Silence spurs creativity

There’s no point quoting from DHH’s Turn down the volume on the world, since I’d just quote the whole thing. It’s short and worth the two minutes it’ll take you to read it.

I talk to a lot of content designers, and nearly all of them are spending increasingly large amounts of their working hours and energy fighting back AI inspired FOMO from others in their organizations. This is pointlessly spent effort on products that will mostly be discarded in a year or so, once the next fad rolls in.

This time could have been spent of cleaning up the fundamental information architecture of websites and products. Yet these sorts of projects are increasingly harder to sell to management, which operates under the notion that “AI will solve all that”.

It won’t.

As I’ve mused on this before: these LLMs require massive amounts of well structured content in order to work. But they’re also causing fewer people to produce new content. After all, what’s the point if it’s just going to get gobbled up by ChatGPT and spit out without any citation. And so we’re going to enter a documentation drought.

The other point that DHH makes, is that you need a bit of isolation from the noise of the crowd if you want to build something new, something different.

I’ve been noticing this more and more. The designers and UX writers that I see doing great work aren’t the ones attending every conference, watching UX tutorials on YouTube, or gorging on newsletters. They’re working. And they learn from their work. And then they work some more.