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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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...

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Long day ahead of me today. A couple of important meetings, a 3-hour grad seminar, more meetings… and then if I have the energy, I’m going to try to go to a talk on campus about AI and art.

I’m taking an asynchronous class on survey development. The professor’s comments on assignments are constructive and helpful, but her grading rubric is massively complex. We’re talking fractional points with varying weights. I’ve been a grad student for a really long time and I’ve never seen a grading scale this complicated. I’ve read over my last assignment several times and I can’t figure out for the life of me how I got an A.

I’ve pretty much stopped posting to Instagram. I have issues with Meta, but that wasn’t the driving factor. In fact, it wasn’t really an intentional shift… I just stopped enjoying Instagram. Now I’m posting images to Micro.Blog and cross posting to Bluesky and Threads.

Shots from last night at Craft and Draft in Irmo. Lizzy was very entertained by, well, everything.

A person is smiling broadly while sitting in a colorful, lively setting.A person sits at a wooden table, laughing with eyes closed and hands on their head, in a colorful indoor setting.

The senior citizens in the doctor’s office waiting room are talking non-stop. So many personal details being screamed out across a whole room of strangers.

I love Iconfactory’s Tapestry – a unified timeline for my iPhone

New app lets iOS users weave together sources

When the Iconfactory announced their Tapestry Kickstarter, I backed it immediately. I’ve been a fan of the Iconfactory’s work for decades, and was a loyal user of Twitteriffic before Musk cut off the API. I’ve had beta access for months as a Kickstarter perk and I’ve been using it daily.1 Now that Tapestry is released to everyone, I wanted to write a little review with some thoughts about how it’s working for me.

Screenshots of Tapestry, a unified feed reader for iOS.

One app for pretty much everything. Tapestry is a unified feed reader. You build a feed from a variety of sources and “connectors.” I’ve used connectors to bring in my Micro.Blog, Mastodon and Bluesky social timelines. I still use Feedbin as a traditional feed reader so I’ve also some of my favorite RSS...

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It’s almost time for the college baseball season to start. Beautiful day at Founders Park.

The University of South Carolina baseball stadium with garnet seats, featuring an empty field and a city skyline in the background.