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January 7, 2024

A new year of design

A very happy 2024 to all my readers!

I sent no emails for a while as I was engrossed in other things (mostly organizing a visit of hostage families to Boston). Good progress on the concept design front though:

  • Peter presented our Palantir project at Splash/Onward, and got some nice feedback. People seemed to resonate most with the idea of conceptual entropy (as a sign of trouble), and the relationship of concepts to domain-driven design.
  • Arvind and I taught our senior-level design class again at MIT, with concept design now fully integrated. For the first time, we gave our students a template for coding concepts in Node.js, which worked well (and reduced the code length from last year's projects by a factor of 5).
  • I wrote a big pile of tutorials/essays about concept design and software design in general. I'm going to revisit some of these and explain them better as some of them seem inscrutable to UX/PM types (thank you, Lea Verou, for complaining!). In the meantime, here are some you might enjoy: form, context and misfits, an explanation of Christopher Alexander's notion of design; concept criteria, to help you figure out what is and isn't a concept; concept dependencies and subsets, about products as families; and tactics for divergent design which tries to meld an ethical approach to design with brainstorming.

About the forum: I changed the URL; it's now https://forum.essenceofsoftware.com. My first post of the year is about a wonderful and thought-provoking essay by Lea on "eigensolutions"—a way to identify deeper and more general functionality than use cases suggest. Some connections here to concepts to explore.

Finally, a book recommendation. My old friend from CMU, Merrick Furst, has just published a terrific new book with some colleagues called Heart of Innovation. In short, the book's message is that no amount of needfinding, user empathy or other design-thinky tactics are enough to identify "authentic demand". People not only want but even need things they end up not buying. So what's the secret sauce? It's having a "not not": something that it is not OK for your customers not to have.

I love this idea, and have been exploring it in the context of concept design and will be sending a post out soon on this topic.

In the meantime, let me know what you're up to, and send me any suggestions for design topics that you're interested in.

Daniel

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