DD: What is good design? What can makers learn to make them better designers?

Massimo Banzi: In design there are different fields, and like art, there are different movements. If you look at the design of Apple products, that design descends directly from the Bauhaus and their minimalistic, clean shapes that emphasized rationalism. You see it later in the work of Dieter Rams, a German designer, and Rams’ influence on Jonathan Ive (Apple’s senior V.P. of industrial design) and Steve Jobs.

Good design is about using the minimal amount of stuff that you need. Also, if something is visually simple, it encourages people to use it.

DD: What about the intuitive sense of design?

MB: Design can be used to make an object desirable. You can make an object so that others are attracted to it. You might say it’s beautiful, that it’s striking a chord in you, that you want to have this thing.

I tend to think that people who come from an engineering background value adding multiple options, as many options as possible, making the object customizable. In my opinion, design is about finding a way to say “no,” deciding which things you’re not going to put in the product.

We get a lot of criticism at Arduino because we refuse to apply some of the modifications that users submit to us. As a result, people get disgruntled and they move to other open source projects. We try to explain to them that we’re trying to keep the system clean and consistent. We don’t want to confuse people.

When I was trying to learn Perl years ago, I saw that you could do the same thing in five different ways. This was completely illogical to me. I said, “Why?” Then I came to understand that in the world of geeky programmers, each one of them has their own preferred way of doing things, and the language had to cater to them.

In design, I think if you have to cater to everyone, you become useless. Nobody will connect to your product. If you design something around yourself or some person, then you’ll find some people who will connect to that, because the product you design has a personality.

“We've all seen how this topic has exploded on, social media and in articles and in books, but a lot of the uses are very utilitarian, how to make your grade book more efficient, how to write lesson plans, how to grade kids papers, how kids can use AI to write assignments, do assignments that are just old fashioned, work that they've always done.”

Prompts are the text you enter to initiate a conversation with a chatbot. You are prompting it to behave in the desired manner. Many believe that crafting effective prompts is a crucial skill for using chatbots. In my experience, while a good prompt is valuable, the idea that just learning to write one good prompt is somewhat overrated. Any errors or omissions in the initial prompt can be corrected in subsequent exchanges.

A chatbot can easily be guided to behave in a multitude of ways, and can even be directed to revisit or reframe its output. It is a conversational partner that never gets tired and doesn’t take offense if you want it to behave differently.

As you converse with the chatbot, it remembers what was previously said, so you don’t have to repeat yourself. As the conversation continues, you can add, revise, and correct the chatbot.