So much knowledge not being applied Most organisations have a lot of documents and data floating around that hardly ever gets revisited or used. They all have research, reading, and relevant information collecting dust. Stuff that should be informing the decisions and strategies of the company. Some of it sits unread in a knowledge base or a wiki. Some of it lies in the drives of individual employees who don’t have a way to share it productively. So much knowledge not being applied! Except that’s not how we work as human beings. If you haven’t read it, experienced it, and contextualised it, then it isn’t knowledge to you. Knowledge is a quality that people possess, not documents, and the only way to transfer it from one place to another is for people at both ends to apply themselves and make it their own. Baldur Bjarnason, On online collaboration and our obligations as makers of software knowledgedocumentationwork
Dependence is more profitable than education A customer who pays—in advance—for service contracts is a more stable income source than a customer who has fully mastered a product's use. Customer dependence is more profitable than customer education. What I find truly baffling are manuals—hundreds of pages long—that accompany software applications, programming languages, and operating systems. Unmistakably, they signal both a contorted design that lacks clear concepts and an intent to hook customers. Niklaus Wirth, A Plea for Lean Software The design concept documentation
The arbitrariness of the sign A key difference between verbal language and the modernist ideal of a visual “language” is the arbitrariness of a verbal sign, which has no natural, inherent relationship to the concept it represents. The sound of the word “horse”, for example, does not innately resemble the concept of a horse. Ferdinand de Saussure called this arbitrariness the fundamental feature of the verbal sign. The meaning of a sign is generated by its relationship to other signs in the language: the sign’s legibility lies in its difference from other signs. Ellen Lupton & J. Abbott Miller, The ABC's of ▲■●: The Bauhaus and Design Theory Gods of the Word soundmeaninglanguage