Transmission #60: Secret Art, UX Doomerism, Cheeseburger Flavour, and the Chimp-Pig Hypothesis.
Design, ideas and other flotsam.
Hello and welcome.
This is Transmissions by me, Marty Brown. It’s a fortnightly newsletter that collates some of the more interesting stories, links, and other curios that float my way.
As I mentioned in my last edition, I’ve just left my post as design director at a tech scale-up and am on the hunt for new projects and opportunities next year, so if you’re searching for someone to help you design wonderful things, then please get in touch soon. My calendar is filling up!
On with the show!
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Marty
Design
The Virus Inside Your TV
Isaac Butler • Slate • Link
The story of the GALA collective, a secretive, hidden art project that for two years manifested in props and backgrounds, inside the 90s TV smash hit Melrose Place.
[Abortion was taboo on network TV, but] if you look closely at “101 Damnations,” the Melrose Place episode in which Alison miscarries, you might notice something quite odd: There is a reference to abortion in the episode. It’s just visual instead of spoken. Through much of the episode, Alison Parker is draped in a quilt that bears the chemical structure of RU-486, the so-called abortion pill.
And that’s not all. Watch enough episodes of Melrose Place and you’ll notice other very odd props and set design all over the show. A pool float in the shape of a sperm about to fertilize an egg. A golf trophy that appears to have testicles. Furniture designed to look like an endangered spotted owl.
No one knew about the project except the artists, the show’s production designer, and a handful of other insiders. Of course barely anyone actually noticed the art in the show, and even fewer were likely persuaded by its political messaging. But the whole thing still feels like a minor form of heroism, from a quaint moment in time when ironic and smirking subversion were considered to be genuine agents for political change. Vale the 90s.
The State of UX in 2024: Enter Late-stage UX
Edited by Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga • Link
When people use the term late-stage capitalism it’s usually with a kind of impish glee. As in, this thing is so broken it has to end soon. So it’s not the kind of term you’d necessarily want to associate with your own profession, which is exactly was UX Trends have done with their 2024 report: we are now officially in ‘Late-stage UX’.
It’s the latest in a fairly long line of doomerist proclamations about the state of design in 2023/24: the rise of AI automation, the commoditisation of the craft, the overhiring and market saturation of designers, the financialisation and enshittification of nearly everything online, and the erosion of user trust as dark patterns embed themselves into our shared infrastructure.
It’s grim read. But with every wave comes an inevitable counterwave, and perhaps that is what we’re entering. Design is not dead, but it is changing. And change is a necessary, and, over time, a good thing.
Having had the privilege of working at IDEO during what might have been the halcyon days of design thinking™️ (2010-2017), reading articles like this reminds me of this passage from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas
San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...
And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.
Ideas
‘How do you reduce a national dish to a powder?’: the weird, secretive world of crisp flavours
Amelia Tait • Guardian • Link
This article hits the bliss point of my informational palate: a deeply serious look at a completely insubstantial topic.
The crisp aisles of the world are stacked with mysteries. Why are Salt & Pepper Pringles favoured by Norwegians, and Oven-Roasted Chicken Doritos only available in Korea? Why does Europe love paprika so much?
The Chimp-Pig Hypothesis
Uri • Atoms vs Bits • Link
The exact moment where human evolution deviated from primate lineage is still somewhat debatable - the ‘missing link’ is still, well, missing. So there is still some room for alternate theories. And if you like the sound of ‘alternate theories’, then you will like this one: the Chimp-pig hypothesis.
This article is less about the actual Chimp-pig hypothesis than I would have liked, and more about the metaphysics of what is believable and what is not, but if the headline is intriguing (how can it not be?), then you should most definitely read on.
Chart of the week
Other
🔥 Twitter has been endearingly termed a dumpster fire, or a hellsite, or some other pejorative, for as long as I’ve been on it (since 2010-ish). But now, thanks to you-know-who, it’s truly awful, and appears headed for its own immolation. Which is actually quite sad, because despite its flaws, Twitter used to be really funny. So here, the Verge have attempted to collect some of Twitter’s funniest moments, and preserved them for us, for ever. Link
🕹️ Excellent thread of inappropriate computing systems that have been hacked to run DOOM, including a pregnancy test and a Macbook Pro touchbar. Link
📕 Book cover designers show us the designs that got away, the book covers that never went to print. Link
👨🏫 The yearly tech slide deck and presentation from the always insightful Ben Evans. This year: mostly it’s (of course) about AI. Link
👴🏻 Our COBOL engineers are getting so old they are dying out. So what do we do with the foundational infrastructure in our banks, governments and healthcare systems that still run on COBOL? Link
Thanks for reading! See you in a fortnight.