Case Study Club

The weekly read for designers who shape products.

The Dispatch

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Who's doing the thinking?

MIT's Media Lab put 54 students in EEG caps and had them write essays.

The ones who used ChatGPT showed the weakest brain connectivity of the three groups, and when asked to quote a line they'd written minutes before, 83% couldn't.

They had produced the words without ever owning them.

I lean on AI all day, so it stuck with me. The rule I set early was that it executes and I decide.

The trap is handing the deciding over too. The work still ships. It just stops being yours, and you'll feel it the way those students couldn't find their own sentences.

No connection.

Via Elisa Viglianese, writing in UX Collective.

Field Notes

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Stack Overflow question volume is falling as developers turn to AI and docs. CSS-Tricks: when we stop asking

WebAIM finds web accessibility measurably worse over the past year despite rising attention. WebAIM: tolerating inaccessibility

About 35% of websites published by mid-2025 are AI-generated or AI-assisted. AI on the internet

Debbie Millman's new TED talk argues the joy of finishing lasts minutes and the making is what sustains a practice. Design Observer: what sticks

Designers are reintroducing inconvenience and constraint into their work as a creative catalyst. It's Nice That: friction breeds creativity

The Portfolio

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Liam Matteson's portfolio at liam.cv, a clock widget beside a writing post titled Code as medium

liam.cv Portfolio, 2026

A design lead who skips case studies

Liam Matteson is a product design lead at Browserbase. His site carries no formal case studies. The frame here is seniority rather than process: the names he has worked with carry the weight, and his written pieces do the rest, laying out his core ideas and values directly.

Small playful widgets personalize the site without ever getting in the way. This is what separates a design-lead portfolio from a mid or even senior IC, who would still need to defend the work and the process.

From the Archive

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A late-1990s home computer setup, a CRT monitor on a wooden desk with a tower PC, keyboard, CDs and gaming magazines

mudmapmagazine.com Essay

The computer in the hallway

In the 1990s and early 2000s, a single computer often anchored a household's connection to the internet. It lived in a hallway, study, or shared corner of the home. Getting online was tied to a place, and often to a kind of domestic ritual. As Mud Map magazine puts it, the internet was once something a family gathered around, not something each person carried alone in their pocket.

The Tool

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The Just a Design List homepage, a curated index of design studios

justadesignlist.com Directory, 2026

A studio index curated by hand

Just a Design List is a hand-curated, searchable index of 814 design studios and independent practices across 54 countries. Wences Sanz-Alonso maintains it by hand, a deliberately slow alternative to algorithmic feeds that favors depth and human curation over growth metrics. It is built for studio scouting and for seeing where interesting work is actually happening, globally.

Written and edited by Jan Haaland. Published weekly from Norway.

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Issue No. 005

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