Eight years ago today, I attended an Edward Tufte workshop in Atlanta. I left questioning so many assumptions about how designers present information and how people process data. It was one of the driving forces behind my return to grad school.
My son’s middle school has been sending an email, a text message and a pre-recorded phone call every Sunday night at 6:30. Thankfully, the principal just mentioned in the email that she’s not going to do the phone call anymore after talking to parents. There is such a thing as over communicating.
The start of another season. Ryan had some really nice saves today. 🥍
Nicknaming places
I realized the other day that our family tends to give places nicknames and that to an outside observer, our place names would be undecodable. Here are a few of my favorites.
- St. Mary Ashley. In reality, this church is St. Mary Episcopal Church, but our former babysitter, Mary Ashley got married here. It’s on my drive home and when my wife would ask where I was, I’d say “I’m by St. Mary, you know, where Mary Ashley got married.” Eventually, I shortened it to St. Mary Ashley.
- The Honeybaked Ham Plant. Not far past St. Mary Ashley is sprawling industrial facility. Once owned by Honeywell, it’s now operated by Shaw Industries and makes carpet fibers.1 It obviously does not “make” hams, but I guess at some point, Honeywell became Honeybaked. If I told my wife I was near the Shaw Industries plant, she’d have no idea where...
If you don’t value government, everything looks like waste.
Long day ahead of me, but the weekend is on the other side.
Nine years ago, I wasn't in a mass shooting
I still have Facebook, primarily to check my memories. Usually, it’s something funny that the kids said, or some family pictures. But today was different:
“Just left Columbiana in a stampede. Rumored shooting. Scary.”
We’d gone to Columbiana Mall near our house to do some shopping and stopped at the Red Robin near the exit to get some dinner before heading home. After dinner, we stepped out of the restaurant into a stampede of people running toward us. A woman yelled “Go! There was a shooting!” as she ran past. We darted back inside Red Robin and left through their exits. I had Norah and Jill, and we got briefly separated from Ryan and my wife, Liz as we left through different doors. We found each other, ran to the car and got the hell out of there as police and first responders poured into the parking lot from all directions.
That is...
It’s been a long week, y’all.
They are about to start work on the riverfront trails near my house, eventually connecting to 27 miles of riverfront trails. They’ve been trying to make this happen for as long as I can remember. Would be fun to ride a bike from the suburbs along the river to downtown Columbia.
AI and Design: It’s what you make of it.
I attended a lecture tonight at the University of South Carolina with Helen Armstrong, professor and researcher from NC State. The talk was well attended… mostly students with a handful of professional designers sprinkled in. I didn’t take notes, but figured I’d share some quick impressions.
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Designers need to learn to use AI. Think of artificial intelligence as a tool that we can wield to design more effectively. The point isn’t that AI will do the whole project, but that we can choose how to implement AI tools most effectively.
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Designers need to partner with data scientists to maximize the impact of AI tools. Helen talked about the importance of partnering with data scientists to understand the tools and help focus AI products.
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Designers can craft the interface to AI. Right now, we think of most AI tools as text prompts, but designers can work to help build the interfaces that allow people...