This week's best things

Nokia's design archive, the dangers of bad strategy, a fun smartphone app, dyslexia-friendly content design, the impact of GPS on memory, AI skepticism, different ways of thinking about work schedules, changes in Google search, and a trip to the opera.

This week's best things
Photo by Nikola Johnny Mirkovic / Unsplash

Less than two weeks until Christmas so this is the last this week's best things of the year. I'll send out a 2024 round-up next week and then it's time for a Christmas break.

Lord of the ringtones: Nokia celebrates pop-culture status by opening design archive

News that the Nokia design archive is being opened up (online and, by appointment, in-person) through a project from Aalto University which has acquired the archive.

This article in the Guardian has some interviews with some design people who worked at Nokia in the 90s and is a reminder of just how dominant and widespread the Nokia design language was when it came to the pre-iPhone mobile aesthetic.

"“Everyone remembers their first Nokia,” says Mark Mason, who joined the telecoms company’s design team back in its 1990s heyday. “When you say the name, it evokes a memory.”

This is not as hyperbolic as it sounds – in 1998, the Finnish consumer electronics company was the bestselling phone brand in the world, with 40% of the world market and 70% of the UK market."

Lord of the ringtones: Nokia celebrates pop-culture status by opening design archive
The mobile phones we loved then lost will go on show in Finland and online to reveal history of bestselling brand

Why bad strategy is a ‘social contagion’

An interview from a couple of years ago with Richard Rumelt looking at "how to develop strategies that aim to solve problems rather than simply state ambitions"

If you've ever spent more than about five minutes working in or with a cultural organisation you'll probably recognise this issue.

"Many companies treat strategy as a way of presenting to the board and to the investing public their ambitions for performance, and they confuse that with having a strategy [...] Executives end up saying, “Our strategy is to achieve these results,” but that is not strategy. [...] Strategy is how you overcome the obstacles that stand between where you are and what you want to achieve."

Why bad strategy is a ‘social contagion’
Richard Rumelt explains how to develop good strategies that aim to solve problems, and he shares why bad strategy is a social contagion.

Brilliant Smartphone App Generates Lego Plans for Real-World Objects

This is fun, and as the article says I imagine it's a matter of days or weeks until Lego either kills, steals, or acquires it.

"Every once in a while, you'll see a brilliant innovator steal the march on a major corporation. Czech entrepreneur Iva Papoušková developed a smartphone app called Brick My World, which uses photogrammetry to generate Lego instructions for any object you photograph."

Brilliant Smartphone App Generates Lego Plans for Real-World Objects - Core77
Every once in a while, you’ll see a brilliant innovator steal the march on a major corporation. Czech entrepreneur Iva Papoušková developed a smartphone app called Brick My World, which uses photogrammetry to generate Lego instructions for any object you photograph. Lego, the company has to be kicking themselves for

How to Choose Dyslexia-Friendly Fonts

Around 10% of the UK population have dyslexia but it rarely seems to feature as a focus in conversations about digital accessibility. And when so much of the web is made up of words then that is a problem.

This useful article highlights how you can make choices about typography that could help people with dyslexia have a better time with your content.

Specific font characteristics are known to enhance readability for individuals with dyslexia. These features include:

  • Clear Distinction Between Characters: Fonts with unique letter shapes reduce confusion. For example, the letters “b” and “d” should look distinct from one another.
  • Consistent Spacing: Uniform spacing between letters and words prevents visual clutter, making it easier to follow text.
  • Sans Serif Style: Sans serif fonts, like Arial or Verdana, lack decorative strokes, which can simplify the reading process.
  • Weighted Bottoms: Fonts with slightly heavier bottoms help ground each letter, reducing the likelihood of flipping or rotating characters in the reader’s mind.

There's more information on how to design content for people with dyslexia on Scope's (excellent) website.

How To Choose Dyslexia-Friendly Fonts
Typography can be more than just a design choice—it plays a crucial role in readability and accessibility, especially for individuals with dyslexia. Fonts
Writing dyslexic friendly content: colours and fonts
Make your digital content more accessible to people with dyslexia. Follow these tips on using plain English, colours, and font styles to make your website dyslexic friendly.

How GPS Weakens Memory—and What We Can Do about It

An oldie but a goodie in Scientific American about the impact of turn-by-turn navigation apps on our memory. Also has a lot of nice stuff in there about the history of navigation.

