I’ve always maintained that prototyping and production require different mindsets. Trys suggests it’s not as simple as that.
I agree with much of what he says about back-end decisions (make it manual ‘till it hurts—avoid premature optimisation), but as soon as you’re delivering HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to real people, I think you need to meet certain standards when it comes to accessibility, performance, etc.
Here’s the transcript of Paul’s excellent talk at this year’s UX London:
How designers can record decisions and cultivate a fun and inclusive culture within their team.
Josh mashes up design systems and pace layers, like Mark did a few years back. With this mindset, if your product interface are in sync, that’s not good—either your product is moving too slow or your design system is moving too fast.
The job of the design system team is not to innovate, but to curate. The system should provide answers only for settled solutions: the components and patterns that don’t require innovation because they’ve been solved and now standardized. Answers go into the design system when the questions are no longer interesting—proven out in product. The most exciting design systems are boring.
I did an episode of the Clearleft podcast on innovation a while back:
Everyone wants to be innovative …but no one wants to take risks.
The word innovation is often bandied about in an unquestioned positive way. But if we acknowledge that innovation is—by definition—risky, then the exhortations sound less positive.
“We provide innovative solutions for businesses!” becomes “We provide risky solutions for businesses!”
I was reminded of this when I saw the website for the Podcast Standards Project. The original text on the website described the project as:
…a grassroots coalition working to establish modern, open standards, to enable innovation in the podcast industry.
I pushed back on that wording (partly because I’ve seen the word “innovation” used as a smoke screen for user-hostile practices like tracking and surveillance). The wording has since changed to:
…a grassroots coalition dedicated to creating standards and practices that improve the open podcasting ecosystem for both listeners and creators.
That’s better. It’s more precise.
Am I nitpicking? Only if you think that “innovation” and “improvement” are synonyms. I don’t think they are.
Innovation implies change. Improvement implies positive change.
Not all change is positive. Not all innovation is positive.
Innovation goes hand in hand with disruption. Again, disruption involves change. But not necessarily positive change.
Think about the antonyms of change and disruption: stasis and stability. Those words don’t sound very exciting, but in some arenas they’re exactly what you should be aiming for; arenas like infrastructure or standards.
Not to get all pace layers-y here, but it seems to me that every endeavour has a sweet spot for innovation. For some projects, too little innovation is bad. For others, too much innovation is worse.
The trick is knowing which kind of project you’re working on.
(As a side note, I think some people use the word innovation to describe the generative, divergent phase of a design project: “how might we come up with innovative new approaches?” But we already have a word to describe the practice of generating novel and interesting ideas. That word isn’t innovation. It’s creativity.)
What happens if the ‘pace layers’ get out of sync?
A very thoughtful post by Miriam on how tools can adversely affect the pace of progress in the world of web standards.
When tools intervene between you and your access to the web platform, proceed with caution. Ask not only: How well does it work? But also: How well does it fail? Not only: What features do they provide? But also: What features do they prevent?
I think it was Jason who once told me that if you want to make someone’s life a misery, teach them about typography. After that they’ll be doomed to notice all the terrible type choices and kerning out there in the world. They won’t be able to unsee it. It’s like trying to unsee the arrow in the FedEx logo.
I think that Stewart Brand’s pace layers model is a similar kind of mind virus, albeit milder. Once you’ve been exposed to it, you start seeing in it in all kinds of systems.
Each layer is functionally different from the others and operates somewhat independently, but each layer influences and responds to the layers closest to it in a way that makes the whole system resilient.
Last month I sent out an edition of the Clearleft newsletter that was all about pace layers. I gathered together examples of people who have been infected with the pace-layer mindworm who were applying the same layered thinking to other areas:
My own little mash-up is applying pace layers to the World Wide Web. Tom even brought it to life as an animation.
See the Pen Web Layers Of Pace by Tom (@webrocker) on CodePen.
Recently I had another flare-up of the pace-layer pattern-matching infection.
I was talking to some visiting Austrian students on the weekend about design principles. I explained my mild obsession with design principles stemming from the fact that they sit between “purpose” (or values) and “patterns” (the actual outputs):
Purpose » Principles » Patterns
Your purpose is “why?”
That then influences your principles, “how?”
