Mike Industries » A running commentary of occasionally interesting things

Shipping vs. Learning

“What did you ship last quarter?”

“When is this going to ship?”

“Real artists ship.”

The verb “ship” has a long history in the software development world and before that, the physical world. In the physical world, it originally meant “to transport something on a vessel”, and in the software world, it meant “to press a tape/disk/CD and send it out to consumers”. Since then, it has come to simply mean “release”, and even then, usually not in any sort of final form.

Everyone inside tech companies loves shipping. It’s the culmination of a lot of hard work and creativity from designers, engineers, PMs, researchers, and any number of other people, and when it’s good it puts a dent in the universe. It is no wonder then that so much of the machinery of tech organizations is centered around shipping.

But should it be? Especially given how much shipping itself has changed in the last couple of decades?

⇗ Why Do We Judge Parents For Putting Kids At Perceived — But Unreal — Risk?

As a card-carrying non-parent, one of my favorite questions to ask parents (for some reason) is at what age they will feel comfortable leaving their kids alone for very short periods of time. The answers often surprise me and are a lot more conservative than when I grew up in the 1980s. This article goes deep on why that is. The bit about the "availability heuristic" is what I had previously suspected, but the additional finding about people conflating their own moral judgement with perceived actual risks is fascinating. I wonder what other issues in society this conflation occurs with.

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⇗ Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart

The product of 18 months of reporting, Fractured Lands is one of the best explanations you will read about the current state of the Middle East. The storytelling style is unconventional, weaving the personal journeys of several people together into five distinct time periods, but it works and it's definitely worth your time.

The most interesting thing I learned is that the three nations most devastated by the Arab Spring are all nations the West helped create in the early 20th century: Iraq, Libya, and Syria. The power dynamics of those and other regions mentioned in this piece are fascinating and extraordinarily precarious.

The one thing I was surprised made no appearance in Fractured Lands is the role of global warming in the escalating conflict in Syria. For a great look into that angle, make sure to check out Yonatan Zunger's piece on the subject.

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All Olympic Logos, Ordered By Quality

AIGA just published a fantastic rundown of all Olympic logos, as graded by Milton Glaser. Glaser is a legend, having created some of the most iconic design work of the 20th century, including the I ❤️ NY logo and the fantastic poster for Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits.

Logos, however, are a subjective endeavor, and one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. In other words, there is little objective truth in logo design… only a preponderance of opinions and feelings. It is possible to objectively grade a logo’s craftsmanship by looking for transgressions in things like alignment and stroke width, but in terms of how a mark makes you feel, beauty is much more personal.

With that in mind, there were some things in Glaser’s grading that I agree with and some that I disagree (even strongly) with, and thus, I decided to re-rank them according to a few criteria:

Craftsmanship: How well is the logo made. You’d think more modern marks would have the advantage here, given how design tools have advanced, but that turns out to not always be the case.
Timelessness: Newer marks have obviously experienced less patina throughout the years, but I try to correct for this in the grading. One could argue that for an ephemeral event like the Olympics, timelessness doesn’t matter, but as designers we should always aim for it when we can.
Typography: Type in general is not strong across most of these marks. There are some notable exceptions though.
Overall impression: This is the most important part of the grade as it is the true indicator of a logo’s effectiveness. It is also, however, the most subjective.

With those criteria in mind, here is my re-ranked list, in order of worst to best. Since I’ve ordered it this way, instead of by year, there is also a lot more snark at the beginning, but bear with me. Additionally, it’s important to remember that in practice, logos often go through many layers of politicking, compromising, and otherwise watering-down of what may have once been something much more impressive. Sometimes it is the designer’s fault that something didn’t turn out great and sometimes it is external factors entirely.

⇗ Thoughts on the sociology of Brexit

While it may be one thing for an investment banker to understand that they ‘benefit from the EU’ in regulatory terms, it is quite another to encourage poor and culturally marginalised people to feel grateful towards the elites that sustain them through handouts, month by month. Resentment develops not in spite of this generosity, but arguably because of it.

This is the best piece I've read about the root causes of the Brexit movement, and it carries with it extremely important lessons for the United States over the next several months and years. See also this thought-provoking piece on the importance of dignity when it comes to how people vote. If you don't understand the Trump vote, this should clear things up rather quickly. It did for me.

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⇗ The Artificial Intelligence Revolution

To absorb how big a deal a superintelligent machine would be, imagine one on the dark green step two steps above humans on that staircase. This machine would be only slightly superintelligent, but its increased cognitive ability over us would be as vast as the chimp-human gap we just described. And like the chimp’s incapacity to ever absorb that skyscrapers can be built, we will never be able to even comprehend the things a machine on the dark green step can do, even if the machine tried to explain it to us—let alone do it ourselves. And that’s only two steps above us. A machine on the second-to-highest step on that staircase would be to us as we are to ants—it could try for years to teach us the simplest inkling of what it knows and the endeavor would be hopeless.

A mind-blowing piece on the ramifications of the sort of artificial intelligence we may be headed towards in our lifetime. Like, within a few decades. The most likely outcomes are startlingly binary: extinction or immortality. This was such an entertaining read, and reminds me how smart some of our fellow humans (like Tim Urban) are!

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⇗ Why Do the Poor Make Such Poor Decisions?

Our efforts to combat poverty are often based on a misconception: that the poor must pull themselves up out of the mire. But a revolutionary new theory looks at the cognitive effects of living in poverty. What does the relentless struggle to make ends meet do to people?

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Evaluating Employees in Product Design & Development Roles

Results. Metrics. Impact.

When deciding how to evaluate employees, these are often the things companies land on. It makes sense on its face. If a company’s goal is to, say, grow its customer base from X to Y in 12 months, what better way to align employees to that objective than to try and directly measure their contribution towards it? You worked on Project A and it singlehandedly got the company 20% closer to its goal? Congrats, you are judged to be a successful employee and you will likely enjoy everything that goes along with that.

But what if you worked on Project B — not even by choice but because you were assigned it — and it ended up being a failure? Your results were terrible, you didn’t move metrics, and your project had no impact. Then what?

Welcome to the controversial world of employee evaluation in product design & development.

⇗ An Old Idea, Revived: Starve Cancer to Death

When Thompson presents his research to high-school students, he shows them a slide of mold spreading across a piece of bread. The slide’s heading — “Everyone’s first cancer experiment” — recalls Warburg’s observation that cancer cells will carry out fermentation at almost the same rate of wildly growing yeasts.

It's amazing how many "diseases of civilization" are all starting to point directly at sugar. Incidentally, if you haven't seen Fed Up yet, it's a great documentary.

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⇗ How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist

Here’s the unfortunate truth — several billion people have a slot machine their pocket.

An important essay on the responsibility we have as designers to provide experiences which enrich lives as opposed to merely illusions of enrichment. If you work on digital products, this is a great gutcheck. If you use digital products, this is a wake-up call to take control of your precious attention.

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