Designing Synced Blocks An Article by Ryo Lu www.notion.so Theodor H. Nelson, “As We Will Think." Proceedings of Online 72 Conference, Bruanel University, Uxbridge, England, 1972 What if the exact same information could live and breathe in multiple places? For example, if your company’s process for requesting time off changes, you’d probably have to find all the pages that mention the policy and manually update each of them. Synced Blocks changes that. Instead of going through and updating the process to request time off in every page it’s referenced, turning it into a Synced Block allows you to update it once and have those changes reflected everywhere. Even though it’s a simple idea, it opens up many possibilities for how information can be structured and shared. TransclusionOpen Transclude for Networked WritingProject XanaduThe brilliance of notion hypermedia
Design with courage Make a bold decision (that is controversial). Make a mistake (as a result of a bold decision). Challenge “conventional wisdom”. Challenge authority (that preaches conventional wisdom). Challenge hierarchy (that perpetuates conventional wisdom). Ignore the committee (and the need to converge). Decide who your clients are (and aren’t). Ignore clients that aren’t (especially those who pay the most). Cultivate clients if none exists (instead of compromising your design). Be a generalist (and ignore your job title). Be a specialist (who specializes in being a generalist). Design things from scratch (and build them yourself from scratch). Design things that no one wants (yet). Design freely (and think freely). Chuánqí Sun, The vanishing designer The boldest decisions design