Quotes about interfaces
I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it’s too expensive to change the interface. – Jaron Lanier
A picture is worth a thousand words. An interface is worth a thousand pictures. –Ben Schneiderman
Anyone can dream up great ideas, but an idea is nothing until it’s realized, be it as a website, a physical product, an app, or a user interface. – Jens Martin Skibsted
Interface Philosophy
I stumbled onto this blogpost called Interface Philosophy by Pipsqueak Productions. First of all, when you go onto the website, there’s this gray dot grid that gets rendered at the top of the page. There’s on dot that’s circled with red highlight. For a while, I thought it was a glitch, but I felt the sudden compulsion to click it. In fact, I noticed this dot shifts to a new position on the grid every so often. When I did click it, I was taken to another blog post on a random topic.
What a brilliant way of creating organic links between knowledge artifacts. “Pleasant surprise” is one of the most joyful experiences in life.
An interface is the user’s entire interaction with a designed experience.
The adjective entire and designed here hold a lot of subtext. When reading the blog post, I notice that Pipsqueak extends the commonly held view that the most important qualities of an interface are only the look and the feel of it. Instead, they suggest that “all the points of contact, physical and cognitive between two separate systems” is an interface.
It’s crucially important that I think about this philosophically. The whole purpose of this “knowledge ocean” is to create a system, a knowledge ecosytem, that grows itself naturally. I don’t want to be just a fish in this ocean, constantly grappling with the enormity of the system (if I even have the intellectual capacity to understand the full power of my microcosm). I also don’t want to be an enterprising explorer visiting this relic of an ocean for the first time from a distant planet millennia in the future; I don’t want to constantly feel surprised by circumstances or processes that should be natural to be.
Rather, I think I want to feel like a seasoned fisherman living off of his “land”, on my handmade vessel weathered with positive and negative experiences. I want to be familiar, skilled, and constantly curious about all of the classical methods of making my living.
Feeling fit and brave enough to jump into the ocean with my spear to get exactly what I want to pull. And in doing so, enjoying the process. My resulting meal tastes a lot better.
During calmer times, conducive for contemplation, I want to be able to sit back on my deck, grab my favorite fishing pole, and spend time in collected solitude waiting for serendipity to strike. You never know what the ocean will give you, but you take every offering as a blessing or prasada from the power that is. Who knows? With minimal effort you might catch a bluefin tuna, quickly head back to shore, and make a killing in the market. Or, you might be just in the mood for a fight; a black marlin hooks onto the line and you spend the next few timeless hours in perfect concentration to defeat a worthy opponent. You reel it in finally, exhausted, with a smile on your face. It might be worth next to nothing in the market, but the experience becomes a visceral part of your identity, adding fuel to your strength to persevere.
These are all important considerations for me to make in the design of my knowledge ocean.
Here are some of my objectives with this iniative:
- Find what I need to find, quickly
- Organize the internal chaos of my mind to create something beautiful
- Write and iterate on new ideas based on my trawls
- Share what gives me joy with others, with as many multitudes of contextual dimensions as the receiver would like to have from me
- Create my reputation in the “knowledge worker industry” and especially in my professional field of Data Science
- Eventually put together a stable software distribution with tools of various abstractions to help others cultivate knowledge oceans of their own
- To create a comprehensive historical record of my existence for my loved ones
- To help me remember. Memory is everything. To help me resolve my own hypocrisies. To remember what I stood for from when I was young and curious to when I am weathered and complacent in the future. I hope this doesn’t happen with great effect, but aging is an axiom.
- To shift my cosmic balance towards creatorship rather than consumption
- To celebrate the values of free and open source software.
- To help establish my own values and create my own dharma.
Think about these two phrases: “Design” and “Systems Engineering”
What do you immediately think about? This is an example of a word association test.