[HN Gopher] How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
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How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
Author : kristianc
Score : 37 points
Date : 2020-01-25 17:07 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (numinous.productions)
(TXT) w3m dump (numinous.productions)
| robenkleene wrote:
| As a former UI designer, this is a gross misrepresentation of
| what happened with Sketch (and to a lesser extent, Figma):
|
| > Consider, for example, the way the program Sketch has eaten
| into Adobe's market share, after duplicating many of the best
| features from several of Adobe's products, perhaps most notably
| Illustrator. And consider the way Figma is now eating into both
| Sketch and Illustrator's market share. Both Sketch and Figma have
| done this without needing to make an enormous investment in
| research. That's a big advantage they have over Adobe.
|
| Leading up to the time that Sketch emerged, UI designers were
| complaining constantly to Adobe to provide features to support
| their work. All of us were using a tiny subset of Photoshop's
| features crammed into the corner (the vector editing features).
| Remember Adobe _actively killed_ Fireworks[0] the exact product
| specialized for UI designers that should have prevented Sketch
| from emerging. I consider Adobe leaving an opening big enough for
| Sketch to emerge one of the biggest mistakes I 've ever seen a
| tech company make. It was plainly obvious that there was product
| category there, so many people were talking about it that to me
| as a designer it was deafening.
|
| Not to mention, if you were paying the slightest bit of attention
| to graphical apps for artists, you would have noticed Acorn[1], a
| Photoshop competitor released in 2007, three years before Sketch,
| _maintained by one person_ , based on the support Apple was
| aggressively adding to AppKit for this type of application. If
| you were an expert in this market and you didn't realize that
| someone was going to use that same toolkit to make a UI tool,
| which so many people were asking for, I don't know what to tell
| you. And of course that's exactly what happened with Sketch.
|
| This isn't a story about Sketch copying Adobe products, it's a
| story about Adobe's product leadership making a series of
| mistakes that left a gap in the market.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks
|
| [1]: https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/
| walterbell wrote:
| The article does a good job of connecting business incentives to
| interface design or lack thereof. Arguably, some of the most
| influential "tools for thought" today are videos, thanks to
| mobile devices/data & Youtube. They offer: -
| distribution: global at low cost - accessibility: low
| barrier to create/view - funding: ads, patreon, product
| placement - creation: video editor + smartphone -
| composition: screenshot/record anything - annotation: free-
| form text/audio/overlay - UX: any structure the creator can
| imagine
|
| The diversity of youtube "thought UX" examples shows what's
| possible when creators are unleashed from restrictive tool pre-
| conceptions. Twitter is a social network where an early
| minimalist UX lead to user-driven innovations, with later
| attempted formalization by the platform vendor. Google has not
| much ventured into content creation tools for its video platform.
| Apple's iPad provides tools for freeform markup of screenshots ->
| PDF, with the LumaFusion video editor rivaling PC apps for one-
| tenth of the cost.
|
| Perhaps universities have studied online videos for UX patterns
| employed by creators to communicate complex topics? Which ones
| deserve formalization in tool workflows, while leaving room for
| ongoing experimentation?
| CKN23-ARIN wrote:
| Tools that empower individuals on a mass scale are threatening to
| existing power structures.
| anotheryou wrote:
| Any evidence for active discouragement of tool building?
|
| I actually don't see that for general purpose tools, only where
| censorship or free speech come in to play.
| robenkleene wrote:
| Point blank I think Mac App Store restrictions, iOS
| restrictions, and the current decrepit state of AppKit are
| all a systemic approach by Apple to prevent new powerful
| tools from emerging that threaten their current market
| dominance. Ben Thompson wrote the canonical piece about this
| situation[0], but I think this paragraph from a different
| article is the best summary[1]:
|
| > The reality for Jobs and Apple was that the company's users
| needed Office (along with Adobe's products) more than they
| needed a Mac. I've long argued that being in this position is
| a big reason why Apple hasn't enabled sustainable apps: never
| again would a software developer hold Apple hostage. The
| irony, though, is that when it came time to launch the iPad
| Pro, Apple had no one else to turn to.
|
| [0]: https://stratechery.com/2013/why-doesnt-apple-enable-
| sustain...
|
| [1]: https://stratechery.com/2015/from-products-to-platforms/
| anotheryou wrote:
| fair point, thanks. Not my universe I guess...
| CKN23-ARIN wrote:
| What do you mean by "active", and why must it be "active" to
| be acknowledged?
| carapace wrote:
| If I had more time I would write a better comment, apologies.
|
| - - - -
|
| I doubt it requires big research to make good tools. Inventing
| "zero" wasn't done by committee. In any event, the research has
| been done. _It is steadfastly ignored._ E.g. something as simple
| and straightforward as Jef Raskin 's "Humane Interface" applied
| uncreatively would measurably improve the majority of user
| interfaces out there. There's a near total disconnect between
| good UI design and what gets inflicted on IRL users. Evidence:
| every change ever made to every app or web app that made the
| users scream. Heck, "Google backtracks on search results design
| (techcrunch.com)" is on HN front page as I type this. At _best_
| people are fucking UI /UX to make a buck, but most of them do it
| because they suck at their jobs.
|
| This isn't limited to UI design. E.g. MLs have had type algebra
| for decades and yet it's only just barely gaining traction among
| "professional" programmers today in A.D. 2020. Instead of flying
| cars we have Rube Goldberg machines made out of other Rube
| Goldberg machines.
|
| That's why "When small groups of motivated people [try] they make
| rapid progress." Because what we're using now is refried _merde._
|
| It doesn't scale either because people are stubborn about giving
| up crap[1] -or- it just hasn't been let.
