I’ve been thinking about how software can feel lately, and I’m finding tension in how I experience software overwhelmingly today and what my body wants to feel when I encounter software.
If someone emerged from the world before the very first computers and asked what a computer was, how would I describe it? What would be the first comparables that come to my mind?
Perhaps you’d describe it as [real-life magic](^98093c), a device that instantiates make-believe. Maybe you’d describe sites on the internet as a [shifting house next to a river of knowledge](My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge). Or you might even think about bicycles for the mind, the famous phrase that some of the original inventors of computer technology originally ascribed to the phenomenon.
I’m feeling this lately because I switched over to obsidian from roam and I’m feeling some loss of agency at all the new mental switches and hoops my mind has to jump through. I like the fact that it’s no longer a primarily block-based model, so I’m more encouraged to write out things. However, it’s stressful and jarring to have to adjust to an entirely new interface. That’s why common keyboard shortcuts are so inviting to a new product. It’s a piece of the familiar.
In interior design, you achieve familiarity by embedding pieces of your home and identity. Locally sourced materials and ceramic bowls.
Our world has changed in a way that isn’t designed for bicycles. Like the modern city is designed around an automobile society, our internet has become catered around siloed data, pandering design, and psychological tricks. We may have bicycles, but we can’t use them properly because of our new environment. As the capabilities of computers has grown, our capacity to use them for their full effectiveness has shrunk. The reason we can’t unlock the full potential in our computers is that our environment isn’t catered for us to use them to their full potential. We have disparate pathways (bike routes) that we can travel on, but they don’t connect and they are limited in scope. What would a bicycle-friendly internet look like?
What makes an environment friendly to bicycles?
- intrerop: computer should be able to freely communicate with each other and the digital data we create on one device in one app should have the ability to be shared outside of those origin contexts
- safety: using computers should feel comfortable, exciting, fun. Like the standards for safety and safety mechanisms in bicycles, from the protective gear (helmets) to the protective controls (brakes), computers should have guardrails that make it feel safe by default and provide controls to give agency of safety to the end-user
- transparency: The nice thing about bicycles is that given a reasonable amount of time or space, you can enumerate how each part of the machine works and what it does. It’s an open book for you to explore and come to know intimately. Using computers should feel like they have the same level of transparency. Instead of using psychology to encourage actions that benefit the underlying company, that kind of design should primarily be applied to helping people, and there should be enough safety/recovery measures in place that make it feel safe for people to explore the insides of their computer.
- right now, people feel scared when something goes on in their computer because there are many mental models you have to layer on top of each other to get a full understanding. Computers and software should provide a handle to the simplest piece of machinery