Really, I consider this to be the actual new year. We’re back from long summer vacation here in Scandinavia. The school year is starting and we’re slowly getting our brains back to thinking about work again after having time for reflection and rest.
This month’s issue of Design Breakfast is about code, interactivity, and new ways of thinking about what you are actually doing when designing something digital. It’ll be a bit philosophical, and somewhat strenuous for the mind, but most of all, I hope that these pieces I’m sharing will feel inspirational. At the very end, I’ll share a concrete way to get you started with code. (Warning: It's potentially life-changing!)
Meet our curator of the month
Arvid, a Lead Designer at our Stockholm office, has wide design interests, ranging from business strategies and organizational topics to the details of human-machine interaction.
I want to start this with a video lecture that I come back to about once a year. I’ve rewatched this video many times, and I will watch it many times still. Bret Victor talks about what he calls inventing on principle. While this is philosophical, and existentialist even, I’m sharing it here due to the learnings on the interplay between design and code. Bret’s point is that you can’t be creative without having feedback on what you are creating. This goes for coding and designing things but also is an important principle for the software we design for our users.
Following this, I’d like to share another one of Bret’s pieces (yes, I’m most definitely a fan). This is an article, but it is also an interactive journey through different ways of viewing data and the world. The article is worth reading (or experiencing) for its content, but also for its interactive storytelling. This piece was created by an author who understands code and design; it shows what is possible when you’re curious about both fields.
You might be thinking: How does this apply to my reality as a designer or aspiring designer? Here’s a concrete example of the Apple Maps design team talking about how they use SwiftUI, the coding framework for Apple devices, to design the Apple Maps app. They show how just some basic knowledge of code will allow you to explore designs in completely new ways.
So where to go from here? Exploring this direction and taking the first step into looking at code can be daunting. Big frameworks like React are confusing for beginners, and you often end up typing away and following tutorials that you actually don’t understand very much. While some tools hide all the complexity, others show too much. A good first step should be small and fundamental. Here’s a short video course on the basics of building websites. It takes just a few hours to complete. Maybe it’ll change your perspectives. Then again, maybe not. Still, it can give you a basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, the very fabric of the digital experience. Much like how you already know the difference between brick, wood, and concrete, and have an intuitive feel for how these different materials make up the buildings we spend our lives in.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a bus driver because of all the cool buttons on the ticket machine. Then I learned that there was a job where I could work with only the buttons all day.
Something you feel very grateful for when looking back on your career
Everyone who’s given me straight feedback and has allowed me to reflect and improve.
Name one superpower that makes you different from the others
I can go quite long stretches of time without food, surviving only on coffee, and still draw rectangles in Figma at high speed.
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