In those intervening years, Twitter has become a pretty repellant environment for serious posting and now I'm not sure where to put my thoughts. I don't feel committed enough for a newsletter, I just want a space for shop talk among peers which seems to simply... not exist?
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FWIW, I want to take a stand for Twitter. It's been *fantastic* for me for serious posting, both reading and writing. This requires a lot of ruthless curation—particularly in design, where serious, high-quality posting is rare. But it's possible, and I'd love to see you join!
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But given that this sounds like a lot of work, and a newsletter seems too high-commitment, may I suggest… a group chat?
The big downside there IME is that it's not serious enough to provoke the main benefit of writing: forcing you to really sharpen your thoughts.
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I'm also a big proponent of impromptu highly polished email threads.
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There's something telling and concerning about the fact that practically none of the designers I most respect write seriously and regularly about their work. In some cases this is because of boring NDA problems, but in many cases it's a choice.
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It's interesting to contrast this culture with game design. Sure, OK, most game designers don't write like DanC, but there's a culture of giving *extremely* depthy talks on work (including work in progress!) at GDC and other venues.
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Great points! I’ll likely try writing a few threads here just to see how it goes. The contrast with game design is what convinces me our side of design has such a large problem, I find it verrrrry concerning.
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Why is it concerning?
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I'm sad we lack that kind of academic community, but I just always assumed it's because we have a norm of caring most about shipping impactful work. (i.e. where you started in the thread)
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A charitable take would be that it reflects the incommensurability of the work: cultural accretion isn't a priority because every project is unique. But more realistically, I think it often reflects a mix of unseriousness, anti-intellectualism, and cynicism.
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Consider: game designers are arguably much scrappier than software designers; they certainly prize shipping. They produce cultural knowledge at a much higher rate.
I guess I'm not sold that seriousness and intellectualism will result in a better field. Agreed on cynicism though. Would there really be growth proportional to organization overhead of cultivating journals, conferences, etc. ?
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I was always jealous of Architects' seriousness though because it seemed more fun and meaningful, so I'd be happy if we could adopt that kind of culture / practice.
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