" There are two words every designer needs to feel comfortable saying: “no” and “why.” These words are the foundation of what we do. They’re the foundation of our ethical framework. "

I think sometimes saying no and why can be really difficult. It needs tons of courage and firm. Like author mentioned later “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” On one side, there might be a lot of people who literally don't understand it, and on the other side there might be even more people who understand it but they choose to pretend they don’t. That means weak alliance is backing you up, and more courage you need to take with you when up to say “No”.

" I was mad I didn’t see it. Was I consciously attempting to leave people of color out of the project? Of course not, but the effect is the same, and that’s the thing to focus on…. I was mad I didn’t see it. Was I consciously attempting to leave people of color out of the project? Of course not, but the effect is the same, and that’s the thing to focus on. "

I was really moved when I read these words - though author didn't consciously try to leave color people out of the room, but the final effect was the same. I realized if we are not consciously trying to focus on one topic and trying to fix it, then we might literally not. Only when we have the attention and consciousness, pay more time and effort into the things we are unconsciously ignoring or marginalizing, we can authentically be lead to a better way. It's a challenge for the privileged group of people but also the necessary work we need to deal with.

" So if you want to do work with social impact, and I honestly cannot believe I’m saying this, but it’s absolutely true—we need you at places like Facebook. But we need you with swords drawn. "

Honestly, this point of you totally shifted my mind. Before all I'm thinking about is trying to avoid or escape from what I think might be a toxic work environment. Yeah it might be also an escape from the responsibilities I need to bear as a designer. But this idea of changing from the inside might actually be an effective strategy for the corporates and society. Also thinking about the “swords” - what supports me to hold and drawn my sword, what is my sword made of, sword drawn for what and when?

" We tend to think of products as lumps of dead matter: inert, passive, dumb. But products are becoming lively, active, and intelligent. Objects that are sensitive to their environment, act with some intelligence, and talk to each other are changing the basic phenomenology of products the way they exist in the world. "

It's interesting to think about how we treat all the products and objects we made or designed as if they don't have any agencies. I believe somehow it's not true. When we are designing or using our will to bend the materials, the tension pushes back. They are designing us back too. We humans are also materials. The things we made are like spider web and as we are moving between this web, we might also be trapped, restricted, influenced.

" In the future, good design may mean taking into account long-term thinking, rather than pursuing short-term need and problem solving. Synthetic biology appears to be fitting into the existing systems of design, but we could challenge this. The question whether the ethical burden of the designed object lies with the consumer, designer, manufacturer, or share holder remains as neglected yet relevant for design as it will be for synthetic biology and the design of living machines. "

I think what is common in real world is that we are more likely to blame the designer or engineer of product and service right after they got into trouble. And sometimes when the trouble only troubling the marginalized people, the blame even vanished, and” trouble” doesn't exist. But what can we do before we release the product and service into the market? Who should be responsible and engaging with the decision making process? That we cannot predict the error before the project actually running, what can we do to iterated it, to optimize it?

" Our nature is almost always unnatural: gardens, wheat fields, and pastures of grazing cows are human-manufactured constructions built from living parts; even wildernesses are state-managed parks. Clinging onto an idea of nature as separate from human activity is a futile and even damaging pursuit when it comes to thinking about what we design and its place in the world, Nature is just another human construct, intensified by design. "

I think in the program, a lot of topic or related to nature and artifacts. It's always a challenging at least for me to separate nature from human activities. But this paragraph gives me another understanding of nature - “another human construct”. That's a really fresh idea. With people are going out of their own residences, trying to conquer Earth and even universe. The nature we mentioned daily now it's becoming another part of urban planning.

" But, like a zoo, this collection is too neat. To make the animals visible and understandable, it separates them from each other and from their normal concealing environment "

I like this zoo example. For the most time when we are trying to understand or conclude one phenomenon, we tried to use basic elements to form a systematic explanation. Thus it can be clear, understandable and universally conveyed. What are the lost factual information which might be unimpressive, unimportant, but still affect the system?

" The information delivered by a feedback loop—even nonphysical feedback—can only affect future behavior; it can’t deliver a signal fast enough to correct behavior that drove the current feedback. Even nonphysical information takes time to feedback into the system. "

From this quote, I started to realize a lot of seemly balanced situation might not be authentically even. Inside the feedback loop, the delay takes up times and the state we have might be just an approximate value. No longer to say time delay also lies in the process of transmission.

" The trick, as with all the behavioral possibilities of complex systems, is to recognize what structures contain which latent behaviors, and what conditions release those behaviors—and, where possible, to arrange the structures and conditions to reduce the probability of destructive behaviors and to encourage the possibility of beneficial ones "

I think this can be also relate to what we can do before we plan to release the product or service to the market. To propose “what if” questions. Somehow predict or estimate what potential reactions or activities users will have with the products. In this case, designers and engineers may have more potential directions to debug, refine and optimize.

