Ideal Process versus Reality

Matej Latin provides good advice for young designers. Namely, that the ideal process learned from books is not true to life.

[T]he double diamond design process which has been often cited as the design process doesn't reflect reality. It's the perfect ideal that designers strive for but rarely achieve. Designers simply don't have that much control over the influencing factors so a design manager reading through a perfect, cookie-cutter case study, even if it uses the double diamond process, knows immediately that it's fake.

Frankly, I sometimes see advanced designers demanding excessive adherence to process from their reports. I suspect that comes from a lack of faith in their designers, and also anxiety from not knowing every detail of the project. Delegating work means trusting that your staff can handle the job. Overemphasizing a double diamond process (or the related documentation) for every single thing creates a classroom-like environment. It feels less than professional despite being by the book.

Duolingo and You, or Not

Dave Rupert made some smart comments on Duolingo.

Slowly you realize the truth about Duolingo; it's not a language learning platform, it's an engagement platform. And through that engagement you might pick up some language skills. Duolingo does little in explaining how rudimentary concepts like verbs or participles work and instead lets you piece it together solely from repetition and context clues. Repetition in learning is important but without ever addressing the fundamentals of a language Duolingo reveals it's prioritizing something else over language mechanics.

He's right in that Duolingo prioritizes repetition over language mechanics. I can't argue with that. Except to say that the repetition is what makes it work for me. I don't open Duolingo to learn the rules of a language (French, in my case). I use Duolingo as a reliable way to inject 10 to 20 minutes of French into my life everyday. And I reinforce that education with a twice-monthly one-on-one lesson with a private teacher.

If you're using Duolingo, I'd recommend ignoring every app mechanic but the streak. Keep the streak going, because it's the daily bit of language which keeps it alive in your brain. And don't expect to become fluent from the app, either. It won't do that for you (unless maybe you dedicate an hour or more a day?). For that reason, I think Rupert is right walk away, having read his explanation. If you don't have enough motivation to learn a language with other supportive practices, Duolingo is probably not going to provide much benefit to you in the long run.

I could replace Duolingo with daily reading in French. I have French books and I do read them, but I'm constantly going to the dictionary to look up words and conjugations. There are thousands of idioms and colloquialisms which need googling to understand. What makes Duolingo better, in my opinion, is that it keeps it simple. It grows the vocabulary slowly, repetitively, and the translations are always a click away, should you need it. And it's on my phone, which is with me all the time. I can do my daily 15min from anywhere at anytime.

So I'd agree with Dave that Duolingo is not the perfect way to learn a language on its own. If it's not working for you, let it drop. But for me, it's the exact kind of reinforcement which propels me forward into fluency. For anyone who truly does want to learn a language, my advice would be to take regular lessons or classes, but to support that with a daily Duolingo habit. Or maybe use Duolingo to find which language you truly want to learn. You might think it's Spanish, but maybe you find you really enjoy German? In any case. it's an excellent app. I've found it incredibly useful. Especially when my expectations for it are in line with what it provides.

The Gulf Between Design and Engineering

I couldn't agree more with Rune Madsen's article on the gulf between design and engineering in some organizations.

I believe the way most organizations produce digital products is fundamentally broken. The elephant in the room is a dated understanding of the role of both design and engineering, which in turn shapes how organizations hire, manage, and produce digital things. These companies invest billions of dollars building teams, processes, and tools on top of an immature discipline and an outdated waterfall model that ends up being detrimental to productivity, team happiness, and ultimately, the resulting experiences we bring to life.

I work at a company which is a nestled set of orgs within orgs. A sibling design department to mine has recently finalized their waterfall process with a very detailed document. It's really well done, and a big achievement for our Design Ops. I'm reading it, though, and realizing that it could not possibly work for my department without introducing bottlenecks from design and slowing down the rate with which we ship. That documentation clearly solves an org problem, albeit one out of my view — I suspect a political one concerned with executive reporting. That's fair. There are many acceptable reasons for leadership to prioritize what they choose. In a big org like the one I'm in, accountability can take precedence over product. Again, fair.

My team — as opposed to the others — operates as Madsen describes: integrated with engineering. Every week, we're shipping new features across multiple Publishing tools. And at various levels. Sometimes the feature is a new button in the UI for a new function. Sometimes the feature is a systems-wide capability which cuts multiple steps out of a newsroom workflow. The high speed with which we work depends on the tight partnership between design and engineering. Because of this, possible ship-sinking icebergs in the engineering phase can be avoided by steering design in the right direction from the very beginning. We move smoothly and quickly from concept to launch.

