Tag Archives: design

Some thoughts on AI plagiarism

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There’s an ad floating around on Facebook for…um, I’m not sure what it’s for. Some kind of online relationship orientation test, I think? Anyway, the Facebook ad has an image that looks like this:

Screenshot

About a dozen people have sent me this image. It ended up on a Facebook group about shitty infographics.

If this image looks vaguely familiar, that’s because it is an AI re-imagining of an infographic I did about sixteen years ago:

This is a Venn diagram (well, technically, no it’s not, it’s a Euler diagram, but most people think of intersection maps as Venn diagrams) of various types of non-monogamy. I made it into a poster and put it on my sexual informatics page and everything.

So the thing about the AI knockoff that’s being used in this ad is that the more you look at it, the less sense it makes, which is pretty much typical of AI graphics in general.

The Euler map I created took months to design, no lie. The intersections matter. There is, for example, a huge overlap between “casual sex,” “swinging,” “soft swing,” and “polyfidelity” (yes, there are polyfi groups that make exceptions for casual sex and swinging, but reserve committed relationships to the polyfi group). The shapes of the areas mean something.

If you look at the advertising image, it’s absurd. Why is there a cutout in the “pansexual” shape? Why does it intersect with homoflexible but not heteroflexible…are they saying you can be pan if you’re mostly gay but not if you’re mostly straight? Why do homosexual and heterosexual almost entirely overlap? And why the little unlabeled Xes?

Okay, I know the answer to the last part. The AI scraped the graphic from my sexual informatics page. The Xes are popups you can touch or mouseover. The AI didn’t see the popups, it just assumed that since it scraped a sexual informatics map with Xes on it, Xes belong on sexual informatics maps, LOL.

The point is, AI output isn’t information. It’s an information-shaped hole. AI LLMs and image generators create stuff that looks like content but isn’t really content. They see “shapes overlapping” but do not understand the meaning of the overlaps, so they make overlapping shapes without meaning.

It frightens me that people who do Google searches are now starting to look only at the AI summary at the top of the page, without even looking at the search results. The AI summary is flat-out wrong an astonishingly high percentage of the time.

The thing about infosec is that the whole history of infosec is the gradual realization that people are sometimes malicious, so a computer must never, ever, ever trust anything that comes from a user without sanitizing it. Yet LLMs shovel all kinds of user-generated content into their gaping maw without fact-checking or sanitization.

This means LLMs often produce wrong output, but worse, it also means that malicious actors can trick AIs into producing malicious output.

I’ve discovered an organized scam group spending a huge amount of effort producing content designed to trick Google Gemini into giving advice that causes people to fall for the scam.

AI image and LLM generators are frightening, but not for the reasons people think. They aren’t intelligent (yet), they do not understand the world or even that the world exists, but they sound authoritative, so people trust them. And they’re easy to corrupt and easy to manipulate, so bad actors can make them say malicious things.

Interesting times indeed.

Stories from the Past: Center for Bioethical Reform

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As I move into my sixth decade of life, I’m posting a series of stories from my past. This is part of that series.

Way back in the dim and distant year of 1992, I started my first paying job in the world of graphic arts, working for a small graphic arts studio in Tampa, Florida called Printgraphics.

My job involved using this newfangled software called “Photoshop” from this obscure company called Adobe to do desktop image editing. Printgraphics had this really fancy gizmo called a “color laser copier” that could make—get this—full color photocopies, one of the first such devices in all of Florida, and it let us charge extortionate rates for something almost nobody else could do: not only could we make color photocopies of something, we could even make printouts from a computer in full color by means of a PostScript interpreter that connected a computer to the CLC, for which we charged $16 a page (if you wanted letter-sized printouts) and almost double that (if you wanted larger printouts).

The CLC also acted as a color scanner, allowing us to do scans at considerably less expense (and considerably less quality) than a drum scanner. We could even scan slides and transparencies!

We also had contracts with print shops to do offset printing and posters and things like that…heady stuff in the early days of desktop publishing that seemed miraculous at the time. This equipment was rare, expensive, and cutting-edge, and people who could use it were rather thin on the ground.

About a year or so after I started working there, a polite, well-dressed man came into the shop asking if we could produce some placards and advertising posters for him. He was cagy about what he wanted, except to say that he was looking for prices on laminated full color materials that could be used for “promotional purposes.” They needed to be weatherproof, he said, and full color.

I told him I’d put together prices for him and he left. He came back a day or so later with a bunch of 35mm slides that, he said, he wated us to scan to make the posters from.

The slides all showed horrific, gruesome images of aborted fetuses, usually late-term abortions of fetuses with grotesque physical defects.

That’s when he came clean about who he was. He said he worked for a “pro-life” group called the Center for Bioethical Reform, a shock group that got a ton of media coverage for picketing women’s health clinics with grotesque, gruesome signs and banners showing the horrors of “infant genocide.”

He offered quite a lot of money if we would make these signs for him, a lot more than I’d quoted.

I told him I wouldn’t do the work for him, and asked him to leave.

Stories from the Past: Night of the Opossum

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As I move into my sixth decade of life, I’m posting a series of stories from my past. This is part of that series.

Waaaaay back in the dim and distant time of 1992, a happier and simpler age when we didn’t have a pedophile grifter in the White House, my first wife and I moved to Tampa, Florida, where I got my first job doing graphic arts for a living.

Prior to that, I’d helped publish several small-press ’zines, something I continued to do all through the 90s and into the early 2000s.

A cover of one of the small-press magazines I produced.

In 1992 I thought, I’m doing a lot of this work anyway, why not make folding money doing graphic design?

I started at a tiny studio called Printgraphics. It ended up going out of business quite dramatically, as in “we showed up to work one Monday to find the owners had changed the locks and the office was gutted” dramatically. The owners bailed and, apparently, fled to Mexico to escape business debts, or at least so I was told by one of our vendors who hired a PI to try to track them down, since apparently they owed him rather a large amount of money.

From there I moved to Dimension, a high-end graphics and pre-press shop with a number of really interesting customers. I did prepress, image retouching, and such for clients ranging from Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines to the New York metro lines (in fact, I have a rather entertaining story about trying to produce an immense advertising poster for the NY subway line; more on that at another time, perhaps).

I worked night shift at Dimension, in the wee small hours of the morning when most of the others had gone home, leaving my friend Tony and I with the most intractable, difficult problems to solve. We’d jam to Alice in Chains and Rage Against the Machine while we laid down immense reams of folm on our imagesetters…

…until the day came when the two of us were sitting in the computer room one day and heard an immense crash from the film-strippers room, a huge dark space filled with enormous light tables, where film strippers worked putting sheets of photographic film used to burn printing plates together by hand.

We promptly went to investigate, and I cannot tell you, dear reader, just how spooky it is to walk into a room that’s maybe a third the size of a football field, completely dark except for the dim glow of huge light tables. Seriously, Hollywood horror films had nothing on that. I mean, yes, the spaceship Nostromo in the Alien movie was spooky and all, but it had nothing, nothing, on an abandoned and dark film stripping room.

So there we are, the two of us, trying to figure out what the hell’s going on, when we found a shattered ceiling tile opening to a dark void above us.

Which did not, I assure you, do anything to decrease associations with the Alien movies.

I think Tony saw it first, a quick flash of motion off in one corner. Specifically, an opossum, a large one, that had somehow gotten into the building up above the drop ceiling and couldn’t find its way out again. It fell through one of the ceiling tiles because opossums don’t know how drop ceilings work.

An opossum. Not the opossum, but an opossum. (Image: fr0ggy5)

In that instant, we changed from Hollywood horror movie to Hollywood absurdist comedy. Tony grabbed a trash can, thinking (reasonably enough, I suppose) that if we could somehow get the opossum into the trash can, we could move it outside where it belongs.

Folks, opossums do not like going into trash cans. They will, in fact, resist going into trash cans with every last ounce of their beady-eyed will. To their last breath, they will do whatever they can to avoid trash cans, some vestigal instinct left over from some tragic but poorly-understood calamity in their evolutionary past, I’m sure.

Anyway, what happened next was less Alien and more Benny Hill, with two design geeks chasing an angry and wildly confused opossum through a nigh-abandoned prepress shop at one o’clock in the morning.

Folks, we pursued that opossum through the film stripping room and round the oversized Avantra imagesetter and round the moons of Nibia and ’round the Antares Maelstrom and ’round perdition’s flames before we finally got it in that trash can.

I don’t know how this tale ends for the opossum. We carried it outside, sweaty and exhausted (those little bastards can corner way better than you think!) and it waddled off into the muggy Florida night without so much as a by-your-leave. I do know we left the strangest note for the morning-shift folks that the company has likely ever seen or will ever see.

Some thoughts on information in the Information Age

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My dad called me yesterday. He received an invoice in an email for $899 for something he didn’t remember ever ordering, and it upset him pretty badly. Fortunately, I’ve worked very hard over the years to educate him about scams, so he calls me before he does anything like call a number or click a link.

The invoice he described was basically identical to one I received a few days ago myself:

These scams are incredibly common right now; I’m getting about 4-6 a month. The scam is the “customer support” number I circled.

The mark calls that number and is greeted by a kind, helpful, polite voice on the other end who says “yes, I’m very sorry, sir, I will take care of it right now, sir, please give me your name and credit card number, sir, and I will be happy to reverse the charges. Oh, was this a PayPal invoice? Okay, can you give me your PayPal name? Yes, sir, perfect, I’ll need your PayPal password too, please…and do you have a passcode on this PayPal account, sir? Yes, yes, thank you, sir, now, do you have a bank account linked to your PayPal? Oh, you do? Can you give me that account number and routing number, sir? Okay, yes, got it, I’ll reverse the charge immediately, sir.”

$$$cha-CHING!$$$

But I didn’t come here to talk about Internet scams. I came here to talk about design, and specifically, how entire generations of people were raised to be gullible and easy to scam, all because of design.

In ages past (like when I first started in the design world), design was hard. Making a simple letterhead was hard.

A company would go to a graphic design studio. They’d bring a copy of their logo as either a camera-ready slick or a square piece of negative film.

A designer would typeset the letterhead using a phototypesetting machine, then output it to a sheet of photographic film. Then, using an XActo knife and a light table, the designer would cut rubylith and use it to burn the letterhead and logo together onto another sheet of film, which would then be used to burn a printing plate for a press.

This was difficult, expensive, and highly skilled work. When I started working prepress professionally, the building I worked in had an entire huge film stripper’s room where people spent their workday sitting at enormous glass light tables, XActo knives in hand, surrounded by sheets of film and rolls of rubylith, doing this work.

Design was hard.

Because design was hard, only large, well-heeled companies could afford good design. Shady fly-by-night scam businesses were largely locked out of the world of design, which is why scam ads in the 70s, 80s, and 90s tended to have that cheap, low-quality “look” about them.

Good design became a proxy for reliability, for legitimacy, for dependability. Only legitimate companies could afford it, which means generations of people, including the Boomers and those of us on the leading edge of Gen X, ended up trained to associate design with a company’s legitimacy and trustworthiness.

Scammers could never afford something like this.

Enter the era of desktop publishing.

I was in on the ground floor. Desktop publishing revolutionized design and prepress. I was working in the industry during the transition from light tables and rubylith to QuarkXPress and Photoshop, and I cannot overstate how much DTP democratized design. I helped publish small-press ’zines in the 90s and early 2000s, something that was all but impossible to do with any quality before the 90s.

Suddenly, design that would’ve been out of reach to anyone but Fortune 1000 businesses became possible for two dudes right out of uni working from an apartment. (In fact, that’s why my website at xeromag.com exists; it started as the site for a small press magazine called Xero.)

This is unquestionably a good thing…but just as it empowered small-press ’zine communities and business owners, it empowered scammers.

Suddenly scammers could create official-looking business stationery, logos, websites, ads, fake invoices, fake receipts, all completely effortlessly.

I talked to a person online a few weeks back who’d fallen for a pig butchering scam—a fake Bitcoin scheme where marks are lured to “invest” in what seems like legitimate Bitcoin sites, only to have their money stolen. “But the site looked so official!” she said. “It even had graphs and charts of real-time Bitcoin prices and everything!”

I’ve heard that countless times before. “But the site looked perfect! How was I supposed to know it wasn’t really PayPal?” “But it looked like a real bank site!”

You can buy templates for websites that look like anything you want. With a two-minute search, I found a pre-created template for a Bitcoin trading platform that included real-time feeds of Bitcoin prices, login, activity tracking, fake account generation, the whole nine, for $39.

You can, with a few clicks of a mouse, use online tools to have fake letterhead and business cards made, then with a few more clicks ship it off to production.

The point here is, design is no longer a proxy for legitimacy. You can no longer measure something’s validity by how it looks.

But millions of people, mostly Boomers and Gen Xers, haven’t got the memo.

The sudden revolution in design created an exploit in the minds of a large number of people indeed, a way to slip past their defenses to take advantage of them with scams.

What’s the solution? I don’t know. I do know that a lot of people base their judgment on something’s legitimacy on how “official” it looks, and nowadays that veneer of legitimacy is available to everyone.

When people get taken by scams, it’s not necessarily that they’re stupid. Sometimes, it’s that they’re using markers for scams that no longer exist, because the world changed in the blink of an eye and the cues that once separated scammers from legitimate enterprises no longer exist.

We live in a world surrounded by design. Design is both invisible and essential, so when the design world changes, it can have weird knock-on effects nobody ever imagined.

New sticker available

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Price: free (donations accepted but not required). I only have a few, but there are more on the way.

The Resist stickers are also back in stock, though I expect to run out of them quickly again.

Get them here!

Resist

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I’ve been having trouble sleeping.

It’s heartbreaking to see the country gutted and its values torn apart by a fat psychopath in bad makeup, and even more heartbreaking to know that a third of the country voted in favor of hatred. There was a time when we could believe that people on both sodes of the political aisle wanted what was best for the nation. Now we cannot.

So I’ve been having trouble sleeping. And when I wake at four AM with that despair in the pit of my stomach, I sit down and design stickers. In the past few weeks, I’ve ordered hundreds and hundreds of them.

The first design just arrived today. I have more designs arriving in the next few weeks. I am giving them away to anyone who wants them for free, and when I say for free I mean I will even cover postage in the US (international is $2).

Here’s the first design:

These are four inches by two and a half inches. To give you a sense of how big they are, here’s one on a 15″ laptop:

Want one? Order them for free on my site here. Want a bunch? Let me know and I’ll have 100 of them shipped to you at my cost. Got an idea for a design? I’d love to hear from you.

New designs will be coming soon, so stay tuned.

[Edit] Wow. Um, I didn’t expect that to happen. It took two hours for my entire first production run of Resist stickers to disappear.

To anyone else trying to get one, I’m really, really sorry. I’ve ordered more. It usually takes about two weeks for them to be produced.

If you ordered multiple stickers, I may send you less than you wanted, to make sure there’s enough for everyone else. I’ll let you all know when I have more. In the meantime, I’ll have some new designs soon as well, they’re already in production.

Looking for Project Help

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I have a number of…um, fairly ambitious projects I’m working on right now that I’ve hit roadblocks on. Since the Internet is a marvel of modern technological accomplishment that allows instantaneous access to not only the entirety of human knowledge but also domain experts in every conceivable field of human endeavor, I’m throwing out a request for ideas and suggestions here.

Project 1: The Alien Pod

I have, through a strange set of circumstances, come into possession of an old “bod pod,” a medical scanner designed, I’m told, to measure BMI. It doesn’t work—it’s just the pod without the computer software and such to drive it—and my goal is to turn it into a gigantic alien egg, like the kind in the Alien movies, but large enough to hold a person.

So the plan is to cover this thing with silicone, to make it look like one of the eggs from the Alien movie (which were basically garbage bags and chicken wire covered with silicone). The effect I’m looking for is something like this:

My thought is to cover the pod with silicone (probably condensation-cure rather than the medical-grade platinum-cure silicone I ise for sex toys, whcih is more than $200 a gallon).

Why silicone and not paper-mâché? The pod weighs more than 400 pounds, so it’s very difficult to transport, and the egg needs to be strong enough to survive handling and moving in a truck. My goal is to use it for a photo shoot, with a model halfway out of it, being dragged back in by tentacles.

The problem is that silicone won’t stick to the surface, like, at all. Not even a little bit.

The pod is a stainless steel shell overlaid with fiberglass and with some sort of textured polymer layer on top. Up close it looks like this:

My first thought is to epoxy a whole bunch of short pins to the pod, to give the silicone something to grip. Many years ago, I remember seeing a product that would be perfect for this: small steel pins, about a centimeter or less long, with a ball on one end and a flat base on the other, kind of like so:

They’re quite small, and a whole bunch of them sticking out of the pod like spines on a porcupine would give the silicone something to hang on to mechanically. Trouble is, I don’t know what they’re called or what they’re used for (I vaguely recall that they’re used in aviation, maybe?), so I don’t know how to search for them.

Alternately, any small, cheap, epoxy-able pin or whatever I can glue to the pod might work. I’m also open to other suggestions. Keep in mind it has to stand up to rough handling—this bloody thing is almost unimaginably heavy and hard to maneuver!

Project 2: Machining Molds

I’ve started making alien xenomorph hiphugger strapons and alien xenomorph facehugger gags for sale.

Right now, I’m 3D printing the molds, a 6-part mold for the hiphugger and a 7-part (yes, seriously) mold for the facehugger.

I’d hoped to get maybe ten castings from each mold. In fact, I’m getting 2-3 before the mold is ruined and I have to print a new one. The facehugger mold takes two weeks(!) to print on my 3D printer. Obviously this isn’t sustainable.

I’ve been planning for a while to move to machined wood or aluminum molds, and I have a 4-axis desktop CNC machine:

I’ve been teaching myself CNC milling, but the learning curve is a cliff; I’m getting reasonably good at 2D and 2.5D machining, but man, the molds are complex.

Here’s a 3D model of one part of the hiphugger mold. This is what I’m looking to machine, either in aluminum or even in wood:

As you can see, it’s a complex shape with aggressive undercuts.

I have not been able to make a CNC program to carve this. (One person online looked at this mold and was like “um, yeah, you’ll need four years of trade school plus at least four years of apprenticeship to even think about machining something like that.”)

So, hey, I have the machine but not the skill, why not hire someone to design the CNC program, right? I’ve talked to a few folks online who are like “yeah, pay me and I’ll do the program for you,” then when they see that part they’re like “oh hell no. Hell. No.”

If anyone reading this knows a skilled CNC machinist who can create a program to mill this part, and parts like it, on my machine (a Makera Carvera with a 4th-axis module), send them my way! This is a paying gig.

In the meantime, I’m also exploring ways to treat the 3D printed molds with resin or epoxy or something to make them more durable. Right now I’m only making one facehugger and one hiphugger per month, and even at that slow rate of production, the process I’m using is unsustainable.

So yeah. I have an eclectic set of friends out there with some highly unusual skills, so I’m hoping that some of you might have insights or ideas to offer.

Setting Math in Adobe Illustrator: The Impossible Dream

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A while back, I posted on social media:

I did not suspect, Gentle Reader, just how many people would have questions about this, nor how many of them there would be. Especially over on Quora, where it raised quite an interesting discussion.

So, in the interests of elaborating, so that I can refer people to this entry:

The equation is real. It’s the Higgs field Lagrangian, the equation that describes how the Higgs gives mass to massive particles. (On a side note, the Higgs field is only a small part of the inertial mass of everyday objects; more than 90% of the mass of things in our normal world comes not from the Higgs, but from the binding energy in the particles that make up those things).

I needed the Higgs Lagrangian for a porn novel Eunice and I are planning but haven’t yet started working on. Specifically, I’m noodling about with an image for that novel, and I needed the Higgs Lagrangian in Adobe Illustrator.

