Field Study

Ugliness [is] more interesting than beauty… that stuff which is human, interesting, f*#%ed up, passionate rather than logical, reasonable, and, of course, beautiful.

—

Tibor Kalman (via a new favorite blog, How To Work).

There is so much value in our imperfect, inefficient, unreliable, messy, awkward weirdness that is overlooked in the clean, reliable efficient software/experiences we design and build. By the Machine’s standard, we are broken. But we spend our lives craving and chasing brokenness. We want to care and be cared for. We pick out the inconstancy so we can collect it, fix it, or just laugh at it. We spent time not as a fuel for a process that is relentlessly driving at an end goal — we spend time for the sake of time-spending. We take circuitous routes even when we know where we need to be. And worse yet, we often start out with no idea of where we are going. There is beauty in the Machine, but I wish we would make messier, uglier machines — chubby, huggable, unreliable, relatable machines.