Design Sense

Design Sense 👁️

A sense is ambient, involuntary, always sampling. This skill models what a working designer carries in their head at all times — not a checklist consulted at review time, but constraints that veto and redirect while the work happens.

The founding case: David Ungar critiqued Don Hopkins' Unity3D pie menus. The menus brought the selected label to the cursor (good — the cheapest target walks over and stands under your gaze), but animated the deselected items retreating (bad — peripheral motion is a hardware interrupt; a dozen slices collapsing fire a dozen interrupts, all pointed away from the one thing the user chose). The takeaway wasn't a fix; it was a permanent resident of the designer's head:

Motion is a foveation summons. Only send it where you want the eye.

That principle needed a place to live. So does Fitts' law. So does Chris Trottier's design-by-accretion. Rather than a swarm of single-law skills, one socket with plugin registries — the copy-that shape (kernel + formats/ + house-styles/), the cursor-mirror growth pattern (one entry point, many organs).

Scope

User interface, interactivity, game design — simulation games are the native genre — and software design (Self's power of simplicity, Korz's de-objectification: design of the invisible). Not visual styling. This skill never tells you what colors to use; a sense is perception and judgment, not palette.

The registries

All plugins are Markdown — human-readable first, k-lineable names, working links (relative in-repo, GitHub URLs cross-repo). Each registry carries its own kernel: GLANCE.yml to scan, CARD.yml with dispatch-table advertisements, README.md for format and norms.

• lenses/ — 31 ways of seeing: always-on perceptual and attention constraints, active whenever you're looking at (or designing) a surface. Fitts: cost grows with distance, shrinks with size. Foveation: motion summons the eye. Stage magic: simple view until complex truth. lenses/CARD.yml dispatches by design context.
• methods/ — 32 ways of working: constraints on process. Design-by-accretion: layer, accumulate, tune late. Worse-is-better: can you remove more? One-page designs: the doc is a poster. methods/CARD.yml dispatches by phase of work.
• masters/ — 59 heads to borrow. A master file gives you a person's votes (positive imperatives, linked to the plugins that cash them) and vetoes (the lines they won't cross), plus the plugins attributed to them. masters/CARD.yml dispatches by problem; load several heads for an adversarial committee.
• seeds/ — the accretion intake. Harvested principles land raw in dated batch files with Planted/Todo journal sections; they germinate (grounded in a source, named, stated plainly, classified) and graduate to the registries. Sinsemilla means without seed — the pipeline is seeds in, sinsemilla out; a cured registry is seedless by definition. (Simsemilla being, canonically, what they smoke in The Sims.)

Two axes, one test: lenses constrain attention while you look; methods constrain process while you build. A candidate that's neither may be a master trait, or isn't ready to leave seeds.

Protocol

1. Designing or critiquing a surface — load the relevant lenses first, before proposing anything. Lenses veto: if a proposal sends motion where you don't want the eye, or puts a small target far away, the lens speaks before taste does.
2. Planning design work — load methods. Accretion says don't top-down specify; tuned emergence says budget the late tuning pass now, because fun arrives last.
3. Channeling a designer — load the master file, then the plugins it indexes. Borrowing a head means adopting its vetoes, not imitating its output.
4. Harvesting — quotable principle found in the wild? PLANT-SEED: append it to seeds/ raw with source and attribution. Germination can wait; losing it can't.
5. Germinating — name it kebab-case, state it in 1-3 plain sentences, cite sources (point, don't copy), classify it, write the registry file. Gate: a seed graduates only if a working designer would actually keep it loaded.

Authoring a plugin

Follow the schema in CARD.yml. Plugins are Markdown files whose anatomy is: header (name, class, attribution, optional dispatch line pointing at a whole moollm skill), one bold statement (the loadable form — it must work without the source documents), a body with mechanism and corpus exhibits, Go deeper external links (Wikipedia, founding papers, primary articles), Sources into the corpus with working links, and See for kin. Master files replace the statement with a Head paragraph and add Votes (do this, bulletized, linked) and Vetoes (never this). The statement or head is what survives context compression ("motion is a foveation summons"); everything else is there for the reader who clicked through.

Part of MOOLLM

This skill is part of MOOLLM — see the repo README and skills/README. Deep context: README.md. Planning and harvest log: CAULDRON.md.