|
| Canon killed the Cat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat
|
| Dynamicland may be fantastic but you can't buy it for money.
|
| ([1] This might be the real problem: People just don't give a
| fuck. Thinking takes energy- _calories_ -and so, as an evolved
| animal, if you can get by w /o it, you will. "The Internet is for
| porn.")
|
| I've known what I wanted to make ever since reading Ted Nelson's
| "Dream Machines" and that was twenty-odd years ago (it was
| published way earlier, that's just when I got ahold of it.)
| Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos" was even earlier.
|
| (I've been playing with a very simple UI demo that incorporates
| elements from Raskin and from Wirth's Oberon OS. Its backing
| store is a git repo and all changes are autosaved. It's dreamy.
| Raskin warns that excellent UIs are addictive in the sense that
| once you get used to them it's like withdrawal if you have to go
| back, and he's right. Mac, Windows, X et. al., it's all so
| painful and clunky now.)
|
| So yeah, with a little work, and standing on the shoulders of
| giants and not on their toes, you can make something
| fantastically better than current tools/OSs. It's not hard.
|
| It might even make money in the marketplace, eh?
|
| - - - -
|
| > What's needed is the development of a powerful praxis, a set of
| core ideas which are explicit and powerful enough that new people
| can rapidly assimilate them, and begin to develop their own
| practice. We're not yet at that stage with tools for thought.
|
| Speak for yourselves, eh?
|
| Here's where I think they fall into the same trap as so many
| people do (philosophers, psychologists, designers-of-tools-for-
| thought, etc.) when talking about thought: They do not define the
| term.
|
| What is thought?
|
| (As an aside the only place I've seen that can begin to claim to
| have a concrete mathematical theory of _intelligence
| amplification_ is "Introduction to Cybernetics" by Ashby.)
|
| Anyhow, the folks who have the goods on the structure of
| subjective experience work under the rubric of "Neurolinguistic
| Programming" (the _other_ NLP). Unfortunately the school of
| thought is still seen as pseudoscience! Oh well, what a world...
|
| Anyway, the "machine code" of thought is called "submodalities"
| in NLP jargon, an (outmoded) model of "microcode" is called
| "strategies" but that's deprecated (I don't know how to
| succinctly describe the replacement models, and many of them
| don't have names), etc. Using the patterns and algorithms
| discovered or reified by the NLP folks you can rapidly and easily
| reprogram your mind. [2] At that point you don't really need
| external "tools of thought" but if that's your thing you're in a
| much better place to make them. (I.e. if you want to make mind-
| machine interfaces and such like, or design
| audio/visual/kinesthetic UIs and UX flows.) Here you're going to
| want to pick up a copy of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics:
| The Invisible Art" to get a handle on the finer points of
| cognition and storytelling. See also Brenda Laurel's "Computers
| as Theatre".
|
| [2] For example there's a spelling "strategy" that involve using
| visual memory to recall the word (as a picture) and a kinethestic
| check for correctness. In other words, remember the word, feel
| that it's right, then read it off from the picture in your mind.
| Most good spellers use that strategy, most bad spellers do
| something else. You can take someone who is bad at spelling,
| teach them to use the proper "strategy", and suddenly they are
| good spellers. It's analogous to replacing a buggy spellcheck
| subroutine with a correct one. Spelling isn't hard, we have just
| been teaching badly. We are in a transition time in psychology
| similar to when alchemy became chemistry.
| anotheryou wrote:
| Maybe UX complexity is a problem, too.
|
| Tools for thought have to become like prosthetics, an extension
| of your body. For this it has to have really low friction.
|
| Here we have two problems:
|
| 1. the ideal power user UX has some learning curve for newcomers
| which hinders adaption a lot;
|
| 2. I prefer typing, but it's hard to beat a piece of paper in
| ease of input and flexibility of arrangement, type of input
| (graphics, text, plots, mindmaps, tables all there without any
| toolbar to click).
|
| The 2nd point makes me think that a general interface is just
| really hard and specific ones can be done really well already.
|
| Examples of tools for thinking I like:
|
| - org mode: suffers a lot from (1.) and is not that generalized
| (more is possible, but little effortlessly).
|
| - Deepl Desktop App: real AI collaboration for translation. The
| UI could be more streamlined, but is fine for now: hit ctrl+c+c,
| check if the translation is ok, click "insert" and your sentence
| is translated within your document. It translates 90% as good as
| I do, I catch the other 10%.
|
| - Soulver/Opalcalc/NaSC: a bit like excel but all calculations
| always visible (trade offs: not working for tabular data, not as
| flexible as programing)
|
| - wikis: amazing for long term and collaborative storage,
| problems with scaling, relevance, discovery and organization
|
| - paper: great input flexibility, hard to refactor, no computer
| assist (calculations, data etc)
|
| - jupyter notebooks: finally mixing documentation and
| programming, sadly problems with structure and state
|
| - grafical programming languages (touch designer, pure data,
| bitwig grid etc.): predominant in the art-world, I think because
| you can tweak values and connections best.
| classified wrote:
| > paper: ... no computer assist
|
| ... the greatest drawbacks being that you can't show relevant
| ads, personalize the UX, or gain deep insights into your users'
| needs.
| sansnomme wrote:
| Org mode doesn't suffer from 1), Emacs does. Org-style editors
| like Workflowy, Notion, and now Roam are all high growth apps
| with a large user base.
| anotheryou wrote:
| But org-mode lives in emacs. But yes, part of it can be done
| in a "user friendly" way and other tools do so :). Most
| notably outliners and task to agenda aggregation.
| anotheryou wrote:
| I usually use paper when I do math or logic and can build a
| crutch from geometry. You just can't draw well with a mouse.
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