
And yet design and designers. I’m a designer, and what I’ve seen is that we are perpetually distressed, perpetually feel threatened by the idea of democratization. As long as I’ve been a designer there’s been talk about the idea of accreditation, about the idea of licensing designers, about making people take training, take tests in order to practice design, regulating the practice of design. Designers take a look at services and website like 99 Designs, which is a website, a marketplace–if you have a design task that you need done, a business card or something, you post it there and designers bid on the job and the effect is it drives down the price of design. It drives down to the median value of design.
Khoi Vinh on The Skeptic’s Case For Design Thinking
In their writing, they reflect on their own work, and they’re skeptical about what they’re doing often times. They’re also very skeptical and question the world around them. And that’s something that I think that we can do a lot more as designers, and I know it is not an easy thing to do, because a lot of our practice is to serve commercial goals and purposes. Under that kind of condition it’s not that easy to say, “Okay. Are we doing the right thing? Or are we doing good design right now?”
Natasha Jen on Design Thinking Is B.S.

Guest speaker: Sacha Connor, Founder of Virtual Work Insider
On Working from Home
Burnout is more of a concern than lack of productivity.
Virtual Meetings
- Make sure it is really necessary
- Avoid tourists in meeting – include only people that need to be there
- Pre-work – what can be done in advance to make the meeting take the shortest time possible
- Video (versus audio-only) is better for facilitation
- Inclusivity
- Ice-breakers – giving everybody a voice in meetings
- E.g., what luggage are you bringing in this meeting? What’s going on outside of your camera?
- Encourage participation from everyone
- Ice-breakers – giving everybody a voice in meetings
- Once the meeting ends, how do we communicate?
- Have common agreement regarding which channel to communicate on regarding a particular concern
- For example, if something needs to be documented, use email for paper-trail
- Who are the key stakeholders internally, externally
- Find out which is a good time to engage with them
I have often seen UX designers present bewildered development teams with an uncoordinated stream of design deliverables that define what they need to build—for example, Adobe Photoshop or XD screen designs, Figma prototypes, Confluence documents, and Excel spreadsheets, along with some hand-coded HTML and JavaScript. Plus, UX teams often seem oblivious or uncaring about the problems their use of multiple, disparate tools causes development teams. Indeed, development teams themselves are sometimes unaware that their job could be so much easier if UX teams used fewer tools and used their tools in a more coordinated manner.
Ritch Macefield in User Experience and the Big Picture, Part 1: Problems, Problems
Sometimes, when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things—a chance word, a tap on the shoulder, or a penny dropped on a newsstand—I am tempted to think there are no little things.
Bruce Barton
It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.
Stephen King in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft