Category: Stories
New stories are published every Thursday on Design.blog by Automattic.
Ricarose Roque: Designing from My Childhood
One of my earliest memories was when I was four years old. I was busy making a jump rope with my older sister. We were using colorful rubber bands, looping them together into a chain […]

Amy Whitaker on Art Thinking: Where Creativity and Commerce Intersect
If you are making a work of art in any area of life, you are not going from a known point A to a known point B. You are inventing point B. You are creating something new—an object, a company, an idea, your life—that must make space for itself. In the act of creating that space, it changes the world, in however big or small a way.
Burak Arikan on Civic Data, the Foundational Tool to Fight Abuses of Power
Big data is the term used to define the perpetual and massive data gathered by corporations and governments on consumers and citizens. When the subject of data is not necessarily individuals but governments and companies […]

Mitchel Resnick: Designing for Wide Walls
It’s not enough to provide a single path from low floor to high ceiling; we need to provide wide walls so that kids can explore multiple pathways from floor to ceiling.

Alice Rawsthorn on Design and Choice
Choice will be a defining element of design in the future. As our personal identities become subtler and more singular, we will wish to make increasingly nuanced choices about the design of many aspects of our lives. We will also have more of the technological tools required to do so. Yet design practise will need to change radically to deliver those choices.

Above All Else, Authenticity: Cassidy Blackwell on Designing for the Individual
To repress what makes us unique is to artificially constrain all the potential we have to offer.

Jessica Helfand: Design and Precedent
Earlier this summer, an internet gimmick surfaced on social media where people randomly posted their first seven jobs. Implicitly, this meant that you had to be old enough to have held seven jobs in the […]
John Maeda, Why Automattic?
At some point in my career, I stopped caring about Open Source. I don’t know exactly when. But I know that when I met Matt Mullenweg just a few months ago and he told me […]