Items of Interest

Page 33

“So, basically, what Lego has done over the last few decades is take a truly wonderful gender-neutral toy, infuse it with boyness, and tell every kid who’ll listen that the toy is not-for-girls. Now, stuck with only 50% of the kid market, they’re going after girls by overcompensating. And, to top it all off, they’re shaking their heads and doing ‘science’ to try to figure out girls, as if they’re some strange variant of human that regular humans just can’t get their head around.”

January 3, 2012

business / feminism / parenting / toys

“We must never forget that our causal beliefs are defined by their limitations. For too long, we’ve pretended that the old problem of causality can be cured by our shiny new knowledge. If only we devote more resources to research or dissect the system at a more fundamental level or search for ever more subtle correlations, we can discover how it all works. But a cause is not a fact, and it never will be; the things we can see will always be bracketed by what we cannot. And this is why, even when we know everything about everything, we’ll still be telling stories about why it happened. It’s mystery all the way down.”

December 28, 2011

medicine / science

I’m gradually reading up on this whole Lean UX thing. While at times I don’t think it’s different from “good UX,” at times the model they present and the specific methods are really helpful. This one is one of those, especially with the way it talks about integrating usability testing. Where I think this particular one falls apart is that design and development aren’t going on simultaneously. I think that’s something that responsive design requires.

December 28, 2011

design / lean / usability-testing / user experience

“i think the trouble is i actually long for pain removal. the absence of pain. the abracadabra kind of pain removal that some parts of my faith experience once promised. pray harder, hope more, surrender more, and it will be “gone”. i know better by now, i really do, but still, if i’m really honest, i keep wanting (and in weird crazy ways still expecting) pain removal. what i got instead was a reminder that hope this side of heaven is about pain relief.”

December 28, 2011

kathy escobar / prayer / spirituality

I meant to link this one a long time ago. Brilliant, for anyone who works with people. “Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It’s written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don’t have a clue about the daily necessity of keeping your team professionally content because they’ve either never done the work or have forgotten how it’s done. These are the people who show up when your single best engineer casually and unexpectedly announces, ‘I’m quitting. I’m joining my good friend to found a start-up. This is my two weeks’ notice.’”

December 23, 2011

business