‘Design is intelligence made visible’
3 min read
·
May 16, 2024
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Welcome back to the Daily Edition
Issue #77: OpenAI comes for Siri, a new study on H5N1 avian flu, and life with Long Covid
By
The word “design” is often used in the context of things we can see: websites, apps, objects in space. But one of the best definitions of design I’ve seen extends it to anything humans create. It comes from graphic designer Louis Danziger, who
said
“Design is intelligence made visible.”
I think about that a lot in the context of Medium, where we’re designing tools to help people read and write. But I think it also applies to writing itself. Writing is also intelligence made visible.
Along those lines, I wanted to share a story about design that you can extend to lots of things: writing, thinking, relating to other people. It’s “
58 rules for beautiful UI design
” by product designer
. In it, he outlines the “elegance formula” of design, 58 rules mapped to eight overarching principles:
- Empathy
: Good design is rooted in an understanding of your audience.
- Layout
: Guide the eye effortlessly across the landscape.
- Essentialism
: Simplicity and purpose above everything else.
- Guidance
: Design should lead us somewhere.
- Aesthetics
: Communicate a feeling.
- Novelty
: “True art lies in balancing novelty with familiarity.”
- Consistency
: Don’t be confusing; build trust.
- Engagement
: Good design is like a good conversation.
Could you apply any of those principles to writing, software engineering, or life itself? I think so.
What else we’re reading
- OpenAI released Chat GPT-4o (the “o” stands for “omni”), a bot that can listen, observe its surroundings, and talk back to you in a slightly more realistic-seeming voice
than Siri
(i.e., it uses more filler words like “um” and “so”). AI expert
points out that while its
heavily-promoted speech capabilities
may feel sort of gimmicky,
GPT-4o’s underlying abilities
will have subtler, broader impacts
on app development.
Basically, they will make any existing apps powered by Chat GPT “smarter, faster, better, and cheaper to operate.”
- If you read
issue #76
about the H5N1 outbreak in cows: Vaccine scientist
reveals that wastewater from nine cities in Texas contains
high levels of H5N1
. “
??A key lesson of the pandemic is that viruses we have traditionally thought of as respiratory pathogens often also replicate in the gut
,” he explains. Buck believes the most likely hypothesis that may explain these findings is a rise in nonsymptomatic H5N1 in humans ? though that idea will need its own testing to be proven.
- shares a
moving firsthand account
of life with Long Covid (specifically, PASC:
post-acute sequelae of Covid-19
). The most painful part, in her view, is how zestily most of the world has moved on from Covid entirely. Her story is the story of millions: Roughly “18 million people, or 7% of the population” are suffering from Long Covid, according to
a 2022 CDC survey
.
?? Your daily dose of practical wisdom: about entrepreneurship
“Storytelling is the defining skill of entrepreneurs,”
wrote
novelist and business strategist
nearly a decade ago. Whenever you’re trying to pitch, recruit, or woo someone in a business context, “try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.”
