A few days ago, Garfield, the newspaper comic featuring the fat cat of the same name, turned 48. Seven years after his debut, he was famous enough to have an interactive “Touch Pulse” phone made in his likeness.¹

Forty years after that, his remains, in telephone form were still washing up on the beaches of Brittany.

This is the story of the people his plastic presence has touched:

Worth reading the back story of that mini-doc, as well, to appreciate tale a bit more.

Footnotes

1. Technically, the second generation of a phone made to look like the napping cat. ↩

Jotting down a couple of hypotheses on how AI affects the practice of product design. They’re thoughts developed from real observation and exposure, salted with ideas from many others. Although not ground breaking, I felt it worth capturing to a least provide a reference point for myself to test or evolve from.

Real-time translation

The benefit offered by the LLM is not that it can create code (or create a PRD, or a design, or a working prototype) it’s that it creates a medium in which experts from a variety of disciplines can collaborate on the actual object, not a model, through their own preferred toolkits.

A designer can manipulate shapes on a canvas that generates code the developer can iterate on in turn changing the shapes the designer is manipulating, all of it being informed by the business rules that can themselves by updated and change the environment, too. (An early term for this I used was a “Living PRD”)

Teams concurrently collaborate, reaching solutions sooner because there’s no handover; the outputs, and insights, are real-time.

Reviews build resilience

The explicit intent of a design review (or any similar process) is to make the end result better. The implicit benefit, though, is in upleveling the team’s own skills. By actively exploring what is meets, misses, or exceeds a goal experts pass along they’re experience to non-experts.

The quality of everyone’s work improves. This is how to make space for those entering a practice to grow and learn.

Workable designs can easily be created by AI, and maybe they are better than those anyone else on the team might individually produce. Highlighting why the design, be it human- or AI-created, works helps reveal the underlying principles; stressing it to show where the design breaks, exposes the wisdom.

The knock-on effect is that these ceremonies, done well, remind people why they matter by highlighting the skills they each uniquely have to share.

As someone who assigned a keyboard shortcut to the interrobang (! + ?), I was happily to discover, via Keith Houston, another niche punctation: the quasiquote. Invented 82 years ago in a fanzine, the punctuation leveraged the ability to overstrike characters easily with a typewriter.

What I really love about it is how it introduces the idea of human fallibility into the myth of objective truth. Much of the work modern (post-WWII) journalism has been done to confirm the veracity of a quote. Anything words contained by quotation marks were words actually spoken (or at least presented legibly).

But what if you couldn’t capture the quote exactly, but were able to repeat it the gist of it accurately?

How would you treat that?

Most journalistic style guides say leave it unquoted. The quasiquote was invented to fix that. By combining a quote, and overstriking it with a hyphen, fanzines were able to share the essence of what was said in a way that kept the words flowing.

As zines (and everything else written) moved off of typewriters on to computers, the ability to overtype the punctation mark disappeared.

That said, Houston offered a path to its resurrection, and I was tempted to refine it further with more semantic markup.

Style rule:

<style>
	q { 
		quotes: "“" "”" "'" "'"; 
	}
	q.quasi::before, q.quasi::after  {
		text-decoration: from-font line-through;
		padding: 0 0.2rem;
	}
</style>

HTML usage:

<p>Ned Brooks demonstrated to Keith Houston 
<q class="quasi">the quasiquote wasn't a 
flash in the pan</q></p>

Rendered as:

Ned Brooks demonstrated to Keith Houston the quasiquote wasn't a flash in the pan

Mixed feeling about this trailer for the final season of The Bear:

This show has been so good, even as it was buffeted by the social hype cycles. I’ve watched it embrace and subvert the norms, and even through my fellow Parked-alien’s over the top performances, I still feel it.

I had hoped season 4 though would be the last. Leave things unanswered, like The Watchmen did. But that couldn’t happen, I guess.

I do hope, though, this last one does offer the actors — and the characters — deserve.

Regardless, you can trust I will be watching.

For reasons, I’ve been inspired to think about how to recreate the Obsidian Vault structure that’s served me so well for the past five or so years.

Turns out, Obsidian does it all for you (through the hidden .obsidian folders), but being a bit lazy (and fastidious), I also wanted the folders and templates to come along for the ride.

So I made a Seed Vault. Nothing fancy, leverages a non-dogmatic interpretation of the PARA Model. Work-focused, but easily adaptable to personal uses, too.

Quick recommend: The Line, an opinionated Canadian news outlet from Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson has been running some really solid pieces of late.

Views and opinions that aren’t easily categorized as right/left, Liberal/Conservative, east/west. Ideas that are additive, not just reactive. Worth reading if you are at all interested in in Canadian politics, especially around the idea of “sovereignty.”

The headline of this post is taken from this thin article on how AI is making the voice interface more prominent.

But it also could have been from used in thought pieces a almost a decade ago as Amazon Alexa rolled across the landscape.

Or maybe a decade before that.

You get the idea.

Inarguably, AI is making voice a more common interface, but this latest hypecycle seems more driven by the idea that developers are talking to their computers to code. And they are only doing that because they’re able to work remotely, usually alone in a room.

Thinking this is the future of how people engage with digital products is how design will be replaced by those very same computers.

Design needs to consider more than just the immediate interactions the product demands, but also about where those interactions take place.

And you can’t do that talking to yourself.