Good design is clear thinking made visible, bad design is stupidity made visible
Edward TufteRead
The minimum we should hope for with any display technology is that it should do no harm.
Interpretation
Display technology should be safe and not cause any negative impact on users.
Edward Tufte emphasizes the fundamental expectation of display technologies: they must be designed in a way that does not cause any harm to users. This sentiment encourages developers and designers to focus on user well-being and the ethical implications of technology, especially in an age where screens dominate our visual experiences.
In practice
In a presentation about user interface design, I would use this quote to highlight the importance of ethical considerations.
Good design is clear thinking made visible, bad design is stupidity made visible
I have stared long enough at the glowing flat rectangles of computer screens. Let us give more time for doing things in the real world...plant a plant, walk the dogs, read a real book, go to the opera.
There is no such thing as information overload, just bad design. If something is cluttered and/or confusing, fix your design.
PowerPoint is like being trapped in the style of early Egyptian flatland cartoons rather than using the more effective tools of Renaissance visual representation.
If youβre told what to look for, you canβt see anything else.
Design cannot rescue failed content.
The PC is the LSD of the '90s.
Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.
It used to be that we imagined that our mobile phones would be for us to talk to each other. Now, our mobile phones are there to talk to us.
Living as we do in the age of Facebook, we shouldn't be surprised that some countries are starting to imagine themselves more as social networks than as a physical place.
One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control. It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless.
The promise of artificial intelligence and computer science generally vastly outweighs the impact it could have on some jobs in the same way that, while the invention of the airplane negatively affected the railroad industry, it opened a much wider door to human progress.
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