We had the absolute pleasure of visiting a private tile collection in Palermo called Museo delle Maioliche during our Automattic Team meetup this week. The collector, Pio Mellina, started his tile collection at age 11 and opens his home to the public for only a few hours a day, with a guided tour. Each of the 10 rooms on display holds the Majolica Tile Collection, organized by region of Italy and era, and made between the 15th and 20th centuries.
One comment the guide made stuck with me. As we moved through the rooms, it was clear the tools improved; the stencil, for example, made tiles easier to make: straighter lines, more complex shapes, and could now be replicated. Designs became more uniform and more intricate, and the imperfections disappeared.
Yet the older tiles are the expensive ones, the ones where the real value remains. He walked us around the room explaining how they were made: how colour was limited to the pigments available at the time, and how the slight imperfection of a hand-drawn curve adds to a tile’s value. That got me thinking about when imperfection has higher value.
Tooling in general follows the same path. As it advances, we can do more, produce faster, and let more people do things that used to need a specialist. Designers shipping code; Devs and PMs shipping UI. But have we lost the imperfect?
As an Ops person, I must admit I love a tool, a framework, and some structure to a process. But standing inside four walls covered floor to ceiling in hand-crafted tiles made me stop and think. We talk a lot about craft in design, and how we spend years training to become experts in our field, the same goes for engineers and PMs. And now AI lets us ship across teams and disciplines, but in the rush we risk producing “slop” and losing that imperfect curve and the care that came from working within cetain constraints.
I’m not saying we should stop using AI or that better tools are bad. I find it fascinating that these worlds are opening up to more people. I just think we should pause and remember why we do this work because faster output isn’t the same as better output.
What’s your imperfect curve? The part of your craft you’d never hand over to a tool?
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