Real: Compliment. “Looks like the real thing” while working on the design means "this feels like it is already done or launch/production ready." Real goes back to Latin *res* "property, goods, matter, thing, affair." Paradoxically, in the tradition of maker's knowledge, made things are more real than nature. Nature is always, to a degree, speculation and not a "fact" (from Lat. facere, to make), meaning a made thing. The metaphysics of Maker's Knowledge nicely explains the delight in reaching reality by making things.
Real Architects: Mythical craftspeople who plan real houses, print plans on real paper and pin them on real boards. They develop their ideas as real cardboard models and pull real all-nighters before handing in their submissions as real pitches. After decades of heavy internet usage, nobody at iA could handle that much reality. Working hours for Real Architects remind us that in spite of us feeling Cold and Exposed at times, information architects actually live the sweet life of California.
Redundancy: “The repetition of elements within a message that prevents the failure of communication of information—is the greatest antidote to Entropy." (Encyclopaedia Britannica) A sign of an unfinished design. However, humans rely on a degree of redundancy in communication. It provides orientation, improves learnability, helps to separate signal from noise and supports error correction. See also Peak Minimalism.
Refactoring: Term beloved by young devs and most hated by seniors. Refactoring is “what experienced developers do without bringing it up explicitly. The opposite of refactoring is code rot. Once someone proposes to ‘refactor’ they really mean to say they want to rewrite it.” (Thijs van der Vossen). When we hear “refactoring” we hear ”big rewrite” and instinctively point to this classic text on the Netscape refactoring disaster: “It's important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time. First of all, you probably don’t even have the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don’t actually have ‘more experience’. You're just going to make most of the old mistakes again and introduce some new problems that weren’t in the original version.” Things You Should Never Do, Part I, by Joel Spolsky. Code needs to be structured and documented. However, great code is not necessarily neat and clean. “Web design is engineering” and a matter of compromise, not perfection.
Rhetoric: The art of the “art of using efficient word patterns.” Just as grammar is often misunderstood and under-appreciated, rhetoric also suffers from a bad reputation, commonly associated with manipulative speech. Properly understood and used, rhetoric allows both the writer and the reader to have more fun.
