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Nick Clegg, president of Meta, penned a lengthy Medium post trying to portray a more positive vision to justify the company’s pivot to all-in for the metaverse future. To Clegg, the metaverse is “ultimately about finding ever more ways for the benefits of the online world to be felt in our daily lives.” This frame is backwards, and reinforces the technology-first lens of social construction that has not held up well over time. A better lens to explain the inevitability of the metaverse is that technology will, over time, provide ever more ways for the benefits of the offline world to be felt through online services. Today’s social media is about communication; the metaverse of tomorrow will be about experiences. Its value is not inherent, but rather lies in the ability of technology to recreate and transport things—in particular, experiences—that have inherent value.

Metaverse technology will, in all likelihood, follow that same evolution. Today’s VR headsets are the equivalent of phonographs and radio. But someday, metaverse users will be able to mix their favorite cocktails in their homes, strap on their multisensory gear, and “walk” into a virtual bar to socialize with friends located anywhere in the world. They’d save the $18 that cocktail costs in a physical bar, and spend it on the $18/month subscription fee for their VirtualBar membership. As the world continues to suffer from the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s easy to see the appeal of virtual substitutes for in-person experiences. In 2020, Zoom replaced in-person social events and professional collaborations; in 2030, the technology options will be far richer, and will capture and convey even more (though not all) of the subtle interpersonal dynamics inherent in human interaction.

It creates more generic-looking interfaces that may perform well in numbers but fall short of appealing to our senses.

It’s easy to make data-driven design decisions, but relying on data alone ignores that some goals are difficult to measure. Data is very useful for incremental, tactical changes, but only if it’s checked and balanced by our instincts and common sense.

It became clear to the team in that moment that we cared about more than just clicks. We had other goals for this design: It needed to set expectations about what happens next, it needed to communicate quality, and we wanted it to build familiarity and trust in our brand.We could have easily measured how many customers clicked one button versus another, and used that data to pick an optimal button. But that approach would have ignored the big picture and other important goals.

Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted.Data is good at measuring things that are easy to measure. Some goals are less tangible, but that doesn’t make them less important.While you’re chasing a 2% increase in conversion rate you may be suffering a 10% decrease in brand trustworthiness. You’ve optimized for something that’s objectively measured, at the cost of goals that aren’t so easily codified.

Design instinct is a lot more than innate creative ability and cultural guesswork. It’s your wealth of experience. It’s familiarity with industry standards and best practices.

Overreliance on data to drive design decisions can be just as harmful as ignoring it. Data only tells one kind of story. But your project goals are often more complex than that. Goals can’t always be objectively measured.

The main problem with the book review today is not that its practitioners live in New York, as some contend. It is not that the critics are in cahoots with the authors under review, embroiled in a shadow economy of social obligation and quid pro quo favor trading. The problem is not that book reviews are too mean or too nice, too long or too short, though they may be those things, too. The main problem is that the contemporary American book review is first and foremost an audition — for another job, another opportunity, another day in the content mine, hopefully with better lighting and tools, but at the very least with better pay. What kind of job or opportunity for the reviewer depends on her ambitions.

He wants honest reviews of novels; instead he gets hype and a dizzying, outrageous, stultifying profusion of adjectives. He wants serious literary criticism of novels; instead he gets withering assessments of the era in which said novels are written, which, by endlessly discussing the same five novels, only confirm his fears that literature has reached the unsustainably small gene-pool era of its long, slow slide to extinction. The contemporary reviewer is unhappy too: she works too hard, and still everything she does is wrong and insufficiently compensated. Her careful reviews end up reading like stenography, and when she swings for the fences her actual readers — unlike the trigger-happy tweeters — complain that she has swung too far.

Here the technologist stands, choosing what kind of future, out of the infinite possibilities, that will actually materialize based on our scientific understanding of the present world.

A piece of technology prioritizes some low-resistance path to achieve an end, and its essential nature involves instrumentality and free will. It must inherently be purposive.

Writing SwiftUI is like riding a bicycle downhill on a beautiful sunny day. Until the bike suddenly explodes, killing you.