In an excellent article on Medium, Jesse Weaver skillfully articulates the tradeoffs of using free tech products:

It’s the Faustian bargain we’ve all struck. In exchange for a “free” web, we give you our time.

Paying for products in the currency of our time – our attention – profoundly shapes their design.

Instead of streamlined experiences, filled with quality content, we’ve seen the rise of clickbait headlines, listicles and ad saturated UIs that are slow, cumbersome and sometimes down right unusable, especially on mobile screens.

While these outcomes are incredibly frustrating, the more notable issue is how it colors our approach as designers:

The drive for attention has also influenced the way we talk about products. As designers we’re expected to make things “habit forming”. Get people “hooked”. And turn monthly “users” into daily “users”. The only other people I know who call their customers users are drug dealers.

As I wrote in 2013:

Simply put, most digital products are designed with a bias towards eliciting as much use as possible.

Jesse continues:

This rhetoric has made companies more and more aggressive about pushing their agenda into our lives. Floods of emails, push notifications, text notifications, daily reminders, and weekly digests are the norm in the attention web.

“Pushing their agenda into our lives.” This is the phrase that gives me pause. To take someone’s time is to take something extremely precious.

Time is more precious than money. Money is a renewable resource. Everyone always has the potential to make more money. Time, on the other hand, is finite. There are only so many hours in a day. By definition, you only have so much time to give.

Therein lies the conflict. An ethical approach to product design results in providing as much value as possible in as little time as possible. But that’s impossible to achieve, when the viability of our businesses depend on providing as much value as possible in as much time as possible.

We aren’t creating human-centered experiences, we are creating attention-centered experiences, which puts the needs of the business squarely ahead of the needs of the customer.

In 2013, I asked:

As digital product designers, what is the measure of our responsibility to encourage moderation (not just maximum use and profit) in the way we design our products to be used?

What would that look like – to provide as much value as possible in as little time as possible? Imagine what the world would be like if all products were designed this way.

A compelling use case for Snapchat: vicariously follow two climbers on their ascent up Everest. It’s as close to experiencing this journey as most people will ever come. What makes it special? It’s not a polished and edited documentary. It can’t be replayed. It’s more real than any reality TV. It’s an opportunity to take part in an experience as it happens each day – something you might look back on and remember.

Two skate videos well worth watching (even if, like me, you don’t skateboard):

• Richie Jackson’s “Death Skateboards” Part — Jackson’s style is mesmerizing, unexpected, and highly creative. The same might also be said for his physical appearance. (via Kottke)
• MALTO — Sean Malto’s uplifting story of recovery is as beautifully told as it is shot, all on an iPhone. (via Daring Fireball)

From Architizer:

Pivot is a pre-war studio revamped into a modern adaptable space containing a secret bedroom. The brief called for hosting 10 for dinner, sleeping 6, a home office, a private study, and an efficient kitchen for a client that loves to entertain, all within a 400s square foot studio apartment.

Incredibly inspiring and perhaps the best design I’ve seen for a small, transforming apartment. Kudos to the designers at Architecture Workshop.

From New York Magazine’s cover story on Donald Trump’s campaign:

But one factor that’s been particularly crucial to Trump’s rise may be the way that reality television, cable news, and talk radio have shaped the culture’s sense of “reality” — in other words, its relationship to truth. If Ronald Reagan showed us that Hollywood was good training for politics, Trump is proving that the performance skills one learns in the more modern entertainment arenas are even more useful. Talk and reality shows are improvised operations, mastered by larger-than-life personalities expert at distorting and provoking, shifting and commandeering attention.

[…]

But a couple of things happen when reality­-TV standards are applied to politics: One is that the level of sleaze gets so high that nothing is shocking — casual racism, misogyny, a campaign manager charged with battery, allegations about candidates’ affairs or sexual orientations, constant gossip about “even worse” revelations on all sides to come (“Tune in next week!”). This primary season would seem implausible if it were fiction. But as reality TV, it’s spot-on.

As a society, the (entertainment) products and systems we design profoundly shape our perception of reality and truth.

A call for more thoughtful design criticism from Michael Bierut that becomes more relevant with each passing year:

The basic starting point of Graphic Design Criticism as a Spectator Sport is “I could have done better.” And of course you could! But simply having the idea is not enough. Crafting a beautiful solution is not enough. Doing a dramatic presentation is not enough. Convincing all your peers is not enough. Even if you’ve done all that, you still have to go through the hard work of selling it to the client. And like any business situation of any complexity whatsoever, that process may be smothered in politics, handicapped with exigencies, and beset with factors that have nothing to do with design excellence. You know, real life. Creating a beautiful design turns out to be just the first step in a long and perilous process with no guarantee of success. Or, as Christopher Simmons put it more succinctly, “Design is a process, not a product.”

Doing design in the real world is rarely about design. It’s about working with people amidst complexity. Bierut writes about graphic design, but the same parallel he draws around the layman’s heightened awareness of graphic design extends just as much, if not more, to software design. People care deeply about their relationships with software products. Substitute “app” for “logo”:

But perhaps the question in these logo discussions could be more than: could I do better? Perhaps we could also ask: what was the purpose? What was the process? Whose ends were being served? How should we judge success? But we seldom look any deeper than first impressions, wallowing instead in a churning maelstrom of snap judgments. Should we be surprised when the general public jumps right in after us?

Where is the thoughtful, articulate criticism for software product design? Bierut’s quotation of Massimo Vignelli’s call to action is apt:

It is time to debate, to probe the values, to examine the theories that are part of our heritage and to verify their validity to express our times.

A contrarian (and true) view of the middle-aged:

They achieve a kind of tranquillity, not because they’ve decided to do nothing, but because they’ve achieved focus and purity of will. They have enough self-confidence, and impatience, to say no to some things so they can say yes to others.

From this perspective, middle age is kind of inspiring. Many of life’s possibilities are now closed, but limitation is often liberating. The remaining possibilities can be seized more bravely, and lived more deeply.

In life as in creativity: limitation is liberating.