out with the ideas!
so i’m thinking a lot about ideas.
my ideas, other people’s ideas, ideas we share, ideas we keep to ourselves…
this makes a great deal of sense, i suppose, since in many ways i am in the business of ideas – connecting the dots between an amorphous, glimmering concept to a fully formed, solid manifestation that can be seen and shared and played with is what designers do. a final manifestation
the thing is, i’m not that interested in the final manifestation.
the difference, i think, is that i’m not thinking about a specific idea, i’m thinking about ideas as a material of their own, and about how much of my work is really about building the tools that people need to manipulate and explore their ideas on their own.
when i was working at the hollytree, i found myself, as always, commenting on the design of the things we used. the water glasses were stupidly bottom-heavy, for example. an attempt to make them not tip over gone terribly wrong, i believe, since the designers apparently didn’t think about the fact that glasses are quite often upside down in restaurant settings – in the dishwasher, for example – so while bottom-heavy glasses might behave admirably when bumped on a table by a slightly inebriated or clumsy customer, they then turn around and wreak total havoc and frustration when carried about by totally competent kitchen porters and waitstaff, leading to more breakages than would probably occur were they just neutrally weighted.
i racked up similar complaints about the fancy adjustable table legs which screwed and unscrewed themselves whenever tables were moved, leading to wobblier tables and more pinched fingers than if we had just been compelled to cram a napkin under the occasional natural rebel, and about the rounded handle knives that were the bane of formal table setting because they sometimes decided that a vertical orientation was simply not in their nature, and they would rather spin around and make the frazzled waitstaff feel like they were playing a game with a poltergeist.
all in a day’s work.
so what does one do with ideas like these?
i was more interested in the fact that observations like these must be everywhere, in every workplace, waiting for someone to take the time to swoop in, collect them, and transmit them to budding (or established, i suppose) entrepreneurs. we spend a lot of energy training people to be designers so that they can go out and observe and interview people to find out things that are everyday knowledge for the “locals”, and one model of design is that we just get enough missionaries out there to
in order for this to happen, computing has to become more malleable
there are limits to the amount of personalization designs of chairs and shirts and helmets could allow. not so with the digital world. the only limit to the amount of personalization is the size and shape of the window into the code.