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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

Full-time designers gotta justify their jobs somehow.

With Android 12 they introduced Material Design 3, the latest iteration of the design system used by Android and other Google products. Their designers haven't even bothered to publish a proper and usable spec this time, but Google marketed it as production ready in blog posts, Google I/O talks and press releases.

The published Material Design 3 spec is missing several basic components, it doesn't even have a checkbox. Google is inviting developers to migrate to the latest version of the design system, while their own teams at Angular and Flutter are now mixing M2 and M3 components and design concepts, and hitting roadblocks because of incompatible elevation and typography changes in certain components.

https://m3.material.io

> it doesn't even have a checkbox

This seems to be intentional. It has a switch component. You don't need a checkbox and a switch.

It isn't intentional, the official implementations of M3 include a new checkbox.

We need to find a way to move on, once something is perfected. Because if we don't we kinda ruin what we have already perfected. It's called planned obsolescence and below are some resources on the same. It is widely used across industries for over a century and kinda plays a huge role in climate change.

Veritasium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE

DW (mostly about phone) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aYJPonRJd8

The problem lies deeper. There's only so much work that the humanity legitimately needs done, but the economy is built upon the assumption that everyone can get a job. So we end up creating jobs the society at large doesn't actually benefit from to make sure every person has to do some work to earn money to live. This includes ballooning IT companies about which you can't help but keep asking "where does enough work even come from to occupy all these people, in a product that's essentially finished".

I don't know how to even approach solving this.

Further reading - The Rise of Bullshit Jobs https://jacobin.com/2018/06/bullshit-jobs-david-graeber-work...

The solution is both simultaneously simple, yet incredibly nuanced and socially complex: UBI.

And because universal basic income is so nuanced and socially complex, I feel like this problem is here to stay until we reach post-scarcity, if we ever do.

Exactly. That's without even considering a botched rollout of UBI causing inflation and inequality like we've never known before.

Iterating design after success to make it worse isn't the same thing as planned obsolescence.

> We need to find a way to move on, once something is perfected

The GUI/UI/UX on Android is so close to perfection like a zygote is close to a human being.

This is one of the posts I wish I could upvote more than once.

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