100 words 017

There are certain attributes of design—or the design process—that are spoken as if they are unquestionably positive. The adjective “innovative” is one of them. But not all innovation is positive. It is possible to create innovative ways to do harm.

Likewise, the word “seamless” is used as though it were by definition a good thing. But hiding the seams in a system is a way of denying a user’s power and autonomy. The problem is that when something goes wrong—as Murphy’s Law dictates it must—the only recourse left is to turn it off and on again.

Have you published a response to this? :

Previously on this day

17 years ago I wrote Visual

Links to pretty pictures of data.

18 years ago I wrote Further flung reading

Links from a keynote.

18 years ago I wrote Flung and refreshed

I’m back from Edinburgh.

21 years ago I wrote Unreal Tech Support

When I was in Arizona at Christmas time, I picked up some games for my Mac. Since then I’ve been happily playing Halo, not so happily playing Aliens vs. Predator 2 (it’s not a patch on the original) and not playing Unreal Tournament 2003 at al