" In this, the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remain private, and cannot be communicated to others. Our secret affinities remain secret even to ourselves ..we fall in love with certain works of art, as we fall in love with certain individuals, for no very clear motive. "

This reminds me of aesthetic experience. People experience the art of reading for the art of writing, their mental state might be shifted. That leads to certain kind of intimacy, which is indescribable, unspeakable, and unable to be completely or 100% accurately conveyed through language. And that distance also contribute to this personal aesthetic experience.

" However, given the scale of operations at Cronus Corp., even a tiny rate of error would likely be amplified beyond what the researchers and the interested companies may consider to be negligible levels "

I do believe a lot of decisions on how the project or product should be designed need the thought and consideration from all angles of a company. We cannot only relying on designers or engineers but also we should have the board room got involved into this decision making process. Also thinking about the giant companies except for what products they are publishing to the market, what kind of values are they sharing and conveying through their advertisement or public behaviors.

" Epimetheus’ engineers had designed the app to do good. Even if it also produced some harmful side effects, the intention was to create something that would benefit society by increasing knowledge "

A lot of cases in this series actually mentioned a lot about when the researchers or the engineers has designed the project or the app to do good, but still the project might have some harmful side effects. Thus I am wondering how should we think of the responsibilities in this situation. I believe that when some harm happened to certain users, the blame cannot be avoided or neglected no matter what's the company's initial aim or purpose. It's really a big challenge for companies to think of how to integrate and optimize their products or project before they are truly coming to the market.

" The common thread seems to be that if data comes from humans, it will likely have bias in it. "

This is so ironic.. But definitely we can not deny that so many biases had become transparent fused in our culture or common sense. We are easily to take it as granted or normal way of society functioning until we become the one who encounter the bias or the discrimination. Even sometimes we are put onto that spot, we hardly notice the tragedy is happening on ourselves since we just think it is how the society running. How to recognized the invisible and pull it out from the system, is harder than ever, but also the mission we can not escape from.

" Since humans tend to be biased, the algorithms that learn from them will also tend to be biased unless humans take extra care to find and remove the bias. "

Since in this article, author discussed so much about the AI taking shortcut to finish their tasks. Bias might also be the shortcut for human. In that case taking extra care to find and remove the bias is not really “extra”. It is necessity. It is basic routine for a non-biased algorithm. For such a long time, we've get used to the shortcut thus the road is deserted, which needs efforts and time to rehabilitate.

" When they looked to see what parts of the image their AI was using to identify the tench, it showed them that it was looking for human fingers against a green background. "

Sometimes it is people who misleading the AI, but obviously, what AI is thinking about somehow can not be 100% understood or predicted. That also led to the question about how we build our data set. What hidden or extra information is given in the collection - which can be utilized by AI?

" Digital products are displayed on screens of different sizes and with dynamic content. Digital products allow users to interact with their content, and take advantage of motion and animation.Furthermore, digital products often have temporal logic where a linear narrative is replaced by a set of complex states and transitions. "

From this quote, there are several characteristics of digital products mentioned, like different sizes, dynamic content, interact, motion and animation, temporal logic, non-linear narrative”. And all of those characteristics are created since digital products are developed with programming languages. This reminds me of how the physical products display their own narrative and the layout which is statistic, linear narrative. Furthermore if we discussed deeper about the visualization of physical products, especially from a cultural aspect -this kind of statistic visualization is always under one certain culture frame of reference. Thus, give us the inspiration that how can digital products be displayed cross-culturally or can be changeable to fit the different colors your frame of reference. Also understand how certain culture background solid the foundation of the uses’ preferences on the interaction with or the usage of digital products.

" By changing the size, you can make that hill longer, continuing outside the canvas. By changing the position of the rectangle, you can create asymmetric whitespace, making sure that the user notices the rectangle. "

I really like the example sketch the author demonstrated here. Though it's a very simple and standardized rectangle - a most common shape, through the rotation and size changing it can also be turned into a totally different abstract thing which can be recognized by the readers. But what I want to critique here is that when authors say “it became a hill”, it requires readers or audience to have certain pre-knowledge about the simplified visualization system to understand this kind of implications. Thus, it's the challenge for the designers or the programmers to reconsider the universality and understand ability of the digital products.

" The star below is created by alternating between a low and a high radius for each vertex. It's easy to tweak the style of the star by using different numbers or more vertices, or using rotate() to change the orientation of the star. "

We can actually see a lot of difference between drawing a shape using hand and using programming language. Here is using the vertex under the ’if-else’ condition, to position the vertex at intervals. Then the area that is generated by connecting those vertex as the outside frame will be filled with color. But in daily life when we are drawing a star using our hands we are more possibly to draw it using one touch drawing. Go with the lines, neglecting they are crossing each other’s. Then we might still use repeititive lines to fill the blank area. The logics behind two different approaches for drawing a star are quite different.