★★★☆☆

The new book by Stewart Brand is tackling a subject that’s important to me. The introduction struck a chord:

The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional. It is easy to put off, yet it has to be done. Defer now, regret later. Neglect kills.

What to do? Here’s a suggestion: Soften the paradox, and the misbehavior it encourages, by expanding the term “maintenance” beyond referring only to preventive maintenance to stave off the trauma of repair—brushing the damn teeth, etc. Let “maintenance” mean the whole grand process of keeping a thing going.

Ultimately, alas, the book doesn’t really expand on this suggestion. While the volume feels rich and dense in some ways – illustrations, extra commentary, highlights – its surface area ultimately appears to be rather shallow. Ironically, given the subject matter, it feels like Brand fell prey to a bunch of “sexy” stories, some of them only tangentially related to maintenance.

I will just say it: I wish the author was more woke. The book is very male-coded. The main chosen areas of investigation are: motorcycles! tanks! guns! wars! There are moments towards the end where Elon Musk and Bill Gates are talked about as if it was still 15 years ago and we haven’t actually learned anything since. (No word of Cybertruck, either.)

We know maintenance tends to be unrewarded and forgotten come promotion time. We know that tedious tasks are often assigned to women and people of color while white men go around doing “genius things.” It’s hard to imagine women not being present in a book about maintenance, and yet – and I wish I was joking – the only woman of any significance in the entire book is… The Statue Of Liberty.

That aside, before opening the book, I hoped it would provide me some vocabulary and evolved thinking about maintenance that I could put to use, and there are some moments where it almost approaches what I wanted from it. Here’s a passage:

Powell credits the Israeli military with a mindset that naturally viewed damaged tanks as soon-to-be-repaired tanks, rather than the irredeemable flotsam of battle. The fact that [Israeli] commanders thought in these terms gave purpose and direction to the maintenance-related technical and tactical skill their crews possessed.

This is fascinating. Tell me how? Tell me what was needed to make it happen? But, unfortunately, outside of some basic tenets of “give the rank and file more freedom to do things” and “embrace improvisation,” the book doesn’t seem to offer more.

Elsewhere, there is this quote:

In almost every plant I worked at, QA was seen as a hindrance to hitting productivity metrics. We never got credit for a well-maintained manufacturing capability, but QA almost always got blamed when things went wrong.

…which, again, felt like a fascinating thread to pull on. But instead of digging deeper, this is left hanging without investigation.

The book doesn’t really have a proper ending with synthesis of what came before, and generally meanders a lot – to a point that the table of contents has more “digressions” than actual subjects. It also feels occasionally rambling and occasionally showing off (name-dropping people like Kevin Kelly and Freeman Dyson, or quotes from “beta-tester” readers that mostly serve to paint Brand in a positive light), which takes away from otherwise brisk writing and at times truly excellent storytelling. (The first chapter in particular is fantastic.)

If you want an easy-to-read, breezy, well-typeset book filled with historical anecdotes, and the above caveats do not bother you, this might be a fun read! But I expected more from it.

The one place where the book shines is pointing people toward other books – there are pages that feel more like literature review (done really well!), and the end matter has bibliography and recommended reading with notes. So in that way, while disappointing in and of itself, it could also become an interesting starting off point for more research.

★★★★★ (as books)
★★★★☆ (for the purposes of this blog)

I still remember Mac OS X arriving on the scene with icons that felt infinite in every possible way: in size, in color palette, in dimensionality. We got used to them over the last quarter century, but Michael Flarup’s books rekindled that feeling for me; the icons presented here are lavish, larger than life, and basically pixel-less.

I do not generally like coffee-table books. But I really liked these. The iOS App Icon Book came out in 2022, and the macOS App Icon Book followed two years later. They’re “almost-coffee-table” – which is a compliment! – extremely well-made but portable, and with soul, and thoughtful details, and inspiring evidence of being labours of love.

Each one has an almost-absurd amount of icons (I counted almost 1,200 in one book, and consequently didn’t even attempt counting in the other), but it’s not just the quantity that impresses. The icons are laid out carefully on gorgeous color-coordinated spreads. Many appear in variations so you compare their evolution over the years. Each one is big enough and printed so well you can study it in detail, and I have not noticed one technical flaw in their reproduction.

In addition to beautiful collections of beautiful icons, the book also veers a bit into history, and design advice, and adds ~10 interviews with icon designers each. Those are welcome additions that elevate the books from a boring coffee-table existence, but those are also its weakest parts – although “weakest” in a comparative sense. The things missing for me in the book are: more work in progress and rejected efforts, more specific advice and hard-learned lessons rather than general-interest interviews, a bit more about recognition of icons when reproduced small on screens, and some harder/​cerebral conversations about iconography and its place in the universe.

On the other hand, I know that of all icons it’s app icons that get to be least concerned with semantics and semiotics, as they’re maybe the closest to just pure art and graphic design. I can understand how talking through it all would be an extremely hard task; all of the fantastic icon designers I know personally would struggle with explaining why their output is better than others. It’s possible the extra “left-brain” stuff I want from these books would also make them less desirable for those who just seek visual or artistic inspiration.

Both books are otherwise basically a love letter to app iconography, and awash in memorable details: delightful covers, colour-coordinated ribbon bookmarks, beautiful ex librissen, and a product index and an artist index.

The price – $84 without shipping (they’re printed in Denmark, so for once Europe gets an advantage) – might be a bit of a showstopper. The books are well-made, but you are definitely paying a premium for a short/​bespoke print run. The volumes complement each other well on a shelf, but you’ll do no wrong with getting either one if two is too much for your budget. (There is also a half-price PDF version, if that’s of interest to you, but I cannot vouch for that.)

★★★★☆

I liked this book. I consider Cory Doctorow a good, smart writer. He can put together one good sentence after another (“this is why the roads leading to Amazon depots are littered with sealed bottles of human urine”), he can tell stories of boring things in riveting ways, and he can connect various themes and events.

This last bit was a (positive) surprise. The book is a tour of what felt a more vast universe than I imagined. Turns out, the reasons for enshittification are complex and spanning many systems. There are case studies – most you’ve probably heard of – but this really feels like a book in that each one comes with extra depth: details, detours, history. The book travels through a lot of places and teaches quite a few things: computer history, arbitration laws, stock market, history of unions. I would not be surprised if everyone reading this finds a jumping off point to dig deeper into a certain area.

I also didn’t mind the tone – angry, but not too angry, blunt, but not cynical, with an entire section at the end dedicated to “now we rebuild” and some examples of what we’re already getting right.

Only two small complaints:

The book loses a bit of steam at the end. It might be simply that suggesting improvements is naturally harder than riveting stories of Things Gone Poorly, especially if those improvements are systemic and legal. But maybe it could just be a bit shorter.

Cory Doctorow also loves coinage, which – well, justified, seeing how the word that became the book’s title helped the idea travel! But there’s a lot of others words around: enshitternet, disenshittification, twiddling, chickenization… There’s this sentence in the book: “There’s something genuinely wonderful about workers who counter-twiddle their bosses’ apps and escape reverse-centaurism.” There are more like it. At this point, this feels like just bad UI.

But those are smaller things. Overall, this is worth a read. To me, it added a lot more higher-level understanding of systems and processes that lead to bad software (not an altitude level I find myself in), and packaged it nicely into a story.

I’m going to finish by listing a few passages that particularly stuck with me.

Page 34:

Companies don’t treat you well because they’re “good” capitalists and they don’t abuse you because they’re “bad” capitalists. […] Companies abuse you if they can get away with it.

Page 51:

Enshittification – deliberately worsening a service – is only possible when people value that service to begin with. Enshittification is a game of seeking an equilibrium between how much people like the thing that locks them to the service (often, that’s other people) and how much they hate the management of that service.

Page 106:

The death of competition […] doomed regulation. Competition is an essential component of effective regulation, for two reasons: First, competition keeps the companies within a sector from all telling the same lie to its regulators. Second, competition erodes companies’ profits and thus starves them of the capital they need to overpower or outmaneuver their regulators.

