Dimensions of experience

Last week I helped with an activity in my fourth-grader’s classroom. While sitting in a tiny chair at the back of the room, my eyes scanned the rich environment around me. Drawings, sculptures, bookshelves, markers, desks and tables; every color and shape imaginable; kids excitedly talking and working.

There was so much diversity, my eyes had trouble resolving it all. I realized then that due to my work and information sources, I spend a large majority of my time looking at flat screens 18-24 inches from my face. My eyes simply are not used to changing focus or direction in order to do work anymore. This isn’t made any easier by their increasing age, of course.

I spoke with a friend later in the week who described their high school-aged son’s schoolwork as entirely screen-based now. “He lies down sideways on the couch with his laptop and doesn’t move for hours,” he said. “All of his assignments and learning materials are delivered via the screen, and he stays in one place until he’s done.”

I’m sure that’s efficient, though hearing it I felt fortunate to have gone to high school before computers became the dominant medium. I’m also lucky to have hobbies and kid activities that do give me dimensionality in the rest of my days. But when such a big part of life is spent in flat experience, it has an impact on how we think, feel, and act.

Julie Beck wrote last year in the Atlantic about “the great friendship flattening“. She noticed that when friend updates were mixed with work, entertainment, and news content, it made those friendships feel flatter and hard to distinguish:

When my phone does its little mating calls of pings and buzzes, it could be bringing me updates from people I love, or showing me alerts I never asked for from corporations hungry for my attention. When I pull it out, content and communication appear in similar forms—notifications, social-media posts, vertical video—and they blur together.

Tom Vanderlinden analyzed recent trends in cinematography and noted that modern movies tend to have a flatter, less realistic look to them. He identified perceptual realism, indexicality, haptic visuality, and cinematic qualia as choices that make the viewer feel a movie is more or less “real”.

One aspect in particular is the depth of focus used–do viewers see everything in detail across the screen, or only the central actor or item with the background blurred. This kind of hyperfocus mimics our own behavior when looking at personal devices; the world behind them is blurred, and only the interface is in focus.

Vanderlinden also quotes Laura Marks from The Skin of the Film, where she says:

Film is grasped not solely by an intellectual act but by the complex perception of the body as a whole. This view of perception implies an attitude toward [a film], not as something that must be analyzed and deciphered in order to deliver forth its meaning but as something that means in itself.

Marks describes “haptic visuality” as a way of seeing that “tends to move over the surface of its object rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture. It is more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze.”

I can’t remember the last time I “grazed” an interface on a screen; interfaces overall have been so hyper-optimized for efficiency that the very idea of it seems an anathema. And yet I feel a craving for that sort of richness of experience; that our screen lives today are poorer without it. Our minds know that an experience is more than just the optics, that real things should be engaged with all of our senses.

So what might this mean for digital designers, who focus on screen-based experiences? Are screens inherently limiting to human experience? Should we return to skeuomorphism in an attempt to engage the “haptics” of the eyes? Might we need virtual reality goggles to take our interfaces to a higher level? Should we all just go touch grass?

I believe flat, rectangular screens will continue to dominate our informational and creative lives. After all, flat books have sufficed for storytelling since Gutenberg, and my own thoughts on the challenges of face computers are well documented.

But it seems worth thinking about visual richness, realism, and dimensionality as important aspects of the human experience that we aren’t currently getting from our screens. And if screens can’t bring them to us, then we will need to more often raise our eyes from them to refocus.

Intelligence as skill acquisition

The intelligence of a system is a measure of its skill-acquisition efficiency over a scope
of tasks, with respect to priors, experience, and generalization difficulty. – François Chollet, On the Measure of Intelligence

How to read hard books

A thoughtful framework for reading and understanding deeply from Brad DeLong.

First, get prepared:

Figure out beforehand what the author is trying to accomplish in the book.

Orient yourself by becoming the kind of reader the book is directed at—the kind of person with whom the arguments would resonate.

During and after reading, try to rephrase and improve on the argument:

Read through the book actively, taking notes.

“Steelman” the argument, reworking it so that you find it as convincing and clear as you can possibly make it.

Find someone else—usually a roommate—and bore them to death by making them listen to you set out your “steelmanned” version of the argument.

Finally, try to disprove the arguments, and decide how you feel about them:

Go back over the book again, giving it a sympathetic but not credulous reading

Then you will be in a good position to figure out what the weak points of this strongest-possible argument version might be.

Test the major assertions and interpretations against reality: do they actually make sense of and in the context of the world as it truly is?

Decide what you think of the whole.

Then comes the task of cementing your interpretation, your reading, into your mind so that it becomes part of your intellectual panoply for the future.

The limiting factor of our education is no longer access to information–it’s making the most of the information we access.

Related: The purpose of reading is to write

Danish Folk High Schools

A [Danish Folk High School](https://www.danishfolkhighschools.com/about-folk-high-schools/what-is-a-folk-high-school) is “a non-formal residential school offering learning opportunities in almost any subject.”

More generally, it’s a place where post-high-