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Technology

The improbable origins of PowerPoint

A history of PowerPoint, a piece of software that has taken over office life more than any other.

Many of us rely on it. But on the downside, PowerPoint persuades pencil pushers that they are designers. The result is that highly-paid people end up spending hours on end mucking about with fonts.

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Web

Faux grid tracks

Now that we have CSS grid, people apparently want to know how to style the divisions between the rows and the columns. Here, Eric Meyer explains one way to do it.

At this stage, I can’t help feeling that no matter how many features get added to CSS, it always results in more gnarly hacks.

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Architecture

Robin Hood Gardens and the divisiveness of brutalism

I was amazed — and delighted — by the V&A design museum’s decision to preserve a section of Robin Hood Gardens, the controversial social housing estate that is set to be demolished. It will be the largest section of a modern building ever to be preserved by a museum.

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Human-centred approaches — User experience

Don’t “validate” designs; test them

This Nielsen Norman Group article warns us to be cautious in the language we use when justifying UX work. Using the word ‘validate’ risks priming both your team members, and your test participants.

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Media

Meet the people who listen to podcasts at super-fast speeds

While commuting I normally listen to podcasts at 1.5× speed. Alex thinks I’m crazy for doing that. But my behaviour pales in comparison to some of what’s described here.

[Rachel Kenny] estimates that she listens to five to seven hours of podcasts a day (which equals 15 to 21 hours at normal speed), “so maybe 20 to 40 episodes a day or 100 to 250 a week,” she said. She tracks her listening habits on a spreadsheet.

I have never tried going faster than 1.5×, because I doubt I would find it enjoyable. For me, 1.5× sounds very normal. I have no trouble understanding and following anything (though music is jarring). In fact, when I find myself listening to familiar podcasts at 1× speed, it always sounds too slow.

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Business

[Your strategy should be a hypothesis you constantly adjust](https://hbr.org/2017/11/your-strategy-should-be-a-hypothesis-you-constantly-adjust)

Why do strategies often “break down in the execution stage”? According to this study, it is often because big companies fail to learn from new information.

Staff on the ground will often fail to raise the alarm for fear of being blamed for failing to execute the strategy correctly. But often, the flaw was in the plan itself.

The Volkswagen diesel emissions case is one stark example:

> VW’s culture — specifically, its executives’ lack of tolerance for pushback from people lower in the organization — seems to have played a major role in its diesel-emissions fiasco… VW leaders lost out on the opportunity to revisit and update the strategy. Meanwhile, engineers had developed software to fool the regulators — postponing the inevitable.

This article suggests taking a ‘strategy-as-learning’ perspective instead. It’s an approach that reminds me a lot of [Lean UX methods](http://www.jeffgothelf.com/lean-ux-book/).

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Architecture

These pictures capture Britain’s brutalist vision of urban utopias

A selection of lecture slides from John Richings James. He was chief planner of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government during the 1960s, when many of the country’s most controversial developments were constructed.

When he became a lecturer, he took with him a fascinating selection of photos that show the good, bad and ugly of the brave new world while it was being developed.

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Human-centred approaches — Technology

A/B testing ain’t for settling your disagreements — Tom Kerwin

We’re running experiments based on ideas we’ve had and ignoring the very real possibility that the thing we’re testing doesn’t actually matter to our customers.

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Digital

Alpha to live is not a linear progression — Michael Brunton-Spall, Medium

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Culture

How the letters of the alphabet got their names — The Economist

This is revelatory. It all makes much more sense than I realised.

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Web

The web began dying in 2014, here’s how – André Staltz

Highly interesting article about how the dominance of Facebook, Google and Amazon is beginning to damage the web. Facebook and Google are silently conspiring to specialise in social and knowledge respectively, further increasing their dominance. Meanwhile, the weakening of net neutrality threatens to move to goalposts even further in their favour.