Cataplasm. Athanor. Estoppel.1 If you know the definition of these words without having to lean on Wikipedia or another source, you’re probably either a linguist or really good at Scrabble. The terms are, respectively, jargon from the fields of medicine, alchemy, and the law in the 1650’s.
KPIs. Synergy. Stakeholders. Over 350 years later, we have our own jargon to wrestle with, terms that sometimes have real meaning, but are often just inserted into our daily conversations with our colleagues to avoid getting specific, or to sound authoritative.
Our guest this week, Blaine Billingsley, is a staff designer at OpenAI who is openly allergic to the kinds of jargon we often run into in the tech world. He studied comparative religion in college, and while reading ancient texts, had to try to understand the real meaning of the words, as well as all of the ways people might interpret it. So he finds it counterproductive to use terms that are ambigous
In our conversation with Blaine, we learned why designers should be at the forefront of the battle against jargon. We also learned how to win over a pushy PM, what design work actually looks like inside OpenAI, and why more experience doesn't always get you better results from AI.
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The battle against jargon
Blaine traces his allergy to vague terms straight back to those ancient texts:
“If I do have a unique quality, like personally in my career, I think it is that I’m just like really allergic to jargon phrases. And I do think actually part of that comes from studying religion where you’re reading a lot of ancient texts and you’re like, what does this really actually mean?”
Jargon sounds silly, but that isn’t the real problem. The real problem is that it lets everyone off the hook. “I find corporate jargon in particular, but any kind of jargon just obfuscating and disempowering,” he told us. “I think it’s a way for us to not get specific.”
Every company he’s worked at has built up its own dialect of “things that are kind of always okay to say,” and those phrases, he says, “always shut down deeper thought.” Blaine thinks designers are the right people to call that out, because the user is literally our job:
