#design

Hadley Wickham details his workflow for generating slide illustrations with Gemini's image model, including bananarama, his own R package for scripting reproducible image generation from a YAML file, and why he thinks AI is best suited to mood-setting illustrations rather than photos or diagrams.

Design Theory's John Mauriello surveys how product and environmental sounds are engineered to shape behavior, from slot machine "losses disguised as wins" and Skinner's variable-reward pigeons to Dyson's $60M quiet vacuum, weighted car doors, and ICU alarm fatigue.

A short essay arguing that good design is about choosing the right tradeoffs, not avoiding them — "uncompromising" products are a myth since every decision trades a weakness for a strength.

Hadley Wickham relaunches his Substack to write about AI — a genuinely conflicted take that acknowledges both the excitement (programming accessibility, wide and shallow expertise) and the harms (copyright theft, wealth concentration, intellectual laziness) without collapsing into a take.

The excited/harm framing is what makes this worth reading — programming accessibility, voice input, and wide/shallow expertise as genuine wins, alongside copyright and wealth concentration as real costs. Rare to see someone acknowledge both sides without collapsing into a take.