IKEA just announced a suite of smart home products that work with the Matter standard, including a whole slew of smart light bulbs, five smart sensors, remote controls and a smart plug. I’ve dabbled with home automation before, and I’ll be looking at these carefully to see how well they work with HomeKit. Our AppleTV is ancient, and if we upgraded to a new 4K version I could use that as the hub for smart devices, including these.
Once I got my own apartment in college, and was too poor to afford my own Mister Coffee drip-coffee machine, I resorted to a single cup pour-over jawn, which I filled by heating water in a pot on the stove. And here I need to take a minute. Because when I walk into a bougie café now and see “pour-over” as a special bullshit bespoke option I cannot help thinking that people are suckers. That’s how I made my coffee when I was too poor to make it any other way.
Mike Montiero, author of Design Is a Job and What Is a Designer? writes about coffee in his newsletter.
I’m currently using a pour-over setup after having cycled through my camping percolator (RIP) Jen’s one-cup coffee machine (RIP), several French presses, a brief attempt at an Aeropress (did not live up to the hype) and back to a French press. I like the pour-over but have been keeping an eye out for another cheap percolator at the thrift store—I did enjoy the coffee it brewed, and now that I have beans I like, I want to give it a try again. (He expresses a love for dark roast, which to me tastes like wet, burned paper towels).
Mike Montiero posted the first chapter of his new book, What Is A Designer? on Medium:
I’ve also seen my share of studios where the designer wasn’t given the opportunity to sell their own work, which is amazingly shortsighted. Selling your work directly to clients is extremely important. Not only should you be able to explain why you made the decisions you did, but you’ll get first-hand feedback on where the work needs to go next.
This right here. I’ve worked at several shops where I did all the hard work and then had some brainless AE–no, wait, let’s call them what they were, project managers–go in and fuck everything up trying to sell it to the client, and then come back and fuck up explaining what the client actually asked for. This was a theme in Baltimore; most of the shops I was at were terrified of the designers poaching clients. It did nothing for my career and contributed to a sense of powerlessness. All designers should be present in the pitch meetings, period. This was why I moonlighted tirelessly for 20 years, sometimes to the irritation of my salaried bosses, because it was the only way I was going to get that experience myself, and they didn’t trust me with “their” clients. Fuck that shit. If you work in a shop that won’t take you to the presentation, get the hell out.
Design is the solution to a problem within a set of constraints. And unsolicited work ignores the biggest constraint of all: your ability to get your work through the approval process. That’s not design, it’s jerking off in a vacuum.
–Mike Montiero, from The Two Corners of Unsolicited Redesigns