directory fourteen
In a world where producing things has become cheap, the scarce thing is judgment. Taste, clarity, the willingness to decide and stand behind the decision. Most of what I write, build, and think about sits somewhere on that line.
This is where I keep it.
My work, for the last decade, has been building design and product organisations. The roles have changed. The job hasn't: turn product ambition into something that actually ships, build the teams and standards that make serious work repeatable, and hold design to outcomes a business can read on a dashboard. I'm less interested in craft for its own sake than in what craft produces when it's aimed at the right problem.
A few things I keep coming back to.
Creativity got rationalised into a process, and the process quietly replaced the thinking. The industry agreed that if you ran the research, used the system, and referenced the right trend, you were doing design. It made everyone a UX designer and almost nobody a thinker. You can see the result in every product you open: the same components, arranged with slightly different confidence.
Intrinsic motivation is the only signal of quality that doesn't lie. Not salary, not title, not the CV. The people worth hiring, backing, and working for are the ones who can't stop improving the thing because something in them refuses to ship it worse than it could be. Everyone else will do the work when they're watched and coast when they aren't. I'm scanning for this in every interview, every founder pitch, every team.
AI belongs behind the product, not in front of it. Most "AI features" are a chat box bolted onto something that was already working, or a label stuck on a payment flow nobody wanted to have a conversation with. The interesting work is the layer underneath, the one that makes the experience simpler without ever announcing itself. Pro users don't want to chat. They want the system to notice what matters and get out of the way.
In high-stakes interfaces, the UI is where the ethics actually live. I've spent time around defense tech and came out of it convinced that a human in the loop who's been handed the wrong option under stress isn't really in the loop. The policy document is downstream. The button placement is the ethics.
Directory, not blog. It isn't in order. It won't always be writing. If tomorrow I launch a chair or a product or a side thing, it lives here too, under the same roof.
If any of this is useful to you, good. My CV and LinkedIn are linked. If you want to talk: alex.dapunt@gmail.com.
— Alex Dapunt