Linknote — — 180 words

Society

Academia uneasy with lack of diversity on ‘dude walls’ of honour — Nell Greenfieldboyce — NPR

A 'dude wall' featuring several portraits of white old men

On the campaign to remove — or make less prominent — walls of portraits of old white men from academia’s past.

“It just sends the message, every day when you walk by it, that science consists of old white men,” says [neuroscientist Leslie] Vosshall. “I think every institution needs to go out into the hallway and ask, ‘What kind of message are we sending with these oil portraits and dusty old photographs?'”

While defenders of dude walls warn of erasing history, the counterpoint is powerful:

…some argue that the old portraits themselves have erased history, by glorifying white men who hold power while ignoring the contributions to science and medicine made by women and people of colour.

Celebrations of individuals in this way always make me wary. It seems to be particularly common in higher education, where awards and buildings are routinely named after white males.

But very few breakthroughs are truly the work of a single individual. The people honoured in this way are likely the people most adept at taking all the credit for other people’s work.

Linknote — — 65 words

Technology

Why bother with What 3 Words? — Terence Eden

Man looking at a map

What3Words may have a good publicity operation, but as Terence Eden points out here, there are many problems with it. It’s not open, it’s difficult to work across languages, and at times it’s even culturally insensitive.

There are better alternatives. Such as the globally recognised co-ordinates system. Or, as noted by Dave Hulbert on Twitter, plus codes, which are easily accessible in Google Maps.

Linknote — — 57 words

Society

Mental illness doesn’t excuse treating people badly — Hattie Gladwell — Metro News

Illustration of a person removing a 'sad' mask

An excellent piece on the damage caused by conflating bad behaviour with mental ill health.

Conflating mental illness with cruelty adds to the stigma of mental illness…

Excusing horrible behaviour for a mental disorder makes it seem as though being horrible is the norm for people with mental illness. And that’s not okay.

Via Jennifer Jones

Linknote — — 106 words

User experience — User research

Author of Practical Empathy Indi Young on going deeper than insights — Carrie Neill — dscout

Indi Young illustration

It’s always great to see advice from Indi Young. Here are tips on how to better identify and synthesise patterns in qualitative data.

…when you’re looking at data, don’t group things together by noun. Group them together by verb. I’ve done a lot of work with the healthcare industry, and one thing I often see research teams do is bring together insights that are all about a noun — here is all of the data that we got about how people feel about the doctors. But when you do that the intent behind what people are really saying ends up all over the place.

Linknote — — 123 words

Society

Can everyone be excellent? — Alfie Kohn

A very good piece about why fears around grade inflation and the like are spurious. Even if everyone meets high standards, people continue to call for the standards to be made higher still. Moreover, people exhibit a damaging compulsion to rank.

But boy, do we love to rank. Worse, we create artificial scarcity such as awards — distinctions manufactured out of thin air specifically so that some cannot get them. Every contest involves the invention of a desired status where none existed before and none needs to exist. This creates an adversarial mentality that makes productive collaboration less likely, encourages gaming the system, and leads all concerned to focus not on meaningful improvement but on trying to outdo (and perhaps undermine) everyone else.

Linknote — — 197 words

Digital — Human-centred approaches

The birth of Inter — Carmel DeAmicis — Figma

Inter typeface detail

I’ve been using the Inter typeface on this blog (and other things) for 1½ years now.* I love it.

Rasmus [Andersson, the designer of Inter] did some research and experimentation and eventually realized there was no free, high-quality text typefaces for computer UIs. That felt backwards to him given how type heavy many UIs are. So he set to work creating one and released the first set of glyphs in August 2017. He’s been iterating on it continuously ever since.

What I really admire about Inter is the way it looks brilliant at both small sizes and large sizes. There really are not many typefaces you can say that about.

It also feels like it has genuinely been designed for our time, while seeming familiar like Helvetica or Univers. While those classics fall down somewhat as digital typefaces (no surprise given how old they are), Inter manages to improve on other digital-first typefaces like Roboto.

Incredibly, while Roboto has the might of Google behind it, Inter is one person’s side project. I have a lot of admiration for this project.

Now, if only it was available on Google Fonts…

* Yes, that was just an excuse to use the ½ glyph.

Linknote — — 66 words

Information architecture — User experience

Work:

Card sorting has informed a new information architecture for Learn courses — Website and Communications Blog

Results of the card sorting study

How we used card sorting to help us devise a consistent information architecture for Learn VLE courses at the University of Edinburgh.

775 students participated in the study — and no two students submitted the same card sort. This highlights the great challenge faced by the Learn Foundations project in attempting to create a more standardised template that meets the wide variety of needs across the University.

Linknote — — 179 words

Social science — Society

The one thing about your spouse’s personality that really affects your career — Andrew O’Connell — Harvard Business Review

Two pairs of sandals

It has been found that having a conscientious spouse helps lead to an increase in income, number of promotions and job satisfaction. Why?

> First, conscientious spouses handle a lot of household tasks, freeing employees to concentrate on work (“When you can depend on someone, it takes pressure off of you,” Solomon told me).

Or, put another way, if someone else is doing all the dirty work at home, it gives you the privilege to focus on your career.

I wonder if there’s research to say what the effect is if both people in a relationship share household duties equally. Hopefully if both partners are conscientious, both feel the benefits in their careers.

Support each other. Teamwork! 🐌🐢

> You can support your spouse in supporting you. If you depend on his or her reliability, diligence, and goal orientation, don’t take those traits for granted. Maybe you’ve been standing heroically at the bow for so long that you’ve forgotten how much effort it takes to row. So sit down and row for a while.