This week, I put up a new episode of Design Notes with David Reinfurt, whose new book A *Co–* Program for Graphic Design recently launched. In recent interviews, I’ve started asking guests not about the future (we have enough future at the moment) but instead about what they think is the most urgent thing for designers to consider.
David said something that resonated not just with the current technological moment, but with what other guests have started bringing up more, too: the importance of individual perspective and individual response. Put short, “it’s more important to be true than new.”
I’ve always been a big believer in actively cultivating the individual perspective as a part of good design rationale, and it’s even more on my mind now. That’s what’s inspired this Doubleshot.
🧑💻 Practice
Here are a few things that are enriching my practice right now.
👀 Have a look: Twine, a beautiful and fluid RSS reader by Sasikanth Miriyampalli and Eduardo Pratti
📻 Tune in: Design Notes with David Reinfurt, A *Co—* Program for Graphic Design (Transcript)
📖 Read: Sorry, I Can't Read Your Visualization by Nancy Organ
💭 Ponder: Where do you show up in your design work? Your experiences, preferences, beliefs and assumptions? Find an example of a design decision you made intuitively, and then find the root of that intuition.
📓 Theory
In recent discourse, the topic of “taste” among designers comes up a lot as a differentiator against automation. As I’ve written before, the concept of taste—particularly if we’re using it as rationale for our work—deserves unpacking. It’s a pointer toward the designer’s individual perspective in design, but the idea of taste has what Harold Garfinkel would call “indexical meaning.” That is, it means something different for each context in which it appears.
So beyond just finding and naming our individual perspective, it’s important to unpack—in specific ways, for specific cases—what it means to the design or to the practice in general.
As a starting point, I’ve been revisiting Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology recently, and it’s sparked a lot of ideas around how design—and digital production more broadly—have these embedded perspectives that don’t come from intentional work on anyone’s part.
Rather, like the social order that Garfinkel says emerges from everyday interactions, our perspectives become encoded (in the interface, in the product, in the design system) through colloquial use, everyday intuitive actions, and interactions with our peers.
Thanks, as always, for spending some time with these ideas today. I hope they’ll enrich your practice.
If these are the kinds of things that you’re discussing with your peers, forward this issue along. The more people in the conversation, the better.
Until next time,
Liam ✌️
P.S. I’m publishing this Doubleshot on the site simultaneously with its email, because I want to test out the new format and gather feedback. In future issues, email subscribers will likely get it exclusively.
