Pencil, Scrivener, Author

Must-Reads for This Week

September 12th - A Toy World: An old game that speaks a ton about how armed conflict affects civilians. Spoiler: Disproportionate violence begets more violence, the result hurts everyone. You don't need to be a recognized expert to see how this relates to the current situation in Palestine and Israel. I'm afraid the game predicts the real-world outcome of what is going to happen between Israel and Palestine in the next decade 😔

Mandatory Palestine: Not into games? Have a look at the Wikipedia article about Mandatory Palestine. The history of tragedy, war and slaughter in that area extends well before Mandatory Palestine, but I think the mandate period covers a representative view of how co-existence of Arab and Jewish communities grew harder and harder with successive mutual attacks, actions of Arab and Zionist terrorist organizations, and a detestable mix of Pan-Islamism, Zionism and colonialism. Terrorist organizations, whether they are Arab, Israeli, Jewish or Muslim, do not have the right to exist; innocent people do.

Piers Morgan interviews Bassem Youssef: A hard-to-watch interview about the current conflict. Piers Morgan frames the conversation around Israel and Hamas, Bassem Youssef highlights how the situation revolves around the Israeli government, Hamas, AND the innocent people who live in Gaza and in the Israeli villages on the border. Please spare 33 minutes of your day to watch it with attention.

A humane ask from Ramsey Nasr: It's very simple.

An Inspirational Reminder

I had a chance to meet Thiago de Faria at DevOpsDays Amsterdam in 2019. Last week I saw a LinkedIn post from him that greatly helped me cope with some recent professional challenges, so I wanted to share it with you.

In the past couple of months, I had to pull several mentees out of pools of desperation because someone at work didn't give them the respect and value they deserved. For my own work, I had to coast and manage less-than-ideal conditions for good design to emerge in a few organizations and I felt overloaded. Overloaded with work, because I put in more than I should to compensate for low design maturity with only acceptable results and tons of unnecessary stress. Overloaded with grief, because some designers I worked with cared more about the product than the decision-makers for that product, and the designers were chastised for doing things right.

I can't say I was fully burnt out, but I was gently charred on the outside. Seared mmm... Seared by conceited decision-makers, pawn product owners, clueless procurement specialists, and impervious designers.

In one of these less-than-joyful mornings, I saw Thiago's post. In his post, he shared a cute story from when he was 15 and concluded with his three core work values:

1. Kindness
2. Everyone is doing their best with the knowledge, context, and time they have
3. Don't assume, ask "silly" questions

You can read his full post on LinkedIn.

His second bullet made me pause with relief. The emphasis on best intention and time undid months of personal dread I accumulated.

No one is born with an understanding of the strategic value of different types of design throughout the digital product development cycle. Some people can develop this understanding by reading a few good books. Some people need to flop 2-3 companies.

I can't control this. They can't control it fully either. They fail to utilize design in the best way, not because they are stupid, but because they just don't know. Maybe they want to know, but they were exposed to the wrong resources with the wrong mindset. Maybe they didn't have the time. Maybe these painful, underwhelming, cringe projects are the first time they are actually seeing design beyond pixels. (and reacting to it in the most hurtful way, unintentionally) These projects may need to just fail for them to learn the value of design.

The three values Thiago mentioned in his post reminded me to be kind with the people that created this sort of grief for others. Where kindness is not possible, at least being graceful. So thank you, Thiago de Faria.

Thoughts: A metaphor on the value of design

I am working on a new talk about the value of design under different conditions. I wanted to share some of my early thoughts.

I believe that design (and designerly thinking in general) always enhances the context it is added in, but it can be hard to gauge the right amount of design involvement and doing it at the right times. When this balance is off, we have undesirable outcomes. Sometimes the people commissioning the design resources follow a flawed path to integrate design. (see above) Sometimes the people who will provide the design capabilities inflate the project needs to trick the client into buying more than what they need. (Big D design consultancy)

Let me take you through an example. Assume that you want to write a love letter, but you don't have full confidence in your writing skills. There are three ways you can go about writing this love letter:

You can write it yourself. You just pick up a pencil and do your best to express your love.