Tags: illusion

Nuberodesign > Blog > Designing for the Eye

I love the interactive illustrations in this article filled with type and architecture nerdery!

The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con

Taken together, these flaws make LLMs look less like an information technology and more like a modern mechanisation of the psychic hotline.

Delegating your decision-making, ranking, assessment, strategising, analysis, or any other form of reasoning to a chatbot becomes the functional equivalent to phoning a psychic for advice.

Imagine Google or a major tech company trying to fix their search engine by adding a psychic hotline to their front page? That’s what they’re doing with Bard.

Design as (un)ethical illusion

Many, if not all, of our world’s most wicked problems are rooted in the excessive hiding of complexity behind illusions of simplicity—the relentless shielding of messy details in favor of easy-to-use interfaces.

Seams.

But there’s always a tradeoff between complexity, truth, and control. The more details are hidden, the harder it is to understand how the system actually works. (And the harder it is to control). The map becomes less and less representative of the territory. We often trade completeness and control for simplicity. We’d rather have a map that’s easy to navigate than a map that shows us every single detail about the territory. We’d rather have a simple user interface than an infinitely flexible one that exposes a bunch of switches and settings. We don’t want to have to think too hard. We just want to get where we’re going.

Seamful and seamless design are reframed here as ethical and deceptive design:

Ethical design is like a glove. It obscures the underlying structure (i.e. your hand) but preserves some truth about its shape and how it works. Deceptive design is like a mitten. It obscures the underlying structure and also hides a lot about its shape and how it works.

cityshrinker

Lots of tiltshift photos gathered together in one place.

Right Brain v Left Brain | Herald Sun

I can only see the dancer going clockwise. Jessica saw anti-clockwise at first but was then able to change direction. I can't do that.

Julian Beever's pavement drawings

Scroll down to see "Anamorphic illusions drawn in a special distortion in order to create an impression of 3 dimensions when seen from one particular viewpoint." Insanely great.

Mr Angry and Mrs Calm

An optical illusion; a mind hack, if you will.

eChalk colour perception

This is the most amazing optical effect in the world... or at least a good mind hack.

Virtual Street Reality

If Holbein had been a street artist, the results might have looked something like this.