And to design is to take purpose into account — as my friend Jared Spool says: design is the rendering of intent. You can’t separate an object’s function from its intent. You cannot critique it, you cannot understand it, and you cannot appreciate something without thinking about its intent.
You are responsible for what you put into the world. And you are responsible for how what you’ve designed affects the world. Mikhail Kalashnikov is responsible for as many deaths as the people who pulled those triggers.
Courtney Stanton: How I Got 50% Women Speakers at My Tech Conference
Having a non-trivial number of women submitting presentations seems to have made it so that a non-trivial number of women are speaking at No Show Conference. Imagine that.
Jamie Lee Curtis Taete: There Is Nothing Pretentious About Being a Vegan (VICE)
A while back, I received a very angry email from someone about an article I once wrote. In the article, I mentioned that I wasn't a huge fan of eating in pretentious restaurants. I also mentioned that I am a vegan, which this man did not appreciate.
his terrifying disorder turns people into zombies, into living, breathing ghosts; they believe they died, or never existed. And somewhere in their brains may be the key to human consciousness.
An experiment to show how designing for The Fold can be treacherous. Each line below is from a random sampling of past-visitors' viewport heights. Take care when making assumptions about people's screen sizes on the web.
Felix Salmon: The most expensive lottery ticket in the world (Reuters)
The real winners are the happy and well-paid engineers, enjoying their lives and their youth while working for great companies like Google. In the world of startups, the only winning move is not to play.
Soraya Chemaly: How We Teach Our Kids That Women Are Liars (Role Reboot)
I find it sad and disturbing that children learn so quickly and normatively to distrust women. Any commitment to parity means challenging the stories we tell them. It means critically assessing the comforting institutions we support out of nostalgia, habit, and tradition. It means walking out of places of worship, not buying certain movie tickets, closing some books, refusing to pay for some music, and politely disagreeing with friends and family at the dinner table. It’s not easy. But, really, what’s the alternative?
Economic status dictates class and diet. We arrange food in a hierarchy based on who originally ate it until we reach mullet, gar, possum, and squirrel—the diet of the poor. The food is called trash, and then the people are.
Adrienne LaFrance: When You Give a Tree an Email Address (CityLab)
The city of Melbourne assigned trees email addresses so citizens could report problems. Instead, people wrote thousands of love letters to their favorite trees.
Input is a flexible system of fonts designed specifically for code by David Jonathan Ross. It offers both monospaced and proportional fonts, all with a large range of widths, weights, and styles for richer code formatting.
If your goal is to fix this broken medium, please consider that, historically, people have relied on different media for different social purposes, and have relied on a clear understanding of how the technical properties of each medium determine the social and temporal scope of its messages.
To be told what is and is not a big deal is to be a young woman or maybe just a woman. I don’t know yet. Give me some time and I’ll get back to you on that one.
Alyssa Rosenberg: ‘Game of Thrones’ has always been a show about rape
If reading this litany has been exhausting, it’s testament to just how well “Game of Thrones” has done at leavening this grimness with humor, tenderness and moments of real human connection. But it also ought to suggest how odd it is to accuse the showrunners of adding a sexual assault to somehow up the stakes when, dragons aside, intimate violence is already at the core of so many of the series’ storylines.
There’s no requirement that anyone like any of these storylines or that anyone who feels exhausted from spending his or her days in a world marked by sexual violence retreat to a worse one for pleasure. But that’s not the same thing as proof that “Game of Thrones” is generally careless in its depiction of sexual assault or that rape doesn’t serve a purpose on the show. Sansa Stark isn’t ruined, as a character or as a person, because she was raped. She lives, and her story continues, even if you’re not tuning in to watch
Maria Bustillos: The Startling Humanism of ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’
In Max, we may read modern men in general, who were taught to fight and die and bleed for everyone else, uncomplainingly and alone, who were taught that women were weak, dependents to be “cherished” and protected—not equals who could fend for ourselves or fight side-by-side with them. But at some point in the late twentieth century, men somehow learned a different way of thinking about all that. What Miller is really doing is teaching men, not only women, how to rise above the patriarchy.
Mat Marquis: `text-rendering: optimizeLegibility` is Decadent and Depraved
TL;DR: Using `text-rendering: optimizeSpeed` can do a lot for performance.
All this typographic power came with a cost: text-rendering: optimizeLegibility is slow—and by “slow,” I mean that it can bog down an entire page, from initial render time to repaints. More than that, though, it’s buggy: Android in particular has serious issues trying to render a page that uses optimizeLegibility heavily, especially the older versions that are still, sadly, very common today.
Jason Pontin: A Feminist Critique of Silicon Valley (MIT Technology Review)
Shanley Kane challenges the assumptions and practices of the tech industry.
“We are not getting hired, and we are not getting promoted, and we are being systematically driven out of the industry.”
Lily Benson: How To Hit On Girls In The Club (Or Not)
I know dudes are reading this thinking I'm a hater, but I really do believe that consensual club flirting is a beautiful thing, and I partake all the time. Flirting should be fun—it's not an adversarial process unless you make it one. Don't treat us like bodyguards who are trying to keep you from having sex with us. We are us. So help us help you have a good time with us.
Rushing doesn’t improve things, it might even slow you down. Focusing on a few things and doing them well is worthwhile. Sharing what you learn—even while you’re still figuring things out—is even better.
Modeling system is.
Imagine what we could learn if we had the ability to break anything down, to reach inside it, and see what that little bit there does. The more ways we find to represent systems such that we retain that ability, the more power we will have to understand complex things.