A new book from Nico B. Boyce
The Racing Line
Building systems that let friction do the work.
Coming soon. The book is with the editors. Register your interest and you'll be first to hear when it ships, with early-reader access for the people who put their hand up first.
What it's about
The Racing Line is a book about designing with intention. It's about being deliberate, thoughtful, and purposeful when you create a process, build a product, run a hiring round, or set a metric.
Between every person and the thing they're trying to do, there's a layer: the form, the queue, the metric, the menu, the road sign, the hiring round, the keyboard, the support ticket. That layer is never neutral. You can choose it on purpose or inherit it by accident, but it's always there.
Carrying speed on a track isn't a question of fighting friction. It's a question of riding the line the friction already wants you to take. The same lens applies to software, physical products, processes, and institutions: deliberate design, process optimisation, and considered interactions wherever a human meets a system.
It isn't a book about which choice is right. Sometimes the right move is to disappear into the background. Sometimes it's to use deliberate friction to shape the choices people make. Sometimes the texture of using the thing is the product itself. None of those is virtuous or failed. They're dimensions, and the work is choosing where you sit on each one, on purpose.
The timing matters. We're increasingly handing the layer to defaults, and the question "what is this layer doing on my behalf, and is that what I wanted?" stops being a luxury and becomes basic literacy.
Who it's for
The Racing Line is for people who design processes, build products, run hiring rounds, lead support teams, set metrics, or otherwise ship the layers other people live inside. It's also for everyone who lives inside layers other people chose and would like to start seeing the choices.
By the end of it you shouldn't be able to walk into a shop, a website, a meeting, or a waiting room without asking: was this designed with intention? Does it work this way for reasons? Are the goals being achieved? Or is there a better racing line through it?
About the author
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The book is with the editors. Register your interest and you'll be first to hear when it's ready.
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