John Carey makes an interesting observation about the Macbook Pro with Retina Display in Progress:

Photography is a place where philosophy and technology mix with art and its ease of entry has diluted its user base to the point of over saturation. While chemistry and technology have always been a central pillar in this space, I fear it could drag it down even further unless we start to greet some of this forward momentum with at least a whisper of skepticism. I guess the best way to break this down is simply to ask, when will we ever be satisfied? When will sharp be sharp enough, or big be big enough? When do we reach the point within some areas of consumer technology where we are making progress simply for the sake of progress?

Just when I thought maybe we’re starting to come to terms with certain technological advancements and actually enjoy ourselves within our technically enhanced lives I have been quickly reminded that it will never end. I don’t mean to be overly pessimistic but you have got to admit it does feel a big daunting at times does it not? It is a subject I have long explored on these pages and I know I am not alone.

Even though he’s speaking from a photographer’s perspective, it’s easy to relate to John’s point. Yesterday, while the Google I/O keynote was going on, my only emotion was relief. I was relieved that I’m so securely locked up in Apple’s Prisonâ„¢ that I couldn’t care less about all the tweets and live blogs about Google Glass and the Nexus 7. I was relieved that I’m not a reporter for Engadget or The Verge, who have to live and breathe every single new thing that comes out day after day after day. Most of all, I was relieved that it wasn’t another Apple keynote, because those take up all my time and attention since I ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO KNOW WHAT I’M ABOUT TO MISS OUT ON.

All this to say that I empathize with John’s mixed feelings about the Retina MacBook Pros. I, too, want more from technology while knowing that more isn’t necessarily what we need. What we need are bicycles for the mind, and to do that, we need some time to practice so we can take the training wheels off. Could it be that continuing to invent better bicycles all the time are actually preventing us from riding the damn things?

A few months before my daughter was born I created a virtual list in my head called “The dad I want to be”. The list got constant attention as I added, edited, and deleted stuff while I waited in line somewhere or lay awake at night. It was a good list, and I was proud of it. And then, on the morning of my daughter’s birth, I lost the list.

At first there was just no time to look at it, so I put it in a brain compartment somewhere for safe keeping. One evening a few weeks later I looked for it, but I couldn’t find it. I searched around for a while, but then there was a dirty diaper, and, you know. One thing led to another.

Today, more than two years later, I still haven’t found that list. To be honest, I stopped looking for it a long time ago, because I realized something very important. I realized that it doesn’t matter how many idealistic, theoretical guidelines you come up with before you become a parent. Once your first child is born, you just become the dad you’ve always been inside. The one that most resembles a personality that’s been shaped by years of experiences and the people around you. Some are lucky — they’re natural parents who slip into the new role comfortably. Others have a harder time with the transition, and end up making weird and scary realizations about themselves. I’m part of the latter group.

Nothing is more humbling than the day-to-day experiences of being a parent. Nothing is more effective at shining a spotlight on all on’s flaws and shortcomings as a human being. But luckily that’s not the only side of the story. Parenting is also a fantastic catalyst for personal change.

Those of us who spend the first few months of parenting with a look of total bewilderment in our eyes learn to do things a little differently. Slowly and with painstaking effort, I started to chip away at all the things that were not “The dad I want to be”. I failed constantly, but then one day I had a small victory over my instincts. The small victories eventually turned into big ones, until one day I realized that I’d just made it through a tantrum and managed to put our daughter to sleep without becoming flustered or losing my cool. I celebrated with a mental high five, and then I got back in the game immediately, because becoming a better dad is not a journey with a neat ending.

I wish someone told me this before we had children, so I’m telling you this now. Throw out your preconceived ideas of what it means to be a dad. You’re already a dad, and ther’s nothing you can do about it at this point. But once your child is born, don’t beat yourself up when you discover that the dad you are is not exactly the dad you want to be. Instead, identify the things you don’t like, and fix them. One minuscule, frustrating, gratifying step at a time.

Bryan Larrick critiques the new Kindle app for iPad in Improved Reading Experience? No. I particularly like his points on how design impacts readability:

It’s hard to overstate the importance of healthy margins and whitespace in good design. [“¦] The words are the most important aspect of a book. That’s intuitive. But, presentation is very important. Having ample margins helps the eye flow over the text and makes it easier to move from one line to the next while reading. Making the margins smaller in the app hinders the ease with which the eye can move over the page, making the book harder to read, not easier. Also, it’s just ugly.

So obvious, yet so often ignored on web sites and in apps.

Nat Ives quotes “an executive at a magazine company” in his piece Wired and The New Yorker Pull Back on Flipboard:

“Nobody will deny that Flipboard is a beautiful product, but the question is, is it too beautiful?” the executive said. “What people want out of a magazine is exactly what they’re delivering. So if people feel like they’re getting that already, even if it’s not the same depth of content that would be in a print or monthly publication, then are they less likely to want to find it in the magazine itself?”

Wait, what? The executive acknowledges that Flipboard gives people what they want out of a magazine, so he/she is advocating that they should respond by pulling their content from Flipboard instead of, I don’t know, giving people what they want out of a magazine.

