The Revolution in Methodology

Product development at a modern technology company is driven, almost pathologically driven, by use-cases.

What is this thing for? That really does seem like a good question, doesn't it? It's not and I'll explain why. At some point in the 2010s or maybe before, designers started inserting the word 'empathy' into everything they said about their practice. You couldn't get away from it. It was all a pretense though. The notion that each of your decisions was made from a position of “user empathy” is really quite self-involved when you think about it. It is an assertion that you, as a trained designer, possess the rarified talent of being able to understand and share the feelings of another. It is paternalistic. So are use-cases. They suppose that you know what this thing is for. But nothing is actually for anything. Things exist and people find utility in them. Sometimes people have to go out of their way to address specific utilizations by synthesizing or combining things. But the things themselves do not belong to those utilizations. They contain multitudes. We learned this about art last century. Art doesn't just mean what the artist means by it, it means what we mean by it too. So I think use-cases are highly overrated.

I prefer concise strokes that beget infinite possibilities.

The shockingly minimal criteria required to achieve Turing completeness - there's one that's done wonders for us. Though, as Alan Perlis famously put it, "Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy."

It turns out that within that concise stroke (the programmable computer) another even more stunning one becomes possible.

DeepMind’s mission statement puts it best:
Solve Intelligence. Use it to solve everything else.

This is the best concision-to-possibility ratio we'll ever see.