September 24, 2023

Creating a button while tasting its code

Gal Rubin
With lessons from the incredible memory and cross-wired senses of "S"
Creating a button while tasting its code

Salomon Shereshevsky, a Russian journalist, had special a skill. It all started when each morning the editor at Shereshevsky's workplace met with the staff and handed out assignments for the day, with the list of addresses and instructions being quite long. The editor noted that Shereshevsky never took notes. He was about to confront him for being inattentive when at his request, Shereshevsky repeated the entire assignment word for word. The editor suggested that Shereshevsky submit to psychological testing.

Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevsky

That’s where Shereshevsky met Alexander Luria, a neuropsychologist who has since then studied Shereshevsky for almost 30 years.

When Shereshevsky listened to Beethoven playing, he immediately saw the color green. Touching his house's door would trigger a sweet sensation in his mouth. Shereshevsky was graced with a fascinating phenomenon called synesthesia - where senses get mixed up and cross-wired.

Time is spatial and colored related. Artwork by Lucy Engelman, who has synesthesia.

The fascinating aspect of Shereshevsky's gift is that images his synesthesia produced, usually enabled him to memorize. everything. lifelong.
His extraordinary memory allowed him to remember every single thing he had ever read or seen. Since then Shereshevsky was more commonly known as 'S', or "the man who couldn't forget".

At JUX, we're working on these superpowers - but for product designers who create software experiences.

In the same way that Shereshevsky touched a tree and “felt” beige, a product designer will create a button, knowing that in addition another event is occurring during the process. code is written.

Developers won't spend time recreating each vector design from scratch, resulting in sloppy generic code. developers will work on business logic and quality. designers will essentially create APIs for developers to use.

When a product designer hands off, a developer colleague will receive something like this:

This technological advancement has tons of implications in the software design & dev workflow space. a code-based design tool that shifts authority from developers to designers. designers will see their screen in action while they design, and not after implementation, making them proud of their designs, since what's pushed to production now will have 1:1 ratio with what they designed. This change balances out the staging/production process and introduces a more efficient working process.


The Why

We get up early every day to establish a unified language between all squad members. We believe that the key to improving time to production is through the juxtaposition of product design and code. These will be the two parallel senses that work for designers and developers like synesthesia did for ‘S’.

So why work twice when we can create a button while tasting its code?

Bon Appétit.