ABOUT

FIASCI is a small design studio based in Ahmedabad, India. We specialize in designing technical enterprise software for various domains, including Data Science, Machine Learning, DevOps, and Computer Aided Design, among others. We consult and contract with a variety of seed stage startups, mostly from Y Combinator. Get in touch at fiasci.design at gmail dot com.

SOFTWARE TOOLS

Today, Humans and computation are irreversibly intertwined. Our lives are governed by invisible systems that subliminally impact our decision making. Computation has become a human right, just like sanitation and electricity. Computers subliminally define our values, personalities, and proclivities in a constant and pervasive fashion. Interfacing with machines is an act of negotiation; we learn the machine, its quirks and its ways, all in the hope of forming a symbiotic relationship with our tool that augments us beyond what we were previously capable of. Observe any expert at their job and you will find a deep relationship between human and tool, intertwined in a way that creates a new being—not an augmented human but a new tool-human amalgam that is capable of previously unknown emergent behavior. Watch a pianist practicing, a street vendor chopping onions, a Japanese woodworker perfecting a dovetail joint, a factory worker assembling circuitry, or an actor applying makeup. This gray space between the tool and its wielder, the machine and its user, the instrument and its player, is the space in which good design exists. It’s a liminal space that is simultaneously a state of mind and also a bunch of physical things, like buttons, knobs, and handles. FIASCI aims to live in this space.

EMBRACING COMPLEXITY

Complex technology is hard to explain without analogies. We reason about software by mapping its technological primitives to human-centric concepts. Common actions such as copying, sorting, filtering, and deleting are all deeply embedded in real world actions and concepts. As designers, our goal is to make these technological primitives easier for humans to understand. This is easy when talking about concepts like ‘news feeds’, ‘followers’, ‘e-commerce checkouts’, and ‘setting an alarm’. But this becomes significantly more difficult when you are thinking about ‘merging a git branch’, ‘forking a repository’, ‘subdividing a 3D mesh’, ‘publishing breaking changes’, or ‘inserting keyframes’. The dominant narrative around software design often talks about simplicity, delight, and beauty. I welcome you to challenge these reductive notions – we want our tools to harness complexity, not shy away from it. Our tools should learn from us, grow with us, and shape themselves around our esoteric workflows, needs, and tendencies. Words like beauty and fluidity should be implicit, not explicit. the best design is complex but invisible – the user shouldn’t realize that they just went through a workflow that took countless weeks, months, or even years to craft. if the user says ‘it’s beautiful’, you might’ve failed. If they say nothing and complete their task, you succeeded. This inversion is not very rewarding on the outset – designing for invisibility, instead of for a resounding ‘aha’ moment of instant dopamine can be demotivating. This is a common concept in the world of hospitality – a good butler is invisible – they appear as if out of thin air when needed, and recede back into the background otherwise. Similiarly, good design should emerge from within the tool, separately and simultaneously, in service of its users.