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/`](lenses/README.md)** — 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](lenses/CARD.yml) dispatches by design context. - **[`methods/`](methods/README.md)** — 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](methods/CARD.yml) dispatches by phase of work. - **[`masters/`](masters/README.md)** — 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](masters/CARD.yml) dispatches by problem; load several heads for an adversarial committee. - **[`seeds/`](seeds/README.md)** — 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](https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm) — see the [repo README](https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/README.md) and [skills/README](https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/README.md). Deep context: [README.md](README.md). Planning and harvest log: [CAULDRON.md](CAULDRON.md).