I’ve got some posts queued up for publishing over the next several days. Most are fragments and short thoughts that I’ve had lying around in some draft queue somewhere for far too long. Most of them are wrong in some fashion that I haven’t bothered to think about yet.
May the reader beware: contents may contain untruths.
I needed teachers to force me to get out of my comfort zone, and partners to get me unstuck.
…what happened? It isn’t a failure of desire so much as one of will. Or not will, exactly, but focus: the ability to still my mind long enough to inhabit someone else’s world, and to let that someone else inhabit mine.
Eventually I get there, but some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down. What I’m struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it’s mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age.
When settling in to read something deep (long-form articles from The New Yorker, Infinite Jest (which I’ve been working on for the past few months) ), I have to fight the urge to check something, anything: tweets, new posts, whatever I can get my hands on. I’m only able to really put my head down and concentrate if I’ve got everything else off. I have to put some ambient music on loop, close the laptop, lock the phone, and force myself to disconnect.
This quote is largely off-topic, but it’s too lovely to not call out:
Back then, if I’d had the language for it, I might have argued that the world within the pages was more compelling than the world without; I was reading both to escape and to be engaged.
This perfectly captures how I feel after an especially satisfying novel/novella/short story. “How wondrous would it be to exist in this world instead of mine?”
Each and every pushable button, darkened pixel, and emanated chirp represent one more thing that has to be processed, understood, and either heeded or disregarded by a user. Measure design decisions carefully against total available cognitive load, lest you overwhelm and alienate those who attempt to interact with your work.
Simple inputs, with high fidelity (maintain accurate, fast, one-to-one translations of even minute movements into input) and low numbers of modes (ideally one), remove a large interaction frustration point for users. The questions they’re continually asking themselves is, “How do I express my current desire to the device?”
Let’s define success a bit differently for computing hardware: “how tightly does your solution fit the problem?” The original iPod’s input devices (and later click wheel) are very nearly perfect: they provide linear and accelerated scrolling, selection, and playback controls (play/pause, back/rewind, forward/fast-forward) with one wheel, a center button, and four pushable locations on the wheel.
There were no other inputs to provide to the device, and there was nothing on the device that demanded complex or convoluted actions to bend these simple inputs into useful conveyance of ideas.
More generally: how well-defined is your problem, and how tightly does your solution fill that potential space? Does it run over or under?
“What kind of jeans are those?”
“Oh, they’re just jeans.”
Just Jeans.
Righteous.
Let’s accept this video as “the future”, for a moment.
People will be even stupider. As computers “teach” us even the most mundane and simplest of daily tasks, our ability to solve problems on any scale will grow weak and under-exercised, and the large majority of society will resemble something more like semi-robotic fleshpuppets, not free-thinking, fully-functional human beings.
But then again, I haven’t had my coffee yet.
An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.
— J.D Salinger (via theimpossiblecool)