"multiple experiments have shown that this easy egocentric navigation also reduces spatial awareness and mental mapping when compared to more traditional forms of allocentric navigation like paper maps. See for example recent work by Eran Ben-Elia comparing paper maps to Google Maps, in which app users significantly underperformed on traditional memory map tasks such as pointing or landmark recognition. "

How GPS Weakens Memory--and What We Can Do about It
A new app helps you navigate, not with turn-by-turn directions but via audio “beacons”

The phony comforts of AI skepticism

A good (depressing, long) read from Casey Newton written after he attended an AI conference at Berkley at the end of November.

"my biggest takeaway is that there is an enormous disconnect between external critics of AI, who post about it on social networks and in their newsletters, and internal critics of AI — people who work on it directly, either for companies like OpenAI or Anthropic or researchers who study it. 

At the moment, no one knows for sure whether the large language models that are now under development will achieve superintelligence and transform the world. And in that uncertainty, two primary camps of criticism have emerged. 

The first camp, which I associate with the external critics, holds that AI is fake and sucks.

The second camp, which I associate more with the internal critics, believes that AI is real and dangerous.

Today I want to lay out why I believe AI is real and dangerous."

This article from Newton then kicked off a whole cycle of response pieces and commentary on the response, which the Garbage Day newsletter cited a useful summary of:

"in a piece on Sunday, writer Edward Ongweso Jr summed this up quite nicely, writing in his newsletter, “AI can be real and fake and suck and dangerous all at the same time or in different configurations.” Which is about as coherent a summary of my own feelings as I’m probably going to find."

The phony comforts of AI skepticism
It’s fun to say that artificial intelligence is fake and sucks — but evidence is mounting that it’s real and dangerous

‘I love you… goodbye:’ What will happen when this companion robot suddenly dies?

I suspect we'll start seeing lots more of this sort of thing.

"Children across the US will likely spend the coming days and weeks saying goodbye to an AI-powered friend named Moxie. The small dog-sized companion bot—which used a ChatGPT-style large language model and expressive features to hold open-ended conversations with children—will soon be taken offline due to its creator’s financial struggles."

Remember when the financial fortunes of an American tech company didn't impact your children's understanding of mortality and their relationship with their toys? Halcyon days...

‘I love you… goodbye:’ What will happen when this companion robot suddenly dies?
Embodied’s financial woes are taking its beloved Moxie offline.

Craft Schedules That Work for Everyone

This week, I was speaking with a friend who also moved to Sweden in the last few years. They have been working back in the UK over the last few months and we were comparing and constrasting the UK and Swedish approaches to working hours, scheduling, and general ways of thinking about 'work time'.

This article in MIT Sloan Management Review (paywalled but you can create a free account to read) looks at the impact of work schedules and how you can arrive at more flexible, and better approaches for deciding when people work.

Tl;dr there are probably lots of different (and often better) ways of approaching this question than whatever the status quo is at your organisation.

"It’s not surprising that employees value good schedules so highly. While there’s no one-size-fits-all best schedule, certain scheduling arrangements can impose a high cost on workers and organizations. An extensive body of research has found that unpredictable, insufficient, and long hours induce economic hardship, disrupt employees’ personal lives, and harm workers’ mental and physical health. On the employer side, getting schedules wrong can harm customer satisfaction, productivity, profits, and the organization’s reputation."

Craft Schedules That Work for Everyone
Schedules can impose a high cost on workers and organizations. Leaders need to rethink what a schedule can be.

Sundar Pichai says Google Search will ‘change profoundly’ in 2025

"“I think we are going to be able to tackle more complex questions than ever before,” Pichai said during the NYT’s DealBook Summit on Wednesday.

“I think you’ll be surprised, even early in ‘25, the kind of newer things Search can do compared to where it is today.”"

Hopefully this will see Google search (I'm not capitalising 'search') become usable again, but I expect the slide into commercialised nonsense will just accelerate.

Sundar Pichai says Google Search will ‘change profoundly’ in 2025
Pichai took a jab at Microsoft.

This week's consumption

I was treated to a surprise trip to see Ane Brun and GöteborgsOperans Danskompani's 12 Songs on Tuesday, with music from GöteborgsOperans Orkester.

I had never heard of Ane Brun before Tuesday, but the Danskompani's production of Hammer which we saw earlier this year, was one of the best things I've ever seen on stage. Anyway, 12 Songs was brilliant, like a beautiful, bombastic, slightly mad gig. And Ane Brun makes beautiful music, like a Norwegian cross between Joanna Newsom and Kate Bush.

Here's a playlist of the 12 songs from the show.

We started watching Black Doves on Netflix, which is very very watchable so far.

I started reading The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride, which is really good.

I saw this beautiful video: For fans of choral acapella.

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