The first time I used Mac OS/X, circa 2004-2005, I was blown away by the design and how they managed to expose the power of the underlying Unix-ish kernel without making it hurt for people who didn't want that experience. My SO couldn't have cared less about Terminal.app, but loved the UI. I also loved the UI and appreciated how they took the time to integrate cli tools with it.
I would say it was a marvelous human experience _for me_.
Sure it was the Apple engineers' and designers' labor transformed into a product, but it was a fucking great product and something that I'm sure those teams were very proud of. The same was true with the the iPod and the iPhone.
I work on niche products, so I've never done something as widely appreciated as those examples, but on the products I've worked on, I can easily say that I really enjoy making things that other people want to use, even if it's just an internal tool. I also enjoy getting paid for my labor. I've found that this is often a win-win situation.
Work doesn't have to be exploitive. Products don't have to exploit their users.
Viewing everything through the lens of production and consumption is like viewing the whole world as a big constraint optimization problem: (1) you end up torturing the meaning of words to fit your preconceived ideas, and (2) by doing so you miss hearing what other people are saying.
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> Work doesn't have to be exploitive. Products don't have to exploit their users.
bruh do people have any idea what they're writing as they write it? you're talking about "work doesn't have to be [exploitative]" in the same breath as Apple which is the third largest market cap company in the world and who's well known for exploiting child labor to produce its products. like has this comment "jumped the shark"?
> Viewing everything through the lens of production and consumption
i don't view everything through any lens - i view work through the lens of work (and therefore production/consumption). i very clearly delineated between this lens and at least one other lens (art).
Ultimately the exploitative pyramid always terminates in a peak, and the guys working up there can for sure be having a hecking great time doing their jobs.
just repeating the same mistake as op: sadness/happiness is completely outside the scope here. these are aspects of a job - "design" explicitly relates to products not art. and wondering about the sadness/happiness of a job is like wondering about the marketability of a piece of art - it's completely besides the point!
1. Good design is innovative 2. Good design makes a product useful 3. Good design is aesthetic 4. Good design makes a product understandable 5. Good design is unobtrusive 6. Good design is honest 7. Good design is long-lasting 8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail 9. Good design is environmentally friendly 10. Good design is as little design as possible
Generative AI just tries to predict based on its training data.
a product can be a piece of art and design can and does in practice often go hand in had with art, practically most designers also other than the utilitarian role practice the artistic one, wether you would want to group art within design as one is a matter of definitions
of course but that's well within the scope of the whole paradigm (as opposed to how it is originally phrased it in relation to a loss of "marvelous human experiences"): if i use a bad tool to solve my customer's problems in an unsatisfactory way then my customers will no longer be my customers (assuming the all knowing guiding hand of the free market). so there's no new observation whatsoever in OP.