26: A Stark Difference in Design
Hey! Welcome to this week’s Stark Difference in Design. Happy St. Paddy’s Day ☘️Last Edition No. 25 had a 45% open rate. The most popular link was the How My Brain Damaged Mother Changed How I Look at Interface Design post. 💌
Tidbits
+ How Plato Foresaw Facebook’s Folly
But the deeper reason that technology so often disappoints and betrays us is that it promises to make easy things that, by their intrinsic nature, have to be hard.Tweeting and trolling are easy. Mastering the arts of conversation and measured debate is hard. Texting is easy. Writing a proper letter is hard. Looking stuff up on Google is easy. Knowing what to search for in the first place is hard. Having a thousand friends on Facebook is easy. Maintaining six or seven close adult friendships over the space of many years is hard. Swiping right on Tinder is easy. Finding love — and staying in it — is hard.
+ What Happens When Kids Design Our Spaces?
When we create spaces that allow for multiple generations to mix, all the research shows that connectivity improves all of our lives. Even those micro-interactions with people you don’t necessarily know helps to create connection. Our kids want to be able to go to the park and just bump into friends; but often, in suburban designs, everyone is secluded in their own backyards and they don’t interact. Kids want communal spaces, where their parents can still keep an eye, but they can meet independently and connect with others.
+ How Bad Design Perpetuates Human Stereotypes
People create emotional connections to a design that make a place or a product feel like their own. Introducing change isn’t just about breaking apart concrete or bits of code. It’s breaking apart human relationships. The result may be that people will leave and never return.
For bookworms
+ The Fifth Risk
What are the consequences if the people given control over our government have no idea how it works?
In Agriculture the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. The Commerce Department may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly. Over at Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it’s not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do.
Timely. And I would read the phone book if Michael Lewis wrote it.
What’s new from Stark
+ Hot Fixes
On Wednesday afternoon, we had something wonky happening in Sketch when trying to run contrast checks with one of the layers being <100% opacity. We pushed out a hot fix that evening.
So changing the layer opacity reflects in the preview and contrast check results again.
+ Stark is coming to Creative South!
Both myself (Cat) and Michael will be at Creative South this year and were stoked. I’ll be speaking but we’ll be together and around to talk shop on all things design, accessibility, and more while eating some real good BBQ food. Want to link up? Let us know. We’d love to meet.
Go get your tickets now!
Liked this newsletter? Let us know. And we’re always talking shop on Twitter @getstarkco or in our community chat.
–Team Stark