Jesús Vera Zorita

You know what AI can’t do? Service Design — or any task that lives in the gaps between systems, people, power, and context.

Congrats Erika!

It's funny how many of the questions I get when talking about designing AI functionality are some form of "How do we convince our users to trust something that will likely fail them and is essentially untrustworthy?"

this is similar to what I've come to think of as the "reverse turing test"

when people find synthetic text is "good enough" to complete a task (homework, business report, email) it doesn't mean the machine is smart. it means they were asked to produce something that didn't matter

it's diagnostic

"prioritization" is often given as a checklist task but really what it represents is potentially an enormously involved empirical process attached to a computation (the prioritization itself) that runs factorial

'F*** Off And Let People Be': David Tennant Doubles Down On Support For Trans People "People are trying to create division... and it's so f***ing unnecessary."

Always love to see great talent using their platform for unabashed good.

Critical theory is no longer enough. It is time for critical practice.

I really hate it when scientists keep saying that “we need to rebuild trust in science,” because it implies that scientists are to blame for the mistrust rather than the millions of dollars of dark money that have funded political attacks on science in order to advance a far right agenda.

Oh, that is a shame. I hope that whatever is negging the development washes away and everyone can get a happy story to tell about. Thanks for answering!

Hey Scott, sorry to bother you about it, but is there any chance of Revenant Hill being developed in the future? Take care!

I liked this post

When I review design concepts, I look for the hypothesis on the behavior. Some designers can’t articulate the hypothesis but their explorations show this. And then there are some people who just move things around. There is always a hypothesis whether it’s optimization or differentiation.

It's easy to blame ignorant people for their lack of knowledge, but the people with the knowledge have the responsibility to be better communicators, or at least to partner with skilled communicators. Because communication is a skill.

Otherwise, why bother knowing things.

Systems design: you have two cows. one of the cows dies; it drops 25 xp, 2x leather, 1x meat.

Narrative design: you have two cows. one of the cows dies; the other cow uses a salience-based storylet system to react with an appropriate bark ("moooo")

3c design: you have two cows. they can airdash

It took me years to learn the importance of repetition.

If you’re communicating across disciplines or levels of expertise or with people you don’t already have a strong relationship with, “but I told them already” doesn’t cut it.

The art is in not being tedious about it.

As I get older I’ve concluded, ‘everything is basically either a cult or a database’. I will not be explaining

It's easy to mistake the polish of a prototype for the quality of the idea

Tapping the sign.

The 2 key workplace skills:
- doing something without making it obvious that you are doing it
- making it seem like you are doing something without actually doing it

Picture of paper 'Epistemic Trespassing' by Nathan Ballantyne. With the first sentence of each section highlighted in yellow. Epistemic trespassers judge matters outside their field of expertise. Trespassing in ubiquitous in this age of interdisciplinary research and recognising this will require us to be more intellectually modest. 1. Introduction Epistemic trespassers are thinkers who have competence or expertise to make good judgments in one field, but move to another field where they lack competence - and pass judgment nevertheless. We should doubt that trespassers are reliable judges in fields where they are outsiders. A few examples will guide our discussion. Linus Pauling, the brilliant chemist and energetic proponent of peace, won two Nobel Prizes—one for his work in chemistry, and another for his activism against atomic weapons. Later, Pauling asserted that mega-doses of vitamin C could effectively treat diseases such as cancer and cure ailments like the common cold. Pauling was roundly dismissed as a crackpot by the medical establishment after researchers ran studies and concluded that high-dose vitamin C therapies did not have the touted health effects. Pauling accused the establishment of fraud and careless science. This trespasser did not want to be moved aside by the real experts.

Two words: Epistemic Trespassing.
philpapers.org/archive/BALE...

When faced with a large initiative w/a ton of ambiguity and unclear POV, I tend to write a UX Brief as a way to put down the initial experiential goals, approaches, behavioral hypotheses, known constraints that presumably will drive the biz goals. It is kind of a straw man to shape the UX POC.

Knowledge is not power. Power is power.

arguably the job of design is to come up with creative ways of exhausting the space of mistakes, and doing it on the cheap

And yet it's true.

You made history, and for a lot of people you enabled us to get a job and start a life in design.

I am really sad about how it happened, but happy to know it did. Thank you.

Two-step process labeled the double square method: 1. The PM has an idea. 2. The engineers build it.

The "double square" is much less well-known than the "double diamond" methodology, but much more frequently practiced

The actual double diamond graphic off Wikipedia with the four stages labeled discover, define, develop, deliver.

two things can simultaneously be true:
1) the double diamond is a cliche, oversimplified process
2) pulling new stages for the double diamond out of your ass is not going to improve that process

working on a windows 95 themed automation game about making powerpoint decks #gamedev

Despite my best efforts I'm writing about AI again. Tomorrow's issue of Product Picnic is channeling Ed Zitron.

AI is no longer optional: it's forced into every product you use and scraping every word you write. If the past decades were the age of user centered design, now is the age of no consent.

Sigh. Fine.
I'll read Systemantics again 😔

Wha—I don't remember Systemantics having any drawings!