Writing

Words on dead trees and in pixels

The extent to which human social interaction can be reduced to a set of equations is just one revelation of The Sims...And soon, with the possibility of creating “voodoo” families with customized skins and downloadable custom-built furniture, real life for some may begin to look a lot like The Sims.
— Irwin Chen, Review of The Sims
I.D. Magazine, March/April 2000

How much of our imaginative power are we giving away when we rely on off-the-shelf programs to design? Are these applications freeing designers from the burden of coding and recoding a set of common tools? Taken to its logical extreme, the question then becomes: Should designers be programmers? Should programmers be designers?
— Irwin Chen, “The Code Creators”
eDesign, June 2002

For electronics companies, this type of hacking — call it tinker-happy or curiosity-driven hacking — can essentially constitute free research and development. Not only does it give manufacturers a chance to see their products from a fresh perspective, it provides valuable market research on how consumers want to use the products they buy. How could any manufacturer ignore such input?
— Irwin Chen, “Hackin’ the Box”
eDesign, February 2003

We expect authors to write the words we will form into pages, and we expect those words to be chosen and arranged to create a specific effect. The author is saying something (or trying to); the typographer enhances or intensifies that effort (or doesn’t). But words themselves have a way of revealing or belying the author’s intention. Suppose the process was run in reverse? Could the unraveling of printed pages uncover hidden desires?

— Irwin Chen, “Wired Dictionary: Lexiconography”
Multiple Signatures: On Designers, Authors, Readers and Users, ed. Michael Rock, 2013

All data, in other words, comes from somewhere. It does not descend magically from the Cloud, pristine and untouched by human hands, into our computers. Data is often dirty, questionable, and stitched together from different places and world views

— Irwin Chen, “Data and the View From Nowhere”
LinkedIn Post, Journalism + Design, 2018