Listened to Episode 8: Choice Overload by Dr Laurie SantosDr Laurie Santos from The Happiness Lab

We all make thousands of choices each day. But making even trivial decisions can sap our energy and cause anxiety. Dr Laurie Santos examines why our society wrongly prioritises choice over happiness, and meets a woman who junked her wardrobe in a bid to improve her life.

Limiting one’s choice can be an important thing in life.

There’s some discussion of limiting one’s wardrobe choices as a way of freeing one’s life up a bit. They didn’t mention the oft-heard example of Einstein wearing the same thing every day, but did catch the possibly better example of Obama cycling through the small handful of choices in his wardrobe to limit the yet another decision of many he had to make each day.

Read The hoof and the horse. by Ethan Marcotte (ethanmarcotte.com)
On objects and slices; on design systems and scale.

Robin brings a helpful name to this problem, by way of the philosopher Timothy Morton: hyperobject. A hyperobject is an entity whose scale is too big, too sprawling for any single person to fully appreciate their scale. Climate change, financial markets, socioeconomic classes, design systems—they’re systems we move through, but their scale dwarfs our own.

Hyperobject is an interesting neologism and concept
Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 08:47AM

Replied to The future of the web, isn't the web by Terence Eden (shkspr.mobi)
My friends, and former employers, at the Government Digital Service have written a spectacularly good blog post "Making GOV.UK more than a website". In it, they describe how adding Schema.org markup to their website has allowed search engines to extract semantic content and display it to a user. For...
This reminds me of Drew McLellan’s talk from 2006 Can Your Website be Your API? or Jeremy Keith’s slightly more recent talk The Spirit Of The Web from 2012 which I’d listened to recently.

I like the idea of experimenting into some of these new areas, but I’m worried about who owns some of these gateways and how they treat the data–both from the perspective of the site owners as well as from the users who are encouraged to access data through them. How do our power structures change based these new modalities? Is it responsible?

Read The Accidental Side Project by Drew McLellanDrew McLellan (24ways.org)
Fifteen years ago, on a bit of a whim, I decided it would be fun to have a Web Standards version of something like the Perl Advent calendar. A simple website with a new tip or trick each day leading the readers through December up until Christmas. I emailed a bunch of friends that kept web design an...
I’ve noticed that Bloomberg Businessweek’s Jealousy List for 2020 has quirky little animated drolleries racing around on it as you scroll up and down the page.

This makes me wonder what web designers and developers would put on their own personal jealousy lists for 2020. What types of features and functionality have you seen this year that you’d love to have on your own website or in your own projects?

Listened to The Spirit Of The Web by Jeremy KeithJeremy Keith from Smashing Conference 2012 via Internet Archive

This talk was given at the first Smashing Conference 2012 in Freiburg. Here is the talk description:
With the explosion of Web-enabled devices of all shapes and sizes, the practice of Web design and development seems more complex than ever. But if we can learn to see below this overwhelming surface to the underlying Web beneath, we can learn to make sites not for specific devices but for the people using them. This talk will demonstrate how tried and tested principles like progressive enhancement are more important than ever. By embracing the spirit of the Web, you can ensure that your websites are backwards-compatible and future-friendly.

Amazing how apropos this talk is even seven years on. Good design and solid principles are obviously timeless.

I’m curious what, if anything, Jeremy might change all these years later?

Notes:

Donald Rumsfeld, known unknowns, unknown unknowns

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…

–William Gibson, in Neuromancer

A tao of web design by John Alsop (A List Apart, April 7, 2000)

Do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser?

dConstruct audio archive of content since 2005

Performance is not a checkbox

style tiles (mood boards) for websites

Originally bookmarked on December 06, 2019 at 10:40PM

Read It’s Time to Get Personal by Laura KalbagLaura Kalbag (24ways.org)
Is it just me or does nobody have their own website anymore? OK, some people do. But a lot of these sites are outdated, or just a list of links to profiles on big tech platforms. Despite being people who build websites, who love to share on the web, we don’t share much on our own sites. Of course ...
Some great ethical reasons for why go IndieWeb. I like that she’s got some concrete examples here and then goes into how she’s done what she has for herself.
Read Well, That Escalated Quickly (meyerweb.com)
This post is probably going to be a little bit scattered, because I’m still reeling from the overwhelming, unexpected response to the last post.

The people who I envisioned myself writing for—they got what I was saying and where I was focused.  The very early responses to the post were about what I expected.  But then it took off, and a lot of people came into it without the context I assumed the audience would have.

Definitely a good example of context collapse here.
–December 10, 2019 at 12:20PM

Watched What obligation do social media platforms have to the greater good? by Eli PariserEli Pariser from ted.com

Social media has become our new home. Can we build it better? Taking design cues from urban planners and social scientists, technologist Eli Pariser shows how the problems we're encountering on digital platforms aren't all that new -- and shares how, by following the model of thriving towns and cities, we can create trustworthy online communities.

I liked Pariser’s idea of a video facepalm UI around the 12:25 mark.

I also loved the analogy of Facebook and 1970’s New York… I was sort of surprised at the audience applause at his comment, but this is such a heartwarming sign.

Bookmarked Civic Signals (Civic Signals)

Civic Signals started when we asked ourselves what healthy societies need from digital spaces — not just in terms of harms, but in terms of the public goods they provide. Over the last year, we have been engaging experts across a wide variety of disciplines and doing research to understand what makes “public-friendly” spaces, well, public-friendly — what common characteristics (civic signals) are shared by the spaces that valorize the collective, and that are designed for the greater public good.

We think this matters both because these ideas could inform the design of existing digital platforms, but also perhaps more importantly because they could help inspire and shape the new platforms that will rise up in the years to come. 

Watched A Meditation on the Open Web (2019) by Alexis Lloyd from alexislloyd.com

What is the world of the open web like, beyond the walls of dominant social media platforms? How do our experiences of the internet differ depending on where we spend our time and share our ideas? Come with us on a journey to explore the landscape of the web and get to know the people and possibilities of open source, the open web, and open opportunities.

“The technology industry, like all industries, follows cycles, and the pendulum is swinging back to the broad, empowering philosophies that underpinned the early social web. But we’re going to face a big challenge with re-educating a billion people about what the web means.”
—Anil Dash, The Web We Lost

Exactly how it’s described. A wonderful little meditation on the open web.
Followed Lynn Fisher (Lynnandtonic Blog) (Lynnandtonic Blog)

My name is Lynn Fisher and I am an artist and designer out of Phoenix, Arizona.

I make art for the web. Check out some of my recent projects:

Take a peek at my portfolio, follow me on Twitter or Instagram, or support my work on Patreon.

Lynn Fisher

Followed Lynn Fisher (lynnandtonic.com)
I’m Lynn Fisher, a designer, developer, and artist from Phoenix, Arizona. Lynn Fisher
Lynn has a handful of great little projects in addition to a fantastic web presence for herself. I particularly like that she does an annual refresh of her personal site and uses it as a portfolio, archive, and as a learning playground.

🔖 http://oldweb.today/

Bookmarked oldweb-today/netcapsule (GitHub)
Browse old web pages the old way with virtual browsers in the browser
Hat tip: