Transparent Ambition

> Apple's designers (and those of many other companies) come back to the idea of translucency giving order and imbuing personality. I cannot for the life of me understand where this idea comes from.

When the company employs designers on a permanent salaried basis, those designers must make changes in order to assure their continued employment. To do otherwise risks the bean counters in the accounting department asking the pointed question: "Why are we employing all these designers when they are not producing anything?". The result is that there must be change for the purpose of assuring the designers continued employment. Result: translucent designs no one wants, but that looked great in the powerpoint presentations used to assure the designers remained employed.

This argument makes no sense, because if it's so obvious what the designers are up to, it should be easy for the bean counters to take that into consideration when deciding whether to fire the designers.

> When the company employs designers on a permanent salaried basis, those designers must make changes in order to assure their continued employment.

I don't think it's exactly this, but it's close. Every so many years you have a new crop of talent rotate in and someone wants to make their mark and shake things up in order to be promoted. Rinse and repeat.

The problem with this explanation is that it also requires multiple parties to be unaware of things which you seem to think are obvious or even self-evident:

1. The designers must be unaware that "no one wants" these new designs (or perhaps they're incapable of creating new designs that people do want).

2. The executives must be unaware that "no one wants" these new designs.

3. The executives must be unaware of the designers' plot to prevent themselves from being fired.

If you believe the designers have some perverse self-centered motivation you might also believe the bean counters do too.

Another framing of the same phenomenon:

If the company makes cellphones, the cellphones need to sell. In order for people to buy the cellphone, they first have to want it, and so the cellphone needs to be universally desirable. The company hires a design team on a permanent salaried basis to do exactly this. Accounting really needs the number of phones sold to keep going up every year, so they really need the designers to think of new things that people might desire to include in the phones each year.

This was first done with cars, and that is why car companies also hire design teams on a permanent salaried basis.

You could apply precisely the same cynical calculus to engineering but I suspect a lot of the people nodding along with this could suddenly find it offensive when applied to their mission-critical DevSecOps roadmap.

The reality is there's always work to done responding to changing user needs, market forces and organisational objectives and it's not uncommon that UI design overhauls are driven by an abstract desire to make things seem 'fresh' but that doesn't come (solely) from designers, it's often a top-down strategic directive.

Hear my rationale for Catholicism-infused Daoism (or Daoism-infused Catholicism, but the equivalence proof thereof shall be postponed to a later margin :)

  If the pontiff is chief designer*, and bean counters the cardinals..

*In other contexts, I'd have used the term "Designor", to inspire interest in Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel)

>Hesse frequently mentioned his understanding of the Taoist philosophies of Laozi (老子) and Zhuangzi (庄子) in letters to his friends, and Taoist ideas such as 'Tao' (道) or 'One' and 'polar opposites and unity' recur across his work.

Another worthy ref: https://isonomiaquarterly.com/archive/volume-3-issue-2/the-u...

(What jumped out at me was that author considered Poland to be smaller than Switzerland)

Edit: the Godfather ref in TFA also worthy of consideration https://old.reddit.com/r/television/comments/1i74th9/seth_ma...

Yes, I do :) abbreviated-- "ideology". Now, the question is how can the two parties demonstrate to each other the usefulness of their respective (hopefully, divergent) perversions :)

In this framing, transparent ambition is apt

The feels like a cousin of “everyone protesting against my views is a paid protestor”.