The Chinese Internet by Spencer Chang substack.com/home/post/p-... "In December & January, I spent over a month in China. What follows is a condensed breakdown of all the observations I had. I’m splitting them up into 3 sections: physical culture, digital culture & craft/creative culture"

uwu we are just smol beans doing some chonky peeping

the difference between "technology" and "design" is "this is the only way it'll work" vs "you could just make different decisions and get different outcomes"

a while ago i ruminated on how software is always marketed in terms of features, which conveniently represent on one hand a capability for the user, and on the other a unit of work for programmers but a raw capability says nothing about how the software behaves doriantaylor.com/distilled-ca...

my inclination is to shift the focus from technology (which is developing raw capability) to *design*, which is about decisions taken within a given capability envelope that qualitatively alter how it acts upon the world by emphasizing some parts of it and de-emphasizing others

for the most part writing code isn't inventing novel technology any more than writing an essay is inventing the printing press to the extent that your product genuinely introduces any novel capability at all, there are a hundred times as many decisions around how it's packaged and provisioned

most software dev is applications and app dev is almost all gluing together libraries with ui; you notice when you invent something novel (to you at least) indeed one explanation for why LLMs work for code at all is that they pick up on patterns that repeat themselves all over the corpus

as somebody who has been making software for nearly 30 years, the relationship of any particular software artifact to "technology" is tenuous, in my opinion some artifacts are more technology-ey than others most i would say (like apps) just rearticulate various mundane business processes

The Fragility of Borrowed Intelligence — Aishwarya Khanduja www.aishwaryadoingthings.com/the-fragilit...

Visualizing Fortune 500 logos by similarity by Knut Synstad www.knutsynstad.com/projects/vis...

Anyone on the TL here has worked with Hugh Dubberly?

Visual Collaboration Tools for teams building software by Kenny Baas-Schwegler Krisztina Hirth & João Rosa leanpub.com/visualcollab...

Value-Driven Analysis and Design: Applying Domain-Driven Practices in Ethical Software Engineering dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Domain Storytelling: A Collaborative, Visual, and Agile Way to Build Domain-Driven Software by Stefan Hofer, Henning Schwentner www.oreilly.com/library/view... An Introduction to Domain Storytelling www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9k9...

GitHub : A curated list of awesome resources and links about tackling legacy systems that gives hope. github.com/feststelltas... "Most developers just learn how to create new systems initially and not how to maintain existing ones or even evolve those systems. This list tries to close these gaps"

How to do blind/visually impaired coders keep a mental model of what's happening in their codebase

<3 💜✨ Interview with author @jyoshimi.bsky.social www.tonyakubo.com/016-gaming-c... #cancerresearch #design #gamedesign #systemsthinking #citizenscience @tonyakubo.bsky.social

Gaming Cancer: How Building and Playing Video Games Can Accelerate Scientific Discovery by Jeff Yoshimi www.amazon.in/Gaming-Cance...

The most practical information architecture book that does not sell itself as an information architecture book

WE ARE LIVE! Dying with nerves and excitement. Please help us realise All Will Rise by supporting our kickstarter! Plot your revenge against the billionaire class and play the demo now! #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

The whole GitHub Next team is coming to London in March! And we're hosting a meet-up for anyone interested in the next generation of software eng tools Sign-up here → luma.com/v5eltkec?tk=... March 3rd at 6pm We'll show our recent work & research, but also have open spots for community demos

Splitting a Domain Across Multiple Bounded Contexts by Mathias Verraes @mathiasverraes.bsky.social verraes.net/2021/06/spli... Design and Reality : Essays on Software Design by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Mathias Verraes leanpub.com/design-and-r...

The Kubernetes Special Interest Group for User Interfaces (SIG-UI) is a community group focused on improving the user experience of all Kubernetes graphical user interfaces. kubernetes.io/blog/2016/04... github.com/kubernetes/c...

Rookledge's Classic International Typefinder : The Essential Handbook Of Typeface Recognition And Selection archive.org/details/rook...

