| name | design-sense |
| description | Ambient design skill socket — the working designer's head. Always-on perceptual and attention constraints (lenses like Fitts' law and foveation), process constraints (methods like design-by-accretion and tuned-emergence), and borrowable designer heads (masters), organized as plugin registries. Covers user interface, interactivity, game design (especially simulation games), and software design. Never dictates visual styling. Use when designing or critiquing any interactive surface, pacing design work over time, or curing a harvested design principle into loadable form. |
| allowed-tools | ["Read","Write","Grep","Glob"] |
| related | ["copy-that","cauldron","play-learn-lift","simulator-effect","procedural-rhetoric","k-lines"] |
| license | MIT |
| tags | ["design","ui","interaction","game-design","simulation","attention","ambient"] |
| credits | Don Hopkins; lenses and methods credited per plugin (Fitts, Ungar, Trottier, Wright, Minsky, Bogost, ...) |
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.- — 59 heads to borrow. A master file gives
you a person's (positive imperatives, linked to the plugins that cash
them) and (the lines they won't cross), plus the plugins attributed
to them. dispatches by problem; load
several heads for an adversarial committee.
