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- DesignUp 🥁 90th Issue 🥁 Product features, poetry, dissonance, deconstruct & hiring milkshakes
DesignUp 🥁 90th Issue 🥁 Product features, poetry, dissonance, deconstruct & hiring milkshakes
The 90th issue. And it's taken some time to put together.
Not because it was an extra-special issue, but the times we are living in are unusual. This is an eclectic collection - from product features to poetry, dissonance, deconstruct and hiring milkshakes. An unusual set of reads for the unusual times we live in.
If you think about the fundamental value of diversity, it’s not about skin colour, or who you date, or how you look. It’s about experience. Beyond the traditional markers of diversity, once they have been satisfied, we can look beyond them and begin to see diversity in a different way — by valuing the diversity of each individual, and particularly, each individual’s unique life experience. To do this, we need to look to ‘new markers’ of diversity...
In the past few years, I’ve realized that many arguments for building features are fundamentally wrong. They come with argumentation fallacies, and they can seriously damage the product and affect the decision making of an organization and its flexibility for years.
Stack Overflow’s design team had been flat. All designers and UX researchers reported to the design manager. In 2019, though, we grew to a point where our design manager had too many direct reports…
The DeConstruct Report is based on an extensive study of the Design-In-Tech industry in India and SE Asia - commissioned by DesignUp in 2019. The patterns from the research findings are presented in over 30 beautifully detailed charts - augmented by first person accounts from multiple industry leaders across Product and Service companies. Discover barriers to success, emerging skills, trends and more. Though an industry report - this volume is anything but the pedantic tome. Last few left!
Optimism in the Pandemic
In times of crisis, learning and reciting poetry can act as a balm.
"It turns out that the trend lines Gore has spent a lifetime either warning people about (carbon!) or trying to goose upward (green energy! Access to health care!) are finally headed in the directions he was hoping for. The Covid-19 pandemic, he says, has accelerated the kinds of systemic changes..."
"The minute we make any decision—I think COVID-19 is serious; no, I’m sure it is a hoax—we begin to justify the wisdom of our choice and find reasons to dismiss the alternative."
Jane Metcalfe: "in 1995, we published Scenarios, our first special issue, which imagined the future in 25 years, i.e. 2020. One article from that issue, “The Plague Years,” almost reads like a report from the current pandemic. In it, a virus from China, of course named Mao flu, afflicts the elderly and the immunocompromised. A bio conference becomes a significant vector for infection. Singapore is initially able to contain the virus using draconian measures. The whole world goes into lockdown and cities empty as those who can afford it escape to the countryside"
Exploding Mangoes & Hiring Milkshakes: Recommended Reads for PMs, Designers, Makers... — thehardcopy.co
An essential read for designers, makers and creators, interestingly there are not design books on this list: "It is my belief that designers, or even engineers and PMs for that matter, should not limit themselves to reading about their profession (and fellow professionals). They should truly be the connector of dots between disparate ideas, creating newer ways of seeing, experiencing and interpreting the world via what they design, make, create, build."
See you at the 91st edition. If not earlier :)