notes-design

i think that certain things, like programming architecture design, sometimes benefit from being somewhat coherent and minimalist, as opposed to 'design by committee' compromises. The received wisdom is that this can usually only be achieved when there is one person (or maybe 2 or 3 people) . I think this is partly because you need to make harsh simplifying decisions rather than compromises, and partly because design thinking is best done inside one person's brain, and second-best in a discussion between two or three people, but cannot be done well in large group discussion.

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there is a part of design which is is an alternating contraction and expansion (this thought is mostly thanks to Kurt Laitner). As in, expand to add in all sorts of cool ideas, then contract to try and combine many ideas into one general idea, and eliminate less important ideas.

there is also an interplay between goals and features. You might start off with goals (i want something with the properties X, Y, and Z), or with features (gee, aren't A, B, and C cool ideas, let's make something with all three of them), but often you bounce back and forth between them iteratively (e.g. ok, what features can accomplish goals X, Y, and Z? Maybe D and E can. What other goals do D and E help with? Also goals V and W. What other features help with V and W? etc) (or, e.g., Okay, why is it that something with features A, B, and C would be cool? Because it would accomplish goals S and T. What other features can accomplish S and T? etc)

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notes on http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html :

"principles of good design":

simple

timeless:

• "if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself"
• "Aiming at timelessness is also a way to evade the grip of fashion." (this is kind of a tautology.. isn't that what ppl MEAN when they use the words 'fashion' and 'timeless', eg aren't these defined as opposites?)
• "Strangely enough, if you want to make something that will appeal to future generations, one way to do it is to try to appeal to past generations. It's hard to guess what the future will be like, but we can be sure it will be like the past in caring nothing for present fashions."

solves the right problem:

• "Problems can be improved as well as solutions. In software, an intractable problem can usually be replaced by an equivalent one that's easy to solve."

suggestive

• i feel like he's trying to cram different things into one principal here. In painting, he says, "a painting that suggests is usually more engaging than one that tells. Everyone makes up their own story about the Mona Lisa.". In architecture, he says "a building or object should let you use it how you want: a good building, for example, will serve as a backdrop for whatever life people want to lead in it". In software, he says, "you should give users a few basic elements that they can combine as they wish, like Lego.". In math and science, he says, "a proof that becomes the basis for a lot of new work is preferable to a proof that was difficult, but doesn't lead to future discoveries; in the sciences generally, citation is considered a rough indicator of merit". All that these seem to have in common is the notion that something that it's good when something is useful to a broad audience. But imo something which has a narrow 'market' is not necessarily badly designed. I think a subset of his examples support a good point, though; the Mona Lisa example, and the software example both suggest that, in colloquial language, you should be wary of 'overdesign', and 'back off' a little bit; more concretely, i think the point is that there is often an opportunity for a design to appeal to a wider market than the subset of the market that the designer understands really well, and the way to achieve this is by providing an 'unfinished' design rather than a 'finished' one, by leaving some 'questions marks' in the design which forces the user to participate in the design process.

slightly funny

hard:

• i dont quite see what he means by this. He says there is "good pain and bad pain", but i dont see how he means to distinguish between them.

looks easy:

• not sure what he means by this. In the essay he seems to be saying that good designers practice a lot until they are really good and can easily do things that are difficult for others. OK, but that's a characteristic of a designer, not of a design

uses symmetry:

• two kinds of symmetry, repetition and recursion

resembles nature:

• "It's not so much that resembling nature is intrinsically good as that nature has had a long time to work on the problem"

redesign:

• "Experts expect to throw away some early work."

copy:

• "the greatest masters go on to achieve a kind of selflessness. They just want to get the right answer, and if part of the right answer has already been discovered by someone else, that's no reason not to use it."

often strange:

• eg Euler's Formula, Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow, the SR-71, Lisp.
• "Most of the qualities I've mentioned are things that can be cultivated, but I don't think it works to cultivate strangeness....Einstein didn't try to make relativity strange. He tried to make it true, and the truth turned out to be strange...The only style worth having is the one you can't help."

happens in chunks:

• "At any given time there are a few hot topics and a few groups doing great work on them, and it's nearly impossible to do good work yourself if you're too far removed from one of these centers."

often daring:

• "At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise."
• "As a practical matter, I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly. Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees something and thinks, I could do better than that."
• "Intolerance for ugliness is not in itself enough. You have to understand a field well before you develop a good nose for what needs fixing. You have to do your homework. But as you become expert in a field, you'll start to hear little voices saying, What a hack! There must be a better way. Don't ignore those voices. Cultivate them. The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it."

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"All right, so let me give you an example of simplicity of a particular kind. And I want to introduce a word that I think is very useful, which is stacking. And I'm going to use stacking for a kind of simplicity that has the characteristic that it is so simple and so reliable that I can build things with it. Or I'm going to use simple to mean reliable, predictable, repeatable. And I'm going to use as an example the Internet, because it's a particularly good example of stacked simplicity. We call it a complex system, which it is, but it's also something else."

" The characteristics, which I think are useful to think about for simple things: First, they are predictable. Their behavior is predictable. Now, one of the nice characteristics of simple things is you know what it's going to do, in general. So simplicity and predictability are characteristics of simple things. The second is, and this is a real world statement, they're cheap. If you have things that are cheap enough, people will find uses for them, even if they seem very primitive. So, for example, stones. You can build cathedrals out of stones, you just have to know what it does. You carve them in blocks and then you pile them on top of one another, and they support weight.

12:24 So there has to be function, the function has to be predictable and the cost has to be low. What that means is that you have to have a high performance or value for cost. And then I would propose as this last component that they serve, or have the potential to serve, as building blocks. That is, you can stack them. And stack can mean this way, or it can mean this way, or it can mean in some arbitrary n-dimensional space "

" One of them is from Mr. Einstein, and he says, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." And I think that's a very good way of thinking about the problem. If you take too much out of something that's simple, you lose function. You have to have low cost, but you also have to have a function. So you can't make it too simple. And the second is a design issue, and it's not directly relevant, but it's a nice statement.

15:57 This is by de Saint-Exupery. And he says, "You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away." And that certainly is going in the right direction. "

-- http://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_toward_a_science_of_simplicity/transcript?language=en

https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html

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