Page 129:

That long delay after you reach a web page but before it shows up in your browser? That’s the “surveillance lag,” the delay while all those [advertising] auctions are concluded.

Okay, so maybe I don’t mind all of the newly minted words and coined terms. This one is sharp.

★★★☆☆

I was delighted by the Laws of UX website when it came out. The site was beautiful (it still is!) and it felt important to bring some of this stuff to designers earlier in their careers.

But the book based on the website was largely a disappointment, and seems like a good case study of an unsuccessful adaptation – it felt this was pushed to become a book without editorial help and without thinking too much about what makes for a good book.

The book lost a lot of what made the site great – it’s a pretty generic-looking production with flawed typesetting, an uninspired cover, and poorly sized and reproduced images. But chiefly, I also feel the book showed there is limited rigor behind the whole premise; the writing feels academic in the sense that it’s a little boring, but academic writing at least can be precise and follow process. Not here. The laws of UX are not “laws” in the traditional sense and the combination of “laws” presented, as well as examples of them in use, feel really arbitrary and sometimes at odds with the entire premise.

I felt disagreeing with the book often. For example, I feel the chapter about Doherty Threshold feels is teaching the wrong lessons (100ms is not enough for a bunch of things!). Or the advice on gradually deploying changes (Jakob’s Law) is missing a core component of maintenance and how to approach the contingent of users who will never graduate to the new interface if given a chance to stick with the old one.

I also started worrying that the book doesn’t fully understand how design works. From the very first page:

This project was somewhat unique in one specific way: I was being asked to justify a number of design decisions to project stakeholders, without any data to support them. Normally, when you have quantitative or qualitative data available to draw upon, this is pretty straightforward task – but in this case the data wasn’t available, so the process of justifying the decisions would have to be a little different.

This is… This is not what design is. This is never true. You rarely have the data – and if there’s data, it’s never netural, always at the mercy of people collecting it and people interpreting it.

My friend summarized it well – “design is not mathematical” – but at various moments the book suggests it’s as simple as knowing a certain “law” and applying it. This is perhaps most visible in the Aesthetic-Usability Effect chapter, which touches upon craft without really understanding it.

On the positive side: I think what the book is trying to do feels important and appreciated. Some of the stuff like Fitts’s Law or Doherty Threshold and Jakob’s Law are good to know about, they are still relevant, and can serve as useful tools in your toolkit as a designer.

I also learned some new things from it! I have never heard of shape coding before (turns out I’ve been practicing it without knowing, so learning about it was validating), and never really thought about the equivalent of heat maps for mobile.

Also: I don’t think this book is for me. I get a sense this is a volume for a very different group of UX designers, maybe even people at companies where UX design is not at all established as practice. There is a lot of stuff like explaining personas and basics of user testing and even ethics that feels somewhat out of place and like it’s padding the content – but I can see how that could be valuable. However, I still wish the book didn’t oversimplify a lot of things like I think it does. I believe there’s a way to do it while still keeping it accessible and not overwhelming.

But today, I would rather recommend the beautiful poster that seems more true to what the website was trying to aim for.

In terms of how I would improve the book:

• Have it reviewed by someone who actually lives and breathes this stuff for living.
• Invest in better writing and better storytelling. This of good stories and not just data. Ditch the random O’Reilly-esque callouts and integrate them into the stories.
• Either get deeper into more specific and deeper examples for most of the stuff, or make it drastically shorter.
• Don’t package it all as “laws”, or at least – if this title sells – contextualize it better inside. These are useful tools, but they are not laws like physics has laws. Also, all of them, like most of design, will be caveated with “it depends.”
• Consider adding stuff about motor memory, Sturgeon’s Law, monotony, gestalt to flesh out the toolkit, and maybe group the chapters into a few bigger areas.

★★☆☆☆

This could have been an essay.

When I first learned about this book from Jacob Geller’s video just months ago, I thought this was another example in the vein of The Power Broker – a perfectly Marcin-coded book that somehow escaped me knowing about it for decades.

