Matt Webb

It’s not Zoom fatigue, it’s Zoom whiplash.

It’s a hunch. I can’t prove this.

The trick to get around this is to move smoothly up and down the gradient of social interaction intensity, never dropping below a basic floor of presence: the sense that there are other people in the same place as you.

Instead of having two modes, “in a call” and “on my own,” we need to think about multiple ways of being together which, minimally, could be:

• In a video call
• In an anteroom to a video call, hearing the sound of others
• In a doc together
• On my desktop but with the sense that colleagues are around

And the job of the designer is to ensure that their software ensures the existence of these different contexts, instead of having the binary on-a-call/not-on-a-call, and to design the transitions between them.

• The act of writing the first draft creates new “essential data” that feeds the imagination and makes possible figuring out the second draft.
• Or: In your head, ideas expand until they max out “working memory” – and it’s only be externalising them in the written word that you have capacity to iterate them.
• Or: Good writing necessarily takes multiple edits, and the act of writing and act of rewriting are sufficiently different that performing both simultaneously is like rubbing your tummy and patting your head.

1. I want it to feel intuitive
2. I want any new features to be platform features, not one-offs.

And the second of those is weird, right? It’s like sketching out a toy spaceship, having a list of rules about play, and attempting to simultaneously invent the shape of the Lego brick.

That’s platform design I suppose. Redesigning a newspaper will mean bouncing between comps and style guides, designing both. Inventing the iPhone user interface will have seen apps and app paradigm evolving together.

There’s a standard way to understand the relative danger of any activity. A micromort is "a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death." For example:

• skydiving is 8 micromorts per jump
• running a marathon: 26 micromorts
• 1 micromort: walking 17 miles, or driving 230 miles

Generally being alive averages out at 24 micromorts/day.

I like words, and I note down ones that catch my eye as we cross paths.

Sometimes I read over the list, random access style, just to remind myself of forgotten thoughts. Each word is a bookmark into a little cascade of concepts in my brain.

So because I’d like to keep these words somewhere I can find them in the future, I’m putting them here.

Storm Doris
Mimecom
Cloudbleed
Athleisure
Cromwell
H7N9
Trappist-1
... (+448)

Given there’s an explosion in software to accrete and organise knowledge, is the page model really the best approach?

Perhaps the building blocks shouldn’t be pages or blocks, but

neighbourhoods
roads
rooms and doors
landmarks.

Or rather, as a knowledge base or wiki develops, it should - just like a real city - encourage its users to gravitate towards these different fundamental elements. A page that starts to function a little bit like a road should transform into a slick navigation element, available on all its linked pages. A page which is functioning like a landmark should start being visible from two hops away.

My take is that the web could feel warmer and more lively than it is. Visiting a webpage could feel a little more like visiting a park and watching the world go by. Visiting my homepage could feel just a tiny bit like stopping by my home.

The Codex Justinianus (534 AD), being the book of law for ancient Rome at that time, banned magicians and, in doing so, itemised the types:

• A haruspex is one who prognosticates from sacrificed animals and their internal organs;
• a mathematicus, one who reads the course of the stars;
• a hariolus, a soothsayer, inhaling vapors, as at Delphi;
• augurs, who read the future by the flight and sound of birds;
• a vates, an inspired person - prophet;
• chaldeans and magus are general names for magicians;
• maleficus means an enchanter or poisoner.

I happen to have spent my career in a number of fields that promise to have some kind of claim to supernatural powers: design, innovation, startups…

It’s not hard to run through a few archetypes of the people in those worlds, and map them onto types of ancient magician.

• Those like Steve Jobs (with his famous Reality Distortion Field) who can convincingly tell a story of the future, and by doing so, bring it about by getting others to follow them – prophets.
• Inhaling the vapours and pronouncing gnomic truths? You’ll find all the thought leaders you want in Delphi, sorry, on LinkedIn.
• Those with a good intuition about the future who bring it to life with theatre, and putting people in a state of great excitement so they respond – ad planners. Haruspex.
• Those who have the golden mane of charisma: enchanters. Startup founders.
• People with a great aptitude for systems and numbers, who can tell by intuition what will happen, from systems that stump the rest of us. We call them analysts now. MBAs. Perhaps the same aptitude drew them to read the stars before? Mathematicus.

There’s a movement called the circular economy which is about designing services that don’t include throwing things away. There is no “away.”

A non-extractive economy is going to look very different to today’s economy. These points feel opposed somehow but they are part of the same movement:

• With CupClub, it’s all about infrastructure.
• With the battery-free Game Boy, it’s untethered from infrastructure: once manufactured, no nationwide electricity grid is required to play.

We’ll need better tools to track and measure. There will be new patterns for new types of services. New technologies to build new products. New language. So it’s fascinating seeing the pieces gradually come together.

As soon as I make something, I think of the 100 things I want to have next. That’s why prototyping is good. You don’t need to have much imagination, you just listen to what the prototype tells you.

Use feeds to subscribe to websites and get the latest content in one place.

Feeds put you in control. It’s like subscribing to a podcast, or following a company on Facebook. You don’t need to pay or hand over your email address. And you get the latest content without having to visit lots of sites, and without cluttering up your inbox. Had enough? Unsubscribe from the feed.

You just need a special app called a newsreader.

This site explains how to get started.

To use slightly different terms, mutual appreciation is a healthy jealousy without envy – a drive to achieve the same but without wanting to take it from the other.

My sense is that RSS is having a mini resurgence. People are getting wary of the social media platforms and their rapacious appetite for data. We’re getting fatigued from notifications; our inboxes are overflowing. And people are saying that maybe, just maybe, RSS can help.

It’s been 19 years since Pixar released Monsters, Inc. with all that CGI hair. Where are my hairy icons? Ones that get all long and knotted as the notifications number goes up.

Why can’t I feel my phone? I found that paper from 2010 (when I was complaining about keyboards) about using precision electrostatics to make artificial textures on touchscreens.

I should be able to run my thumb over my phone while it’s in my pocket and feel bumps for apps that want my attention. Touching an active element should feel rough. A scrollbar should *slip. Imagine the accessibility gains. But honestly I don’t even care if it’s useful: 1.5 billion smartphone screens are manufactured every year. For that number, I expect bells. I expect whistles.