Ah yeah thats a cool (coding) exercise! Friction is always an interesting parameter (like Brian Eno Oblique Strategies). Maybe… using a different input device than a keyboard to interact with the CLI? Like move your mouse around to choose or even draw letter?
"what if objects were actually designed for a bad user experience, instead of a good one? she recalled in a 2018 TED talk. That was my ‘eureka’ moment."
Or, she stumbled upon some article or the very Wikipedia page about it:
> Chindōgu (珍道具) is the practice of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that seem to be ideal solutions to particular problems, but which may cause more problems than they solve.
Nobody would look at a fork with a chain separating the end and the handle, or a toothbrush with a 90 degree bend before the head, or a watering can where the spout bends back over to face the opening, and think it seems like an "ideal solution to a practical problem".
What she's doing is something else entirely: making humorous designs which are obviously, viscerally terribly suited for their purpose. The point is that you look at the item and immediately go, "oh that's horrible".
Regardless, even if Chindōgu actually did describe what she was doing, I don't think "design humorously bad products" is such a unique concept. It seems plausible that two people in history could independently come up with it.
Agree. Been seeing this popping everywhere up over the years. Not sure what the attraction is? Almost zero humor, zero critique, zero cultural-historical context, zero insight, zero charm and…renders. This is just a Jugaad Shanzhai of Chindogu in the worst possible way.
Such badly designed products are easy to spot by visual inspection.
Unfortunately, if you go shopping in a supermarket or online, you can find a huge amount of bad products that look like they were well designed, but in reality some of their parts are made from wrong materials, and you discover this only at home, after using them for a few months, or for a few days, or even after a few minutes.
For instance, I have seen devices where pressure-regulating springs were not made of spring steel, but of ordinary steel and they lost their elasticity after a very short time, making the device unusable, water buckets supposedly made of stainless steel that were actually made of chromated steel, which rusted at joints after a few months and a lot of diverse devices where parts that suffer cyclical stresses are not make of a fatigue-resistant material, so they break after a short time of use.
There are countless examples of this kind and all have this problem that you cannot detect visually if the correct materials are used, or not, like you can recognize an inappropriate shape.
> Basically, one reason I’ve lost a lot of will to do anything is because of AI’s existence, and I don’t want to use it. Because I have zero personal time, zero time whatsoever to do anything, so sometimes I’m thinking, “Oh, I could do this task or that task so much faster if I used AI,” but I don’t want to use AI, so then I don’t want to do the task at all. So I don’t have the time to sit down and model something because I know there is a faster way, but I don’t want to use the faster way, so the thing doesn’t get done.
I'm not completely sure, but I think her reasoning is that AI made it a lot easier for random people to just have the idea and translate it into an image in a minute or two, and this cheapens the whole experience for her, to the point that it no longer seems worth doing.
It's sort of a funny point. I think most painters are happy that they don't have to go out and grind up snails to make their own purple pigment, but are perhaps less happy if somebody can produce a painting indistinguishable from their own effort with no manual handwork skill at all. It's like there's a minimum threshold of human skill and investment for an object to be interesting beyond its pure functionality, and functionality has little to do with art (but a lot to do with, say, software).
> I think most painters are happy that they don't have to go out and grind up snails to make their own purple pigment, but are perhaps less happy if somebody can produce a painting indistinguishable from their own effort with no manual handwork skill at all.
This might sound pedantic, but I think it's very meaningful when it comes to art: AI's cannot (yet) produce paintings anywhere near the quality of a human painting. What they can produce are images of paintings, and those are not the same thing.
I think the problem is more the knowledge of an information hazard combined with her just not liking AI.
She doesn't like AI, so she avoids using it, fine. But she's also aware that using AI would make doing the task very easy. Because she is aware of AI's ability to complete the task, she would have to consciously avoid using it, and doing that us the problem itself. Having to consciously avoid the action you know is more efficient.
You see the same effect in video games. Being aware of a powerful item or meta tends to compel one to take that path, even if its less enjoyable. And sometimes it can bring the enjoyment low enough that one doesn't want to play anymore. If one were left unaware, they could keep playing blissfully unaware.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 66.6 ms ] threadEmacs and/or vi, depending on your inclination, have text editors covered already, of course ;-)
That is an interesting point to bring up, because this type of "almost but not quite right" is exactly what AI seems to naturally create.
i also do this for ui and app logic: go to some Microslop service, they are all like these...sad but true
Or, she stumbled upon some article or the very Wikipedia page about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chind%C5%8Dgu
> Chindōgu (珍道具) is the practice of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that seem to be ideal solutions to particular problems, but which may cause more problems than they solve.
Nobody would look at a fork with a chain separating the end and the handle, or a toothbrush with a 90 degree bend before the head, or a watering can where the spout bends back over to face the opening, and think it seems like an "ideal solution to a practical problem".
What she's doing is something else entirely: making humorous designs which are obviously, viscerally terribly suited for their purpose. The point is that you look at the item and immediately go, "oh that's horrible".
Regardless, even if Chindōgu actually did describe what she was doing, I don't think "design humorously bad products" is such a unique concept. It seems plausible that two people in history could independently come up with it.
For example, the inner water tank of a robotic vacuum.
Unfortunately, if you go shopping in a supermarket or online, you can find a huge amount of bad products that look like they were well designed, but in reality some of their parts are made from wrong materials, and you discover this only at home, after using them for a few months, or for a few days, or even after a few minutes.
For instance, I have seen devices where pressure-regulating springs were not made of spring steel, but of ordinary steel and they lost their elasticity after a very short time, making the device unusable, water buckets supposedly made of stainless steel that were actually made of chromated steel, which rusted at joints after a few months and a lot of diverse devices where parts that suffer cyclical stresses are not make of a fatigue-resistant material, so they break after a short time of use.
There are countless examples of this kind and all have this problem that you cannot detect visually if the correct materials are used, or not, like you can recognize an inappropriate shape.
> Basically, one reason I’ve lost a lot of will to do anything is because of AI’s existence, and I don’t want to use it. Because I have zero personal time, zero time whatsoever to do anything, so sometimes I’m thinking, “Oh, I could do this task or that task so much faster if I used AI,” but I don’t want to use AI, so then I don’t want to do the task at all. So I don’t have the time to sit down and model something because I know there is a faster way, but I don’t want to use the faster way, so the thing doesn’t get done.
I'm not completely sure, but I think her reasoning is that AI made it a lot easier for random people to just have the idea and translate it into an image in a minute or two, and this cheapens the whole experience for her, to the point that it no longer seems worth doing.
It's sort of a funny point. I think most painters are happy that they don't have to go out and grind up snails to make their own purple pigment, but are perhaps less happy if somebody can produce a painting indistinguishable from their own effort with no manual handwork skill at all. It's like there's a minimum threshold of human skill and investment for an object to be interesting beyond its pure functionality, and functionality has little to do with art (but a lot to do with, say, software).
This might sound pedantic, but I think it's very meaningful when it comes to art: AI's cannot (yet) produce paintings anywhere near the quality of a human painting. What they can produce are images of paintings, and those are not the same thing.
She doesn't like AI, so she avoids using it, fine. But she's also aware that using AI would make doing the task very easy. Because she is aware of AI's ability to complete the task, she would have to consciously avoid using it, and doing that us the problem itself. Having to consciously avoid the action you know is more efficient.
You see the same effect in video games. Being aware of a powerful item or meta tends to compel one to take that path, even if its less enjoyable. And sometimes it can bring the enjoyment low enough that one doesn't want to play anymore. If one were left unaware, they could keep playing blissfully unaware.