This is the image I’m noodling about with. Everything here, including the face, is vector, built entirely in Illustrator, not raster.

If you look at the largest gold band, that’s the Higgs Lagrangian.

I realize that Illustrator is not in fact an appropriate tool for typesetting math. The proper tool for this is LaTeX; indeed, it’s what LaTeX was created for. And I did in fact originally create the equation in LaTeX, and exported it to SVG to place in Illustrator.

Thereupon I found a problem.

I want to set the equation on a curve. And it is indeed possible to set an image like a PDF or SVG placed into Illustrator on a curve.

But Illustrator treats placed images as, well images, which means if you set them along a curve, it will distort them.

Here’s what I mean. On the top, the Higgs Lagrangian set as type in Illustrator, which did in fact take me about two hours to do; below that, exported from LaTeX; and below that, exported from LaTeX and placed on a curve.

And honestly that would simply not do.

So I set it as type in Illustrator. That required, among other things, installing a typesetting font on my computer to use in Illustrator (New Computer Modern, available here, just in case any other Illustrator users should run into a problem typesetting math equations in Illustrator and stumble across this post in the future), and frequent trips to the Wikipedia list of mathematical symbols here to copy-paste characters into Illustrator in New Computer Modern Math Regular).

I did all this because getting the equation set as type in Illustrator meant I could use Illustrator’s type on a path tool to curve the type while perfectly preserving the shape of each letter.

This also meant it would print smoothly as vectors. I could bend the type in a different graphics program, but any raster (pixel) program would break the letters up into pixels, meaning they look slightly fuzzy on press.

Illustrator’s math typesetting is, bluntly, nonexistent. Which honestly surprises me. I’ve used Illustrator since 1988 and the fact it doesn’t have any typesetting library for math still surprises me. They could, for instance, easily license, oh, I don’t know, something like LaTeX…but I digress.

You can do superscripts and subscripts, but it treats them as text in a line, like X2adoesn’t work correctly on superscripts and subscripts that have to be aligned one right under the other. For that, I had to type the superscript, type the subscript, and set the superscript’s tracking to -1000 to scoot it over the subscript. Big pain in the ass.

The whole equation took a ton of ugly hackery like that (and if you’re reading this because it’s six years after I wrote it and you’re searching for a way to set math in Illustrator, you’re welcome, and also, cry havoc, you mad bastard).

Anyway, I got it done, if not perfectly than at least acceptably, but my god, those are hours of my life I’ll never have back.

A World of Sh*t

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I keep, on my phone, a list of books I want to write. There’s something wrong with it; somehow, every time I finish a book, I discover the list has grown longer, not shorter. (Side note: You can tell someone’s an amateur whaen they say “I don’t want to show my book to an editor or publisher because I’m afraid someone will steal my idea.” Nah bruh, ideas are worthless, and we all have too many ideas of our own to be interested in yours. The bitter truth of writing is it’s almost impossible to get anyone interested in your book in the first place!)

One of the books on the to-be-written list is a nonfiction work titled A World of Sh*t: Normalizing bad design and lazy craftsmanship. Because man, there’s a ton of it out there.

The way I imagine the book’s title

As I sit here in my parents’ house in Florida, I find myself particularly annoyed by the bad, lazy, incompetent, “we didn’t think this through” design around me.

There’s a term that describes a lot of this crap: “psychic litter.” The expression was coined by David Joiner in the 1990s, to describe small acts of immorality that fall beneath the threshold of conscious awareness.

Take, for example, the Windows installer. It takes a while to install Windows, especially older versions. A lot of that time is spent building the Registry. The Windows installer designers could have pre-built a Registry in the installer itself, which would save almost half an hour on each install, but chose not to because it would mean taking an extra half an hour of their time to build the installer. So rather than spending the half an hour on their end, they chose to waste thousands of man-hours of other people’s time.

This kind of selfishness and lack of care is the essential beating heart of a lot of sh*t design.

Take my parents’ kitchen faucet (please!).

