feedback
Control and Correlation
The fastest way to learn something is to do something
An Article by David R. MacIverSuppose you have a problem to solve. What do you do?
Well, you sit down and think real hard, and after extensive and careful planning you try the well thought out and rigorous solution that you have thought up. Right?
No, wrong! Bad.
The correct thing to do when you have a problem is:
- Think for a short amount of time.
- Make sure it is safe to try things.
- Try something you think will work.
- Observe the result. If you succeeded, yay you solved the problem! If it didn't work, think about what that means for the nature of the problem and try again.
How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
A Research Paper by Andy Matuschak & Michael NielsenConventional tech industry product practice will not produce deep enough subject matter insights to create transformative tools for thought.
...The aspiration is for any team serious about making transformative tools for thought. It’s to create a culture that combines the best parts of modern product practice with the best parts of the (very different) modern research culture. You need the insight-through-making loop to operate, whereby deep, original insights about the subject feed back to change and improve the system, and changes to the system result in deep, original insights about the subject.
When Customer Journeys Don’t Work: Arcs, Loops, & Terrain
An Article by Stephen P. AndersonThinking [in terms of loops and arcs] allows us to let go of a specific journey or sequence, and imagine dozens of scenarios and possible sequences in which these skills can be learned. This doesn’t mean there aren’t more fundamental skills that other skills build upon, but we can let go the tyranny of how, precisely, a person will move through a system. We’re free to zoom in and obsess on these loops, which does two things for us:
- Approach the design of a system as the design of these as small but significant moments of learning.
- Consider the many ways these loops might be sequenced, with the exact order being less important.
Asynchronous Design Critique: Getting Feedback
An Article by Erin CasaliGetting feedback can be thought of as a form of design research. In the same way that we wouldn’t do any research without the right questions to get the insights that we need, the best way to ask for feedback is also to craft sharp questions.
Structure, Substructure, and Superstructure
The monotonous perfection
The mathematical physicist must simplify in order to get a manageable model, and although his concepts are of great beauty, they are austere in the extreme, and the more complicated crystal patterns observed by the metallurgist or geologist, being based on partly imperfect reality, often have a richer aesthetic content. Those who are concerned with structure on a super atomic scale find that there is more significance and interest in the imperfections in crystals than in the monotonous perfection of the crystal lattice itself.
On beauty bare
Even more than Euclid, hath Euler gazed on beauty bare.
In a mass of large bubbles
The froth, therefore, though lacking long-range symmetry, nevertheless has very definite rules as to its composition. It is pleasing in appearance because the eye senses this interplay between regularity and irregularity.
The role of history in structures
Although the ideal crystal lattice of a substance at equilibrium depends only on its composition and temperature, all other aspects of the structure of a given bit of polycrystalline matter depends upon history…the manner in which the crystals impinge to produce the grain boundary as a new element of structure which itself changes shape in accordance with its properties and the particular local geometry resulting from historical accidents. Far more complex, but in principle similar, things occur in biological and social organizations.
A kind of moiré pattern
Everything that we can see, everything that we can understand, is related to structure, and, as the gestalt psychologists have so beautifully shown, perception itself is in patterns, not fragments. All awareness or mental activity seems to involve the comparison of a sense or thought pattern with a preexisting one, a pattern formed in the brain’s physical structure by biological inheritance and the imprint of experience. Could it be that aesthetic enjoyment is the formation of a kind of moiré pattern between a newly sensed experience and the old; between the different parts of a sensed pattern transposed in space and in orientation and with variations in scale and time by the marvelous properties of the brain?
It is what is left over when what is expected has been canceled out.
From a roving viewpoint
There is a kind of indeterminacy, quite different in essence from the famous principle of Heisenberg but just as effective in limiting our knowledge of nature, which lies in the fact that we can neither consciously sense nor think of much at any one moment. Understanding can only come from a roving viewpoint and sequential changes of scale of attention.