design for people
We all make things. Sometimes we create things for ourselves, sometimes for the wider hacker community, and sometimes we create things for normal people. It's this last category where it gets tricky and critical. I remembered all of this while watching Chris Combs' excellent Supercon 2022 speech on how to succeed as an entertainer.
"But I don't make art!" I hear you say? About half of Chris' talk is about how he makes his tech art worry-free for galleries to install, and that basically means making it standards-proof - making sure it works as soon as the power is on, day in and day out, without the intervention of a hacker, because sites hate having you there to debug. As Tom joked in the podcast, it's kind of like designing for space: it's a weird environment, you can't send in repair crews, and it has to have safeties to make sure that it works.
What is striking about the discussion is that there is a common core of practices that make our hardware projects more reliable, no matter where they go. Things like having a watchdog that will restart if something goes wrong, designing for modularity whenever possible, incorporating suspension or mounting options if relevant, and writing at least a simple information sheet of a page with everything you need to know to make it work. Of course, with art, aesthetics matter more than usual. Or is it?
So, let's say you're doing something for a normal person, which has to work without your babysitting. What is the common core of the preventive design steps you follow?
We all make things. Sometimes we create things for ourselves, sometimes for the wider hacker community, and sometimes we create things for normal people. It's this last category where it gets tricky and critical. I remembered all of this while watching Chris Combs' excellent Supercon 2022 speech on how to succeed as an entertainer.
"But I don't make art!" I hear you say? About half of Chris' talk is about how he makes his tech art worry-free for galleries to install, and that basically means making it standards-proof - making sure it works as soon as the power is on, day in and day out, without the intervention of a hacker, because sites hate having you there to debug. As Tom joked in the podcast, it's kind of like designing for space: it's a weird environment, you can't send in repair crews, and it has to have safeties to make sure that it works.
What is striking about the discussion is that there is a common core of practices that make our hardware projects more reliable, no matter where they go. Things like having a watchdog that will restart if something goes wrong, designing for modularity whenever possible, incorporating suspension or mounting options if relevant, and writing at least a simple information sheet of a page with everything you need to know to make it work. Of course, with art, aesthetics matter more than usual. Or is it?
So, let's say you're doing something for a normal person, which has to work without your babysitting. What is the common core of the preventive design steps you follow?
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