THE MOZA

where they discuss the current make up of their workforce and lay out their strategy for diversifying the teams even more: Diversity at Slack

Recognize exclusion Exclusion happens when we solve problems using our own biases. As Microsoft designers, we seek out those exclusions, and use them as opportunities to create new ideas and inclusive designs.

Learn from diversity Human beings are the real experts in adapting to diversity. Inclusive design puts people in the center from the very start of the process, and those fresh, diverse perspectives are the key to true insight.

After Effects + Bodymovin + Lottie = Easier animations for native apps

https://www.perspectiveapi.com

Joe Toscano has done a thorough breakdown of the digital campaign touch points of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. He examines the information architecture, interaction patterns, content strategy and much more on their websites, apps, even sms services! 

The Guardian’s Long Read, compelling take-aways for building (digital) tools for people, and why making things seamless, smooth, and easy is not always for the best.

“Earl Wiener, a cult figure in aviation safety, coined what is known as Wiener’s Laws of aviation and human error. “Digital devices tune out small errors while creating opportunities for large errors.” We might rephrase it as: “Automation will routinely tidy up ordinary messes, but occasionally create an extraordinary mess.” It is an insight that applies far beyond aviation.”

“The rarer the exception gets, [...] the less gracefully we are likely to deal with it. We assume that the computer is always right, and when someone says the computer made a mistake, we assume they are wrong or lying.” “Rather than letting the computer fly the plane with the human poised to take over when the computer cannot cope, perhaps it would be better to have the human fly the plane with the computer monitoring the situation, ready to intervene. Computers, after all, are tireless, patient and do not need practice. Why, then, do we ask people to monitor machines and not the other way round?”

”Google and Monotype launch Noto, an open-source typeface family for all the world’s languages” – via It’s Nice That (who also ran an article about my blog last year)

Two weeks ago our UX team attended the EuroIA (Information Architecture) conference in Amsterdam and we had a blast! There were many lessons to learn during the morning workshops and many insights to take away from the talks and presentations – as evident from the many notes I took!

Meet Jimmy, a robot puppet powered by fluid actuators.

Disney Research has created an actuated made of tubes filled with air and water. Read the full interview here.

“About a year ago I started working on merging typographic design and artificial intelligence. Design is absolutely teachable, and I have a 4 step process for teaching it to machines. The process is written about below in the context of typography but it’s equally applicable to layout, color, and every other subdiscipline of graphic design.”

“Peter Wagner and Martin Giles coined the term “authentically mobile” to distinguish services that not only are tailored for the mobile world, but who so thoroughly leverage the unique capabilities of mobile devices that they could literally not exist without them.”

Ben Basche discusses Snapchat and juxtaposes its raison d'être, usage and projected popularity to other social media apps. Very interesting read!

Sunspring, a short science fiction film has an AI as its author. The main characters are called H (played by Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch), H2, and C, so determined by Benjamin, who was fed a big number of Sci-Fi screenplays to learn common patterns found in movie scripts. 

Watch the movie and read Benjamin’s creation story here.

Christopher Alexander, who wrote the seminal The Timeless Way of Building, states that “when language is shared, the individual patterns in the language are profound.” For this to happen, these patterns need to be fundamentally simple. “Nothing which is not simple and direct can survive the slow transmission from person to person.”