and use. 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