“Systematic design excluding intuition yields pedestrian follow-ons and knock-offs; intuitive design without system yields flawed fancies.”

–The Design of Design: Essays From a Computer Scientist by Frederick P. Brooks

This explains Firefox and Windows 8 and 10, I think — they lack and lacked both intuition and systematicity, combining the worst of both worlds.

In striving for some false simplicity, they achieved neither simplicity nor increased capabilities, instead landing squarely at the left failing edge of the bell curve of incoherence and lack of discoverability.

Anyway, the book is good. Most designers “designing” today should read it.

Design is another field like economics that should just be blown up (metaphorically) and started from scratch. There’s nothing there to save.

Tried to read 3 well regarded recent books only to find them all too MFA-y

“The gulls wheeled around the spires, keening themselves hoarse”

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) July 10, 2016

Hear, hear. Had nearly the same experience.

I just can’t read or write books like that. It’s just trying too hard to do something that sounds impressive to the educated morons but that sounds like a shithead shindig to the truly educated.

Marge Piercy is another prose writer like Coetzee, if anyone is interested, though far less well-known.

She ain’t no slouch at poetry, either.