Revisiting Adaptive Design, a lost design movement

One of the things people value about Scandinavian design is that, generally, objects don’t draw attention to themselves. They are plain, functional and offer the user something “honest,” in Saarinen’s assessment. Linear’s leap forward in software development is that it is designed to be honest in this way, to literally not draw attention to itself

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Even when doing concept work, you often need to focus your efforts. The design concept should feel like an exciting evolution of the product. A redesign should not completely disassemble the product to its atomic parts. While you might have ambitious goals, you also have to be realistic and manage risks.

The opposite of process is chaos, but an in-between is rapid adaptation, emphasis on rapid . Limit scope as much as possible, ship small things fast, and react to feedback quickly.

The design process assumes that dev time is the utmost priority, and this moves a bulk of labor into the design process. This is a faulty premise. The most valuable thing... See more

“What is the solution that will give you the required performance for as little money and as little complexity as possible?” The Leveraged Freedom Chair was not a compromise; it wasn’t a chair that was “good enough” for the people who use it. It was the right design for specific people in specific contexts, with deep attention to longevity built in

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