It's very worth reading Madsen's entire article. I started to clip quotes from it and couldn't stop. What I'm going to continue thinking about is the various reasons an org may choose to operate differently. What are the orthogonal complications which prevent a team from working this way? What other company priorities may be worth sacrificing this efficiency for? (via Brad Frost)

NYC Phil

Rob invited me out to the NYC Philharmoic on Saturday. We started the night with dinner at Jeju in the West Village, an excellent Korean place I'd return to. I had the gochu ramyun, Rob the donkatsu, and we split the fried chicken app. We had extra time, so we grabbed some scotch at the old Art Bar; place was still packed and going strong.

The performance was really nice. I don't have the words to appropriately describe the pieces, but I did learn plenty from Rob, not only about the music, but how orchestras and players work as an industry and career. 

The program:

• Mozart: K.505 aria
• Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major
• Mahler: Symphony No. 4

Beirut on AI

Michael Beirut with a great take on a benefit of AI:

"A majority of the world is boilerplate, and that's a good thing," Michael says. "Because all of us are motivated by two opposing kinds of needs. One is the need for predictability and comfort. And the other is the need for surprise and excitement. If you get that balance wrong and everything is just comfortable and predictable, you get bored. And that's not good. But on the other hand, the antidote to that isn't 100% unpredictability, surprise, and entertainment, because then you get too overstimulated and start to freak out. There's a certain reason why you wouldn't want every building on Fifth Avenue to look like the Guggenheim. It just would be too crazy in an unpleasant way. This architect was admiring some anonymous building somewhere in Manhattan, and they said, 'You know, what makes a city great is its ability to put up and maintain something like this, a perfectly good kind of background building that actually does its job well and isn't calling attention to itself.' But if you examine the details, you see that they're sound and built to last, and the tenants are satisfied. And then down the block and around the corner, there's something more special and showy that provides a great foil for that.”

So maybe ChatGPT, Midjourney, and all of those other new generative AI programs can be responsible for doing the boilerplate really well. Now, you've got time to do something a little more interesting. "Everyone dismisses boilerplate as crap that's not worth anyone's time," Bierut says. "You could argue boilerplate makes the world go round, whether it's in architecture, design, or writing. Boilerplate makes things that are special look and feel more appropriately special. Maybe that's an appropriate way to think about the promise of AI, but I don't know."

This tracks with how I've been thinking about AI with respect to design (or any creative profession). It's going to be a tool which helps with boring, rote elements of a process. It'll be able to recreate and fuse older iterations of a craft in order to more quickly produce what had come before. It's just not going to be reliably able to make something humanist and new. At some point, the boundaries of what AI can produce will be obvious, and human beings will bend culture back to what is more fully human.

You can't believe the tech bros about this. They're going to claim AI will be possible of anything — including self-awareness and then becoming our new god. Whatever AI creatures they do eventually create will look and act like them, because people are only able to create gods in their own image. In the case of AI, that god will also be white, male, and techno-centric.

Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing how art and society eventually push back on the upcoming AI-obsessed culture. It should be really human. Really tactile and emotional. Think about how Grunge reset the table on music as we turned into the 1990s. AI stuff will always look clean and rich. It'll have a pristine quality to it, even when prompted to not. Because it's expensive. And it's run by rich people. The pushback to it is going to be a good time. It's going to be the Guggenheims on a street full of forgettable buildings.

Advice from Gaiman

Posted by Jennifer Grand on BlueSky.

[E]xquisite advice from [Neil Gaiman]
“When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”

The End of Pitchfork?

Pitchfork magazine is being folded into GQ. I've been a reader for over twenty years now, and so this is a bummer. I read maybe one out of every 300 reviews, but it was still a good place to catch wind of new artists, or which older artists are putting out new material.

Kornhaber does a pretty good job of capturing my attitude towards it:

The irony of Pitchfork is that although it has long been thought of as a keeper of cool, the site itself has never been particularly cool; one admits sheepishly to reading it. This is not just because of its reputation for snobbery and its sometimes exasperating prose. It's also because to absorb the logic of Pitchfork is to believe in the authority of each individual's ears and brain. Saying you're a Pitchfork person can be mistaken for saying you take its opinions as your own, when ideally it just means that you want a discerning companion for making your own discoveries and judgments.

I never really cared what Pitchfork said about anyone. I'm able to have my own studied opinions. But if they cared to write about someone, I figured they were worth the attention, for good or bad.

This is probably the end of the site, but the real Pitchfork killer would be the sunsetting of its RSS feed. If I can't follow the music news without also getting posts about what watches movie stars wore on red carpets, then I'm out out.

Time to start looking for more places for independent music news.

BrianFeeney.us v11.2

Welcome to a slightly updated brianfeeney.us. This morning, I transferred my domain from one server to another, moving from my old website to this one. Minor updates on the front-end, but it's a fully updated Craft instance on the back-end. Apologies to anyone following via RSS; you might have just been flooded with a bunch of old posts and new.