Those principles inform your patterns, “what?”
Hey, wait a minute! If you put that list in reverse order it looks an awful lot like the pace-layers model with the slowest moving layer at the bottom and the fastest moving layer at the top. Perhaps there’s even room for an additional layer when patterns go into production:
Your purpose should rarely—if ever—change. Your principles can change, but not too frequently. Your patterns need to change quite often. And what you’re actually putting out into production should be constantly updated.
As you travel from the most abstract layer—“purpose”—to the most concrete layer—“production”—the pace of change increases.
I can’t tell if I’m onto something here or if I’m just being apopheniac. Again.
Yes, I’m a sucker for pace layers, but I think Rich is onto something here, mapping a profession onto a pace layer diagram.
I like this mashup of two diagrams: Stewart Brand’s pace layers and Stephanie DiRusso’s typology of design thinking.
Katie shared this (very good) piece about service design on Slack at work today, and when I got to the bit about different levels, my brain immediately went “pace layers!”
- The Service
- The Infrastructure
- The Organisation
- The Intent
- The Culture
Looking at COVID-19 through the lens of pace layers.
…a citizen could actually play a part that was as important as a vaccine, but instead of preventing transmission of the virus into another cell at the ACE receptor level, it’s preventing transmission of the virus at the social network level. So we’re actually adopting a kind of behavioral vaccine policy, by voluntarily or otherwise self-isolating.
How cool is this!!?
Tom took one of the core ideas from my talk at Beyond Tellerrand and turned it into this animated CodePen!
Thanks to the quick work of Marc and his team, the talk I gave at Beyond Tellerrand on Thursday was online within hours!
I’m really pleased with how this turned out. I wasn’t sure if anybody was going to be interested in the deep dive into history that I took for the first 15 or 20 minutes, but lots of people told me that they really enjoyed that part, so that makes me happy.
Over the last fifty years, we have come to recognize that the fuel of our civilizational expansion has become the main driver of our extinction, and that of many of the species we share the planet with. We are now coming to realize that is as true of our cognitive infrastructure. Something is out of sync, felt everywhere: something amiss in the temporal order, and it is as related to political and technological shifts, shifts in our own cognition and attention, as it is to climatic ones. To think clearly in such times requires an intersectional understanding of time itself, a way of thinking that escapes the cognitive traps, ancient and modern, into which we too easily fall. Because our technologies, the infrastructures we have built to escape our past, have turned instead to cancelling our future.
James writes beautifully about rates of change.
The greatest trick our utility-directed technologies have performed is to constantly pull us out of time: to distract us from the here and now, to treat time as a kind of fossil fuel which can be endlessly extracted in the service of a utopian future which never quite arrives. If information is the new oil, we are already, in the hyper-accelerated way of present things, well into the fracking age, with tremors shuddering through the landscape and the tap water on fire. But this is not enough; it will never be enough. We must be displaced utterly in time, caught up in endless imaginings of the future while endlessly neglecting the lessons and potential actions of the present moment.
Here’s the video of the opening talk I gave at New Adventures earlier this year. I think it’s pretty darn good!
Prompted by his recent talk at Smashing Conference, Mark explains why he’s all about the pace layers when it comes to design systems. It’s good stuff, and ties in nicely with my recent (pace layers obsessed) talk at An Event Apart.
Structure for pace. Move at the appropriate speed.
Here are Luke’s notes from the talk I just gave at An Event Apart in Seattle.
There’s a running joke at just about any gathering at Clearleft where we measure TTPL—Time To Pace Layers—a measurement of how long we can discuss anything before making an inevitable reference to Stewart Brand’s framing.
It’s one of those concepts that, once your brain has been exposed, you start seeing everywhere. Like bad kerning or sexism.
A pace layer model for readers (and writers).
Ben points to a new product aiming to ease the pain of connected devices bumping up against the harsh realities of shearing layers:
By exposing the ‘hardwiring’ of our electrical systems, Conduct emphasises how much we rely on existing systems to power our ‘new’ technology – the rate of change and advancement in our traditional technologies moves at a much slower pace than our mobile app-based world and there are physical limitations as a result of this hardwired legacy.
I am—unsurprisingly—in favour of exposing the seams like this.