Stoic Designer
19 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 4 years ago -Bite-sized frequent episodes, Stoic Designer is about applying the practice of stoicism to your design work as a means to benchmark the day, get your head right, and craft virtuously.
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Episodes
Practice really hearing
January 20, 2020 09:07 - 2 minutes"Practice really hearing what people say. Do your best to get inside their minds." - Marcus Aurelius If stoicism is a practice of embracing what is in your control and reminding yourself what's not, then what odd advice. What, after all, is more outside of your control than what's going on in my head? Empathy is a tool for correcting for your own biases. When your boss is short with you, it's natural for anxiety about your job to bubble-up and just ruin your day. That anxiety is soot...
Scipio's Villa and the Product Over Time
December 09, 2019 13:32 - 6 minutesI am resting at the country-house which once belonged to Scipio Africanus himself; and I write to you after doing reverence to his spirit and to an altar which I am inclined to think is the tomb of that great warrior. — Seneca, “On Scipio’s Villa” Scipio Africanus was a consul and general of ancient Rome — a famous one. He defeated Hannibal, an enemy of Rome widely considered one of the greatest military commanders in history. Some 200 years after his death, our boy Seneca vacationed i...
It's Halloween 🦇 The Veil is Thin
October 31, 2019 12:36 - 2 minutesBack in April I introduced Venerating the Grave UX (medium), which is about regularly “ritualizing” negative feedback. The idea is that periodically you make an event out of digging-up negative user feedback and determining whether it has been or how it might be addressed. For those of you who like to feel extra spooky, I called a collection of purely negative feedback — which, real talk, could be just a filter a on spreadsheet that weeds out the positive and neutral feedback — a “Charnel ...
It's Halloween 🦇 The Veil is Thin
October 31, 2019 12:36 - 2 minutesBack in April I introduced Venerating the Grave UX (medium), which is about regularly “ritualizing” negative feedback. The idea is that periodically you make an event out of digging-up negative user feedback and determining whether it has been or how it might be addressed. For those of you who like to feel extra spooky, I called a collection of purely negative feedback — which, real talk, could be just a filter a on spreadsheet that weeds out the positive and neutral feedback — a “Charnel H...
The Ol' College Try is the Goal
October 14, 2019 12:54 - 2 minutesWe idolize a project that is complete in design work. We don’t organize portfolios around failed experiments, incomplete products, the good ol’ college try. Instead, our bragging rights are constrained to a spectrum of doneness, notches in a belt, that — like a belt — represent arbitrary milestones on a line that loops back on itself. Saying this stuff out loud is a little woo, but I’m trying to temper our endemic reverence for getting things done. A complete collaborative project represen...
Adhering to design principles under pressure
October 10, 2019 12:20 - 3 minutesWhen I meet with teams I’m sometimes asked to catch folks up on the progress of various feature requests in the system. I work pretty hard to make sure these statuses are transparent, so more often than not I’m confirming what they know: I haven’t made and probably won’t address these in the near future. That sucks to hear. Often many of these requests are small design tweaks that take no time at all, but stay in the backlog by principle. Here’s a real conversation between me (MS) and a s...
Fear of Missing Out
October 09, 2019 13:34 - 4 minutesDesign is a performance of smart people among smart people where it’s easy to conflate merit with your in/ability to solve the kind of algorithm you’ll probably never actually encounter in your day-to-day. While reminding yourself you’re not the smartest person in the room is probably key to doing quality work, it’s easy to start believing you’re the dumbest. This sense of being head and shoulders below a colleague fuels this survival impulse to try to further clamber-up the tree because no...
The adaptable will
September 19, 2019 12:17 - 2 minutesOne of the first a-ha moments many of us have who are interested in user experience design is that whole maxim that “you are not your user.” At the time it’s a profound wagging of the finger that after years rings a tad cliche if only because it’s on the tip of every UX designer’s tongue. It’s not wrong, though. In fact, we reinforce this truth adopting principles like being data driven, internalizing infinity-loop design models with quadrants dedicated to testing. Good design, we learn,...
Klosterman's Razor
September 17, 2019 12:50 - 1 minuteBy recommendation on twitter I’m reading But What If We’re Wrong? Thinking About The Present As If It Were The Past by Chuck Klosterman who talks about our inability to predict. I think he meant it as a joke but early in the book he describes how Occam’s Razor — the principle that the simplest solution is probably the right one — doesn’t work with predicting the future, and instead suggests Klosterman’s Razor: The best hypothesis is the one that reflexively accepts its potential wrongness...
What is a "Design Virtue"?
