iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Darda Motor racing cars are a strange case of lost engineering. The wind-up motors built in the 80s could manage 5 consecutive loopings with ease. After production was moved to China in the 90s, that level of performance was never reached again. Original motors in mint condition now trade for 40 USD

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

More toy repair: a particularly ugly Matchbox car from 1975. Impressive that it has survived for over 50 years.

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Then again, others find an unsuspected second life. This is one of those things my kid pulled out of the sandbox and refuses to let go of. It turned into some sort of hair curler. The broken edges needed a bit of smoothing.

A red piece of plastic trash that somehow found a second life.

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Some broken toys are a lost cause. This scissor mechanism was simply not built to survive the probing hands of a toddler.

A dinosaur toy with a telescoping broken neck.

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Turns out I was very wrong. That fix didn’t hold at all. I am adding a piece cut from a plastic bottle to give the glue more surface area.

A crocodile water-squirting toy, a hot glue gun, and a cut-out piece of a plastic bottle.

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

This little guy just needs some hot glue. Easy.

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

This guy had a broken push button, so I drilled a hole in his hip and installed a sturdier one. Also turned the volume down a notch.

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

I do my best, trying to repair all the cheap toys that keep breaking, but more often than not I fail.

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Improving industrial-scale design-to-code workflows across teams using design systems and GenAI tools… it currently seems to hinge all on having a proper Figma Code Connect setup, right? Right? So why does Figma Code Connect feel so unfinished, overcomplicated… at times almost abandoned?

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

A little gem from the German children’s show Die Maus (2000): factory robots unironically getting named after the workers they replaced. But don’t despair, kids - there’s still a place for humans … in QA: youtu.be/vVNX--ROvtU?...

youtu.be

Autobau Part1

YouTube video by Bibliothek der Sachgeschichten

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Reposted by designfactotum

Einar W. Høst @einarwh.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Can't tell you how much I enjoyed reading your LinkedIn post and the twenty hashtags that accompanied it.

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

“[…] the human in a highly complex and automated system may become simply a component—accidently or intentionally—that bears the brunt of the moral and legal responsibilities when the overall system malfunctions.“ Moral Crumple Zones: Cautionary Tales in Human-Robot Interaction (Elish, 2019)

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

@erikahall.bsky.social Have you seen this? The Figma “State of the Designer 2026” report. Can you make sense of it? What are we even comparing here?

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

Bullshit receptivity is linked to a lower analytic thinking, insight, verbal ability, general knowledge, metacognition, and intelligence (Littrell & Fugelsang, 2024; Littrell et al., 2021b; Pennycook et al., 2015; Salvi et al., 2023).”

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

Changing user-centered design to human-centered design was a misstep. It moved the focus from representing specific groups of people to some sort of vague, oppositional stance. Which humans are we putting in the center? All of them? Against what, concretely?

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

"Platforms must be transparent." - https:// pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/10/if-users-notice-your-software-youre-already-a-loser/ He's got a point… and if you don't remember how gimmickry Netscape 6 was, this is how it looked like in 2002:

A screenshot showing Netscape 6 in all its gimmickry glory.

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

I updated the Grudin AI-HCI Hype graph.

A chart showing the changing seasons of AI and HCI.

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

I keep returning to this C64 live coding session by Linus Åkesson; not because of the mastery on display. There's a tangible distance, between what drew me in and what now passes for work. Separate toto coelo - divided by the whole extent of the heavens. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly5B...

youtube.com

Making 8-bit Music From Scratch at the Commodore 64 BASIC Prompt

YouTube video by lftkryo

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

LLM on a C64. (llama2.c64 by YTM/Elysium)

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Reposted by designfactotum

tef @tef.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

building the world's first ethical data centre, powered by david graeber's spinning corpse

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

The UI choices in macOS Tahoe leave me puzzled. Why outline every group with hard border-lines, pair them with oversized, toy-like corner radii, then box the window controls together with the sidebar?

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Reposted by designfactotum

eileen chengyin chow @chowleen.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

The room is almost all elephant. Almost none of it isn’t. Pretty much solid elephant. So there’s no room to talk about it. -Kay Ryan, “The Elephant in the Room” #everynightapoem

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
Kay Ryan

The room is

almost all

elephant.

Almost none

of it isn't.

Pretty much

solid elephant.

So there's no

room to talk

about it.

131046367

designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Watching the Coca-Cola AI slop "workflow" get publicly dismantled is - in a way - hilarious. Still, design - especially UX/UI - has a long tradition of its own kind of process theatre. Who hasn't been tempted to trace wireframes after-the-fact, just to meet expectations?

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

The usual low- vs. high-fidelity prototyping distinction (cf. ISO 9241-210) is not particularly useful. It provides no language to indicate what exactly is kept "rough" and what is "polished" what is included or omitted, and which aspects are just artifacts of the prototyping tool.

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

Improving ux through Jira is like trying to describe the sun to post-nuclear mole people.

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

"The work of engineers used to be about taking small parts that they understood entirely and using simple techniques to compose them into larger things […]" – Sussman, 2008 wingolog.org/archives/201...

Screenshot of a quote: "The work of engineers used to be about taking small parts that they understood entirely and using simple techniques to
compose them into larger things that do what they want.

But programming now isn't so much like that. Nowadays you
muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages
for software you don't know who wrote. You have to do basic
science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different
inputs and seeing how the code reacts. This is a fundamentally
different job."

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

ABSTRACT ARCHITECTURE (Zemanek, 1979) "Sins of design are hereditary: they bind the following generations and this is much worse than it sounds."

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

There are some well established places where one can explain shortcuts. The email *body* is not one of them.

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

Avoided hotel safes for ages due to frustrating setup processes: Press '*' twice, wait for the green led, close, enter code, now press '#' etc. etc. Surprised by the big leap in usability. Turns out a simple 'lock' button was all we ever needed.

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

The subtle allure of consumer tech that reached peak refinement… just before slipping into obsolescence.

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designfactotum @designfactotum.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

“There's a profound issue […] that is haunting this hype around agents, and it is ultimately threatening to break the blood brain barrier between the application layer and the OS layer” – www.youtube.com/live/AyH7zoP...

youtube.com

The State of Personal Online Security and Confidentiality | SXSW LIVE

YouTube video by SXSW

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