It’s pretty. It’s sleek.

It doesn’t move.

You literally cannot rotate it between the two sinks, which is, you know, one of the most basic of all faucet functions. It doesn’t turn. At all. They have two sinks, but you can only use the faucet with one of them.

Worse, it’s also a sprayer; the entire faucet removes. Clever, except that it does not, and has never, docked correctly. It has a plastic ring on the faucet that fits a plastic sleeve on the base, but the ring is too large; it doesn’t fit. (I imagine the fact that it’s a sprayer is the reason it can’t rotate, and that would be absolutely perfect for a three-armed user.)

And then there’s this marvel of engineering:

This is the steering-wheel-mounted remote for the car stereo in my parents’ truck, a Toyota Tacoma.

Steering-wheel-mounted remotes for a car stereo are a brilliant idea. And they’re really not that complex. They move the most often-used functions to a place where you need not look away from the road or take your hands off the steering wheel to use them.

This control has four primary buttons: left, right, up, down. Now, thinking about what it’s supposed to do (work a CD player/Bluetooth combo), you might reasonably expect that left and right go to previous and next track, and up and down raise and lower the volume.

And you’d be 100% wrong.

Left skips back 10 seconds in the current track. (Yes, seriously.) Right skips forward 10 seconds. Up goes to the next track, down goes to the previous track.

What about volume? How do you adjust the volume?

You don’t. There are no volume controls on the steering wheel. To change the volume, you have to take your hands off the steering wheel.

Yes, you read that right. They literally believed that forward 10 seconds/back 10 seconds was so important it should be on the steering wheel, but volume? Eh. Who uses the volume controls, anyway?

Every single digital music player I’ve ever used, from the Radio Shack Compact Disc Player CD-1000 my parents got in 1984 to my iPhone today, uses left and right arrows for previous and next tracks. But whatever Toyota intern who designed the car stereo controls, having apparently never used or indeed seen an entertainment sound system before, had his own ideas, and somehow, somehow it passed all the design review steps. Somehow, someone signed off on manufacture.

Skip ahead ten seconds yes, volume control no.

And here’s the thing:

The world we live in today, our world of marvels and miracles, is filled with examples like this.

It’s hard not to believe that the vast majority of industrial designers are anything but lazy and barely competent, unwilling or unable to put any effort into their job (and it certainly feels like they never use the things they design). From consumer electronics to furniture to software to clothing, we live in a universe of shit.

My jacket has a zipper edged by a hem that is exactly the right width to catch the slider as it moves. It is not possible to zip or unzil the jacket without the hem catching the slider at least three times.

Someone designed that. It went through several review steps before it was released to manufacture. And yet, neither the designer nor any of the peple resonsible for reviewing the design ever put the jacket on. (I’m serious when I say you cannot zip or unzip it without catching the slider. Even one test would’ve been enough.)

We live, we exist in a world of sh*t. We don’t pay attention to the way design impacts our lives, and as a result, trivial design failures—failures that can easily be corrected in minutes during the design stage—waste countless person-years of time. In some cases, like car stereos with cluttered or counterintuitive layouts, they kill people.

And we as a society are remarkably okay with that.

I’m not sure what changed, but in the last five years or so, I’ve found it increasingly difficult not to notice shitty design all around me. And once you’ve started to see it, it snowballs. You can’t un-see it.

I would like to live in a world where perhaps people cared about design more. But the problem seems to be getting worse, not better.

“Incompatible with Biblical Morality”

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A while back, some wag left a comment on one of my Quora answers stating that I am, quote, “incompatible with Biblical morality.”

Which is a fair cop and no mistake. I mean, he thought he was being insulting, but there it is: I am indeed incompatible with Biblical morality.

So I made a T-shirt.

I put this on my social media, and right away people started messaging me to say they wanted one. Which isn’t what I expected—it’s a rather odd thing to say, which is part of why I made it a shirt—but hey, apparently there are a lot of us.

So I’ve made it available at Villaintees.com, for those of you who, like me, are incompatible with Biblical morality and proud of it. You can even get a sticker and a coffee mug!