“Pilgrim” is from 1983, and is a story of a pianist discovering the classic videogame Breakout, and trying to perfect his own gameplay.

I love so many stories of videogame mastery, because at times they feel the closest we got to Doug Engelbart’s dream of incredibly effective machine operation somewhere deep below the threshold of consciousness: You and the computer becoming one, eyes and fingers forming feedback loops so perfect they cease to be noticeable.

Here I am alone in a pitch-black hotel room, a middle-aged man with some time to kill, getting ready to check out some jazz clubs in Greenwich Village, in possession of an early cretinous offering from a gold rush grab bag of tuby thingies coming our way from hundreds of decision-making puzzle peddlers throughout the new electric “entertainment” industry. And now instead of playing the game it‘s packaged up to be, I‘ve gotten into more or less occupying myself by outlining invisible triangles across the screen of a TV doodling machine. What am I doing?

Unfortunately, as you can maybe already sense, the book is an overwritten, ponderous, and pretentious mess. “Beach reading, it ain’t,” quipped a Kill Screen reviewer in 2013. But there are some interesting parts in it.

Before, the piano was the quintessential human instrument. Of all things exterior to the body, in its every detail it most enables our digital capacities to sequence delicate actions. Pushing the hand to its anatomical limit, it forces the development of strength and independence of movement for fourth and fifth fingers, for no other tool or task so deeply needed. This piano invites hands to fully live up to the huge amount of brain matter with which they participate, more there for them than any other body part. At this gnetically predestined instrument we thoroughly encircle ourselves within the finest capabilities of the organ.

Then a typewriter, speeding the process whereby speech becomes visible, the extraordinary keyboard for sequencing and articulating perhaps awaiting a still truer sounding board, strings, and tuning, a still more suited canvas for thought.

Then TV.

This arrives at page 26. Alas, it’s kind of downhill from here.

The author visits Atari (imagine that!) to learn that the programmer of Breakout doesn’t really understand what makes Breakout so alluring. The game perhaps lucked in to being so imminently playable, and then replayable.

I’m interested in designing for mastery. We should not rely on luck that separated a classic like Breakout from a hundred other games from that era that felt awful to play and were immediately forgotten.

Sure, Sudnow definitely takes Breakout way too seriously:

Maybe I can remember the five shots by putting pieces of tape on the TV cabinet to mark each paddle destination, I say to myself, even though it seems that would undercut true learning. It’s bad practice to learn the piano by writing the names of the notes on the keys, much better not to use a code, to grasp the layout of things by their own looks and feel. And I can’t carry Scotch tape to a Breakout tournament.

But in a way: why wouldn’t you?

In fact it’s already happening. I’ve found myself playing with the cursor on my word processor just for the hell of it, seeing if I could track it across screen and get it to stop at every comma in the text.

The word processor (or any other app you use often) operating at the speed of fingers unlocks superpowers, and then some.

There’s one experience in particular at the word processor that gets me downright angry at times. There’s no more of that room for finger breathing while you awaited a carriage’s return. You reach the end of a processed line of text and if your word becomes too long for the margin while there’s still alloted space to get it underway, it splits in the midst of your articulation and your voice instantaneously reappears six inches to the left, a quarter of an inch lower. The computer can’t know what you’re about to write, not yet, not a word or even a letter in advance, has to wait and merely calculate how things are going in order to then “decide” where to put the sound. ¶ Before, you felt a big word welling up, hit the carriage return, lifted off from the keyboard just a bit, reorganized your grasp, and dug back into the improvisation with a renewed rhythmic mobilization to continue. And some of the things you found to say, you found because you said them that way.

This was a fascinating tidbit, this reflection on how small interactions can change the nature of creative process.

If this book was cut to 20% of its size, those fascinating tidbits would stand out more, and the book would still be of value today.

But despite this complaint, I miss people writing about using computers this way. Such a big chunk of my struggle with computers today is fighting with it because I expect a better connection between my fingers and what’s happening onscreen.

I wish more designers understood how important that is.