alt Hacker News> because of the truly marvelous human experiences that they’ll miss
when people wax philosophical/poetical about what is essentially capital production already i'm always so perplexed - do you not realize that you're not doing art/you're not an artisan? your labor is always actively being transformed into a product sold on a market. there are no "marvelous human experiences", there is only production and consumption.
> They’ll be impoverished and confuse output with agency
ironic.
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What a sad take. For the sake of human satisfaction I hope this is a minority perspective.
Whatever the merits or demerits of 'marvelous human experiences' are from the point of view of production and consumption, the OP's conclusion leaves out the important point that Alexander's 'rationalization of forces that define a problem' produces designs that come closer to solving real-life problems (even in production and consumption) than simply putting attractive lipstick on an economic utility pig. If production isn't solving real human problems, consumers will go elsewhere.
> your labor is always actively being transformed into a product sold on a market. there are no "marvelous human experiences", there is only production and consumption.
The first time I used Mac OS/X, circa 2004-2005, I was blown away by the design and how they managed to expose the power of the underlying Unix-ish kernel without making it hurt for people who didn't want that experience. My SO couldn't have cared less about Terminal.app, but loved the UI. I also loved the UI and appreciated how they took the time to integrate cli tools with it.
I would say it was a marvelous human experience _for me_.
Sure it was the Apple engineers' and designers' labor transformed into a product, but it was a fucking great product and something that I'm sure those teams were very proud of. The same was true with the the iPod and the iPhone.
I work on niche products, so I've never done something as widely appreciated as those examples, but on the products I've worked on, I can easily say that I really enjoy making things that other people want to use, even if it's just an internal tool. I also enjoy getting paid for my labor. I've found that this is often a win-win situation.
Work doesn't have to be exploitive. Products don't have to exploit their users.
Viewing everything through the lens of production and consumption is like viewing the whole world as a big constraint optimization problem: (1) you end up torturing the meaning of words to fit your preconceived ideas, and (2) by doing so you miss hearing what other people are saying.