Only a few things have changed between v11.1 and v11.2. Here's a short list:

• I've added a Notes post type for short comments not necessitating a title.
• There's a new homepage featuring writing and photos.
• My portfolio & CV is no longer on this site, but on a new domain: http://brianfeeney.design
• An about page! I plan to update this with something better ASAP.

That's about it for now. I'm currently playing with designs for a big v12 update. I don't feel pressured to get that up anytime soon, as I still really like the general design of v11. Maybe summer 2024?

If you're a reader, I welcome you to reach out! I run this site as if there are literally zero real people visiting. I don't believe for a moment that the 4.6k unique visitors registered by Cloudflare is really real. But surely a few those are friends and future friends out there.

AirPlay is Broken

At some point in the last few months, Apple degraded the user experience with AirPlay and the HomePods. I used to be able to play music on my speakers via an "iPhone -> Living Room" option. Now, I can only handoff to the Living Room option, which is a combo HomePods/AppleTV thing. I can control the music playing out of the speakers, but it's not really my Apple Music library. It's a facsimile of it. And that's the real problem. It doesn't retain "favorites", gives me an "Add to Library" option for songs supposedly playing from my library, does not allow for rating tracks, and play counts do not increase inside my iTunes smart playlists. When viewing on the iPhone, it doesn't even let you look back through the history so you can update Favorites or ratings from there. It's all very frustrating because it used to work exactly as I expected it to.

I've troublshooted by turning on/off every single setting I can find on my phone, HomePods, Apple TV, and Apple Music apps. No luck. The problem is such that no amount of specificity in my Google search terms can filter to it. I suspect that once you set a pair of HomePods to be the default audio for an AppleTV, those HomePods are no longer findable on their own to AirPlay to. They disappear as their own thing which can AirPlay.

My hope is that my personal use case has fallen into the cracks between one update and the next within something in the Apple ecosystem, and that an upcoming update will realign it all. That AirPlaying music will once again be possible.

New Findings on Migraines

This Vox article on migraines is a rare quality on on the subject.

Experts used to think migraines were solely caused by the abnormal expansion of blood vessels in the brain, according to Zhang. Over the past couple of decades, that thinking has evolved: Scientists now believe the brains of people with migraines are exquisitely sensitive to the effects of certain neurotransmitters, in particular calcitonin gene-related peptide, or CGRP.
"The CGRP molecule is essentially a pain molecule," says Zhang. Headache researchers have found that people with migraines had higher blood CGRP levels during headaches than people without migraines, and that giving migraine-prone people infusions of the molecule triggered headaches. These discoveries made the molecule a target for a flurry of drug discovery, and since 2018, the FDA has approved eight new migraine drugs.

Nurtec is one of the newer drugs and it has been wonderfully effective for me. I've been taking it every other day since late 2021 and it effectively prevents my migraines. Rizatriptan had helped, too, but it wasn't preventative and I was going through the maximum 10 pills a month. If you're a migraine sufferer and put off seeing a neurologist, let me tell you to change that. The new drugs work.

Anticipatory anxiety, the worry about something bad to come, is one of the types of stress that can trigger migraines. That can make it challenging to disentangle actual migraine triggers from beliefs about triggers. Lipton remembers a patient who blamed his migraines on changes in barometric pressure, which his smartwatch pinged him about in real time. "I took away his watch, and his headaches got a lot better," he says. "Beliefs about triggers cause anticipatory anxiety, which increases the probability of headache."

This is also true for me. It's undiagnosed, but I'm pretty sure I have a low-level general anxiety disorder which I highly suspect it's also one of my migraine triggers. How frustrating is it that fear of a thing could make that thing happen? Very.

He notes that migraine triggers are often cumulative: For example, many women can drink alcohol without getting a migraine at most times of the month, but a glass of wine during their menstrual cycle can lead to a headache.

Absolutely. After keeping a migraine journal for years, I found this to be true for me. I learned that migraines were regularly occurring on overcast or rainy days. That itself, wasn't enough to cause a migraine, but it was if I had had multiple drinks the night before. Or if I was stressed about something, or my diet had been bad for a day or two. Keeping tabs on all of this has been a huge help.

When it comes to prevention, the greatest boon has been the ability to work from home. No commute, no fluorescent office lights, no social anxiety and forcing myself to be pleasant. Also, when at home, comfortable on a couch in soft natural light.

Migraines are the worst. I've been suffering from them since I was in 3rd grade, when my eyesight went south and I needed glasses. And when my social anxiety was coming on board. If you're suffering from regular headaches and haven't looked into treatment, you absolutely should. I put it off for a very long time and regret it.