Sunday morning thoughts on Henry Ford and UX
I've been thinking a great deal about the idea of industrialized software production, and the impact it has on, among other things, employment for students. This is an incomplete and completely overly-simplistic analogy, but I keep coming back to Ford and the process of assembly, mostly because the word "assembly" keeps coming up over and over in the larger conversation of design, primarily in the context of Figma and design systems.
I'm no expert in Ford, but here's a brief, surface-level approximation of the timeline of car production at scale, cobbled together from my memory of design history from 30 years ago, web histories, and our friendly Wikipedia:
So to summarize: cars went from nothing to a one-off hobby in lots of years; then, to limited assembly production in about five years, with growth, "celebration of workers", and great money; to huge efficiencies in about ten years; to labor disputes related to fair practice in another ten; and then to robots, and the inevitable shrinking workforce, in another twenty. Call it 70 years from magic to robots, with stops along the way for golden years and profit sharing, huge jumps in efficiency, a little racism, the need for fewer and fewer people, and now we have the Ford Escape and the Toyota Corolla.
That sure looks familiar-ish. Engelbart in 1968 with an entirely one-off platform, through BBSes from the late 70s through the late 80s, running packages like PCBoard (My stuff was on UltraBBS). Software in production in the 80s and 90s; I'm old enough to remember buying it in boxes, and before CDs became a thing, installing one of the Kings Quest games from something like 25 floppy disks. The crazy of the internet in the mid-1990s, with the complete lack of infrastructure; when we built Barcraze in 1999, my friend Zack made his fraternity pledges watch the server and restart Jrun when it crashed. Pure experimentation with tons of VC money in random stuff, a crash, rise, crash, then formalized web systems and application framework packages like jquery, the rise of ticketing systems and requirements in, software out product/engineering/design squads, a slow decline into blanding that is today's apps, and then old people like me telling everyone to get off my lawn. With the exception of the union part, there's a similar pattern in software right now, and the Unimate is staring at us in the face as AI-generated layouts.
