On Attics and Assumptions
My wife and I were in our early twenties when we bought our first house. The previous owner was renovating the 1898 Victorian to become apartments when he ran out of cash and was forced to sell. The beauty and character of the house had been largely plastered over — vinyl siding covered original clapboards, cheap Berber […]
Pee, Poo, and Unintended Consequences
My three-and-a-half-year-old son, Evan, has decided that he’s just not that interested in getting out of diapers. He’s our last, and we’re ready to stop funding Pampers, so we’ve resorted to the most time-honored of parenting tools: bribery. Each time he pee-pees in the potty, he gets to watch a cartoon. Evan hasn’t peed in […]
Design Is About Process, Not Heroics
I’m not a genius. That might sound shocking if your perception of design involves people solving problems by having brilliant, inspired, creative ideas. But it’s true: I’m not any smarter than the next guy, and I don’t have better ideas than anyone else. But I am a designer, and if you task a non-designer and […]
Tension Is To Be Loved
In product development, there’s a perpetual tension between designers, developers, and product managers. By learning to balance the concerns of all of the parts of the team, we can craft truly great products.