(link via @iamFinch)

Towards the end of Finding Meaning in the Technium Cave — Francisco Inchauste’s essay for Distance 02 — he urges us to be more cognizant of the lasting impact of our work:

What we create today will become the baseline for future generations. In the future, explorers will find our technium cave, filled with the artifacts of our present. What will they find in there? What will our creations tell them about what was meaningful to us? I can only hope it’s not what I see today. I know it can change, and I hope you see it too.

This is the theme that echoes through Distance 02, a collection of three essays on the topic of “Extracurriculars” — how to take ourselves out of the daily grind and think more clearly about how the things we make impact the world around us. It’s a topic that I see more and more designers touch on, starting with Wilson Miner’s excellent When We Build talk, all the way through Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design, parts of Mike Monteiro’s Design is a Job, and smaller essays like Dmitry Fadeyev’s Moral Design. I’ve also touched on this before:

I wonder what would happen if we felt the weight of responsibility a little more when w’re designing. What if we go into each project as if the design will be around for 100 years or more? Would we make it fit into the web environment better, aim to give it a timeless aesthetic, and spend more time considering the consequences of our design decisions? Would we try to design something that “makes life worth living”?

The cynic in me worries that this vitally important topic is getting a bit too trendy, which brings with it lots of attention but also hoards of Internet critics. But before the possible backlash gets into full swing there is still time to read Distance 02 and be challenged to be better designers, not just people who design things better. For example, Sharlene King urges us to do more side projects in Do Your Homework:

I believe success comes through homework: the projects we do separate from our day-to-day work, that help us live design rather than simply work in design, allow passionate designers to break through.

And in The Embedded Designer, Cassie McDaniel talks about designers’ ability to influence adjacent industries in a positive way:

While design processes are available to anyone, regular experience with the creative process makes the designer particularly adaptable to new environments. An eagerness to understand the nature of our design challenges is part of our mandate. We ask tough questions of our clients and their industries. We need to know: Why are things done this way? What problem is it solving? What can we get rid of to make this simpler? Designers are receptive to new input by definition, and that makes us inherently more malleable than other kinds of workers.

What I found pleasantly surprising about Distance 02 is that it doesn’t stick to the philosophical. There is plenty of practical advice on how to make these ideas real in our everyday design work. Francisco’s framework for measuring meaning will come in particularly handy in all my projects.

Like any publication, Distance 02 is not perfect. It buckles under the weight of its 100+ citations, which sometimes makes it hard to follow the authors’ own story threads through the essays. Either that, or I’m just very easily distracted.

But that is a small complaint, and certainly not enough to make me discourage you from reading the book in any format your heart desires. In fact, at $5 for a digital copy and $15 for print & digital, it’s pretty much a no-brainer. You can buy Distance here.

I remember when Wilson Miner’s talk When We Build first hit the web with a bang — for days you couldn’t open Twitter without seeing a link to it. I don’t know why, but I just never got around to watching it until today. It is, in a word, extraordinary. I generally don’t want to post things that you’ve likely seen before, but I need to make an exception on this one, just in case some of you procrastinated like I did.

It’s not really possible to summarize, but if I had to, I’d say that the talk is loosely based on John Ruskin’s words from his 1849 book The Seven Lamps of Architecture:

When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, “See! This our father did for us.”

If you can make 40 minutes to watch this, you won’t regret it.

n+1 Magazine has a wonderfully-written editorial on the ups and downs of using Twitter, appropriately titled Please RT:

Look at your Twitter feed at the wrong moment, however, or send a dumb tweet yourself, and a bad infinity opens up onto the narcissistical sublime. What tweet is that, flashing, subliminally, behind the others? In exactly 140 characters: “I need to be noticed so badly that I can’t pay attention to you except inasmuch as it calls attention to me. I know for you it’s the same.” In this way, a huge crowd of people”Š”””Š40 percent more users since last year”Š”””Šdevalue one another through mutual self-importance.

They’re referring to other people, of course. You and I are very different! It’s this part that scares me the most though, because the evidence proving their point is starting to pile up all around us:

Soon, if not yet already, it will seem pretentious, elitist, and old-fashioned to write anything, anywhere, with patience and care.

Jim Dalrymple in The Surface and the iPad:

From what I’ve seen, it seems to me that Microsoft is trying to do a similar type of dance with the Surface that it did with previous tablets. The company is trying to convince consumers that this device can be a computer and a tablet at the same time. Based on the sales of the iPad, I’m not sure that’s what consumers really want.

Exactly. This is the core of the problem with Microsoft’s “no compromise” strategy. As Kieran Healy pointed out in his response to that approach:

Uncompromising designers make products that will not appeal to everyone, or be of equal use to everyone, or do everything equally well. On the other hand, IT products advertised to consumers as having “no compromises” try to please everyone all of the time. From the perspective of the Dieter Ramses of this world, Sinofsky’s repeated use of the phrase “no compromises” means exactly the opposite of what it says — and more or less guarantees that the product will actually be riddled with design compromises, all made in an ultimately futile effort to keep everyone happy.

Or to summarize using John Gruber’s words:

[C]ompromises enforce simplicity and obviousness in design.

Maybe we’ll all be proved wrong about this. But I just don’t see how a tablet that doesn’t know if it’s a tablet or a computer won’t be confusing to users.

(By the way, speaking of Jim Dalrymple — you have to check out this Tumblr site dedicated to his awesome beard)