September 16, 2019 13:13 - 3 minutesWe might instead call a “design virtue” a design principle, the difference being that what we’re calling virtuous are principles that we have so much faith in we treat them with more reverence than rationality. Personally, or organizationally, we have them. Lately a principle like “design accessibly” — which describes the requirement that the service or product we put out into the world ought to be usable through any medium — has sort of ascended to community reverence, so that when you an...
Systems underlie the craft
September 12, 2019 13:10 - 2 minutesReal talk, “practicing Stoicism” involves a lot of reading of the same core concepts boiled down to “get good at prioritizing what really matters” and “don’t lose your s**t.” Tim Ferris calls Stoicism his operating system; I think of it - because I’m a dork - like an honor code. What’s appealing about Stoicism, I think, is its practical application devoid of woo. It’s less common to run across letters about interconnectedness, but that’s precisely what I did this morning. Keep reminding yo...
Actionable insight overload
September 11, 2019 13:09 - 2 minutesSometimes the stars align just so and your to-do list explodes with actionable insights that, pursued, improves your design, makes your product easier to use, adds credibility to your cause, or grows your userbase. You find that except for substituting excitement for shame your anxiety around the to-do list isn’t too different than if it were a list of bugs. A to-do list is a to-do list. You prioritize a positive one no differently. * Will not pursuing this insight kill you, your colleagu...
Design for the recovery experience
September 10, 2019 13:54 - 2 minutesNote: I don’t love “recovery experience” as a term, but I’m sorely decaffeinated. Halp. We advocate this meditation-of-evils practice the Roman Stoics called praemeditatio malorum where, in planning, we imagine the worst-case scenarios and make contingencies for them. The capital-d Design process common among many of us actually has mechanisms that embody this ethic like the beta test, like QA, and so on. We do our best to shore-up our thing against failure. Inevitably, though, things b...
DevOps in the Shadow of Hurricane Dorian
September 05, 2019 11:56 - 1 minuteThere’s this satellite image of the hurricane Dorian that shook me. There are neither grids nor map-markers, no projections, no data. It is this still of a dangerously awesome-in-the-true-sense destroyer an “inch” — fifty or so miles — from the south-Florida coast. Somewhere there in the wisps of cloud that demarcate Dorian’s outer rain bands is Ft. Lauderdale - where I live. My family and I spent the labor day weekend here moving s**t inside, waiting in half-hour long lines to fill-up on g...
On systems of work and design
August 13, 2019 10:37 - 1 minuteGetting sprint estimation right is the kind of headscratcher product management twitter fusses over on the daily, but while we can’t agree on the nitty gritty we imagine the same u/dystopia. Behind one door, deadlines* evaporate in favor of inspired predictions based on sane systems of work established organically by solid [design] principles and a light hand. Behind the other, a developer mill. Both are modular agile blooms optimized for their hosts. A symbiotic relationship of system and ...
A Wake for Failed Design
August 05, 2019 10:00 - 2 minutesGrief is on my mind. A thunder of mass shootings again sobered the nation to dovetail the death of a relative this weekend, so that just about everybody I know — for one reason or another — was feeling glum. If you’re interested you can read on twitter my guesswork about how Stoics might respond to a mass shooting, but for Stoic Designer I thought I’d adapt griefthink to designs, projects, or experiments that go wrong, have had their time, and slip the cable. In agile, at the end of a sprin...
Practice gratitude
August 01, 2019 14:10We all have rough days. Joyless projects - even if they’re not particularly difficult - you slog through tap your morale like it’s a tree sap. This s**t makes you less productive, reduces the quality of your craft, inspires you the next morning to sleep-in or call-in sick. Day after day, tedious design work or engineering, inane obstacles, baffling people, will turn the footing under you into quicksand. Your practice of stoicism has toughened you against wily external forces, but - honestly...
Your designs are just fingerprints and shapes
July 31, 2019 11:43 - 2 minutesNot too long ago we were designing this kickstarter-like feature we could use to help fund specific local journalism, and circumstances being what they were our team didn’t have the bandwidth to prototype a new thing without dropping something else. So, someone outside of that small silo did it. It was just a draft, screenshots puzzled-together in a word document, not intended to be pixel perfect but to start the conversation. Still, part of me bristled. The layout wasn’t “right,” or whate...
Your design work is not an end unto itself
July 30, 2019 15:09 - 1 minuteSeneca, on the brevity of life, condemns this idea of dying doing what you love - particularly when what you love is your work: How disgraceful is the lawyer whose dying breath passes while at court, at an advanced age, pleading for unknown litigants and still seeking the approval of ignorant spectators. All the dicta and principles of stoicism try to concentrate all that you spend your time on from day to day and everything that you really value into a single, dense venn diagram, so much ...