Conceptions of Design Practice From Academy to Industry: Implications for HCI and Design Education dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Challenges and Opportunities in Developing Cross-Cultural UX Professional Competencies | Proceedings of the 7th Annual Symposium on HCI Education @graydesign.bsky.social dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

The #chi2025 closing keynote: Masako Wakamiya - who built her first iPhone app at the age of 81. She is reflecting on the way that technology played a role in society for older women in Japanese society: eg Microsoft excel being used for art and creativity in the 1990s. Design for 100 years of life.

Masako Wakamiya's keynote is a beautiful love letter to technology appropriation. Loved her stories about turning "Office" into a playground #chi2025

Designers Have to Move from the Surface to the Substrate — Suff Syed www.suffsyed.com/futurememo/d...

this post by @maggieappleton.com is the best checkpoint on agent-driven programming i've read yet. it's ostensibly about gas town but you can ignore that part. it's very "where are we in january of 2026?" and its clarity, in a sea of confusing terminology, is refreshing. maggieappleton.com/gastown

Information Design Workbook: Graphic Approaches, Solutions, and Inspiration by Kim Baer www.amazon.in/Information-...

Developing user-centered system design guidelines for explainable AI: a systematic literature review link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Graspable AI: Physical Forms as Explanation Modality for Explainable AI www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/di... From "Explainable AI" to "Graspable AI" par.nsf.gov/servlets/pur...

Anyone on the TL here that has taken a class with Bill Verplank?

I am calling for a complete and total boycott of the Mercator projection in all news stories about Greenland until every member of the American public has seen this

Designing for forgiveness: How to create error-tolerant interfaces | by Tia Sydorenko | UX Collective uxdesign.cc/designing-fo...

Reading List of 70+ Distributed Systems papers all from 2025 compiled by Prof. Indranil Gupta for the CS525 course at UIUC docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Is there a UI pattern library for preventing, surfacing, and recovering from costly errors in healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, aviation, food safety and finance A resource for "Decision points in interfaces that are most likely to cause costly errors"

Crux of spotting saas moat for future : What promises, under deadlines, fail to deliver at scale even with AI agents because of human limitations in using them If anyone can spin up agents, workflows, and internal tools quickly, where does something still systematically break at scale?

The ability and willingness to care for someone even when it's inconvenient to you is the most beautiful behaviour. It's a timeless enduring beauty, the kind that doesn't decay with age.

hear me out: • @signal.org forks gecko • banishes superfluous ai • makes properly private browser • hires me to do it

Any designer on the TL works on products that decide what is safe, valid, correct or worth doing in environments where mistakes cost real things (money, safety, trust, legality) Like where the cost of errors, failure is too high. Where mistakes cost money, lawsuits, or lives?

I really do adore ❤️ gameuidatabase.com. It is an amazing resource; the amount of love and skill that has poured into it is clear to see. #Gaming #UI #Design #UIDesign #GamingUI #GameDev #Frontend #UIDev

On touchscreens and UI controls acuity.design/touchscreens... as Wired has article about car controls and buttons. We did a lot of work on this about 10 years ago. #accessibility

What's the most impressive project you've seen shipped in 15 days

yo dawg i herd u didn't liek ai so we put some ai in yo comments about ai so it would come out lookin liek u liek ai www.thestar.com/politics/fed...

Brian made another amazing book for open hardware, industrial design folks makeityourself.org Digital book called Make it Yourself: 1000 Useful Things to Make & it's basically a showcase of some of the best open hardware & DIY projects from across the Internet

It's my book's release day! The Patterns of Comics is now officially published, featuring an extended data-driven analysis of the structures used in 350+ comics from Asia, Europe, and North America analyzing diversity, regularity, and change over time www.visuallanguagelab.com/poc

@meganakpeters.bsky.social "My research aims to reveal how the brain represents and uses uncertainty, and performs adaptive computations based on noisy, incomplete information" sites.google.com/site/meganak... Wow!

Absolutely delighted to keynote Cooperative AI in Istanbul today: telling everyone how we built @transkribus.bsky.social, and how it has flourished under READ-COOP. I usually speak about this to DH, Library & Archive audiences - great to show our wares to researchers of coops, & fab discussions.