Latest / The Feed & The Thread / The Feed & The Thread - September 27, 2026

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The Feed & The Thread - September 27, 2026 · The Feed & The Thread

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  A quarter of web pages from the last decade are gone. Even
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  though their sites are still operational? Yes, and designers
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  are losing their work to silent tool shutdowns.
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  Welcome to The Feed and The Thread, brought to you by
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  Chicago Camps. The Feed & The Thread is available online at
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  feed and thread dot com to submit your feeds, or download
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  our app for all the feeds and threads delivered right to your
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  pocket.
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  The tools we use to build and store our work are disappearing.
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  And the industry is starting to ask who's responsible when that
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  happens. Dora Czerna at UX Design.cc makes the case in
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  "Where does your work go when the tool shuts down?" that a
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  quarter of web pages from the last decade have vanished. This
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  loss hits hardest when the parent site is still
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  operational, yet the specific content is gone. It forces us to
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  look at our reliance on third- party tools for storing research
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  and design assets. If we don't take ownership of our data,
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  we're betting against our own continuity. Fabricio Teixeira
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  at UX Design.cc explores this shift in "For the Designless,
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  The death of the deliverable, iPhone Duo’s UX". The piece
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  introduces the concept of the designless, a group that lacks
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  the access or motivation to engage with design. It also
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  challenges the idea that wireframes are the final
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  product. The real value lies in the problem-solving process, not
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  the static deliverable. This rewrites the assumption that our
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  output is the design itself. Other articles today from UX
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  Design.cc on digital preservation and design theory.
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  A designer is skipping the reading phase entirely, and
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  asking the community to validate that shortcut. Over on
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  r/UXDesign, one practitioner argues that feeding raw
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  requirements directly into an AI agent creates a better baseline
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  than starting from a blank canvas. They treat the AI output
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  like a junior engineer's draft, using it as a starting point for
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  critique in Figma rather than a final answer. This approach
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  reframes the designer's role from creator to editor, which
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  challenges the idea that deep manual ideation is always the
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  most efficient path to a superior design. In the same
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  subreddit, a designer joining a rigid waterfall environment is
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  asking for book recommendations to bridge a gap in user empathy.
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  Their team signs off on requirements that fail during
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  testing because stakeholders lack a dedicated researcher, and
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  the designer wants resources to help them advocate for real user
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  needs without the usual research support. It's a practical plea
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  for tools that can translate abstract requirements into
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  human-centered evidence before the code is written. On
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  r/ProductDesign, a design engineer is sharing a side
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  project that helps parents find high-quality children's
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  products. They built it to return to hands-on work and
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  solve a personal pain point, focusing on a simple, one-note
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  interface that cuts through the noise of low-quality options.
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  The project stands out as a reminder that effective design
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  often isn't about adding features, but about removing
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  friction and trust barriers for a specific, vulnerable audience.
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  The common thread today is the tension between relying on
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  external tools for efficiency and maintaining the human
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  judgment that actually serves the user.
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  The Feed and The Thread is brought to you by Chicago Camps.
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  For a weekly and monthly exploration of the patterns and
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  signals across UX, you can also check out Patterns and Signals
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  at the website patterns and signals dot com. Chicago Camps
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  will have more events in 2027. You can submit to be a speaker
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  at a future event at Chicago Camps dot org.
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  A quarter of web pages from the last decade are gone, and that
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  statistic lands differently when you realize it's not just about
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  old links. It's about the fact that a significant portion of
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  that missing content sits on domains that are still alive,
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  which means the specific work was deleted or lost while the
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  platform itself kept running. That distinction changes
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  everything about how we store things. We've been treating
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  third-party tools like they're permanent repositories, but
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  they're really just temporary caches. If a designer's research
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  or a company's design system lives inside a SaaS platform
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  that decides to sunset a feature, or if the account gets
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  locked, that work is effectively erased. We're betting our
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  continuity on someone else's business model. And that
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  connects directly to the "death of the deliverable" argument we
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  saw in the feed. Fabricio Teixeira argues that the static
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  wireframe isn't the real product anyway; the value is in the
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  problem-solving process. So, if the deliverable isn't the point,
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  why are we so terrified that the container holding it might
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  disappear? We've built a culture where the file is the proof of
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  work, rather than the decision- making that created it. I think
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  that's where the anxiety comes from. If the file is the proof,
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  and the file can vanish, then the proof is gone. But if we
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  shift the mindset to Teixeira's point, the file is just a
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  snapshot. The real asset is the reasoning, the context, the
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  "why." That reasoning doesn't live in a Figma file. It lives
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  in the team's collective memory and their documentation habits.
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  The loss of a visual is a loss of the institutional knowledge
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  of why a design decision was made. Exactly. And that's where
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  the "designless" concept fits in. If we're not engaging with
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  the design process deeply, if we're just consuming outputs,
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  we're vulnerable to this loss. But if we're active participants
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  in the process, the loss of a specific file becomes a
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  logistical problem. We can rebuild the file. We can't
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  rebuild the intuition if we never cultivated it. So the fix
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  is making the reasoning explicit and portable. It's about writing
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  down the "why" in a way that doesn't depend on a proprietary
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  tool. It's about treating our own intellectual property as the
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  primary asset, not the software that houses it. That's a shift
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  from tool-dependence to thought- dependence. And that's a much
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  stronger foundation. The question isn't whether your
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  tools will last, it's whether your thinking does.
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  That's The Feed and The Thread for today. We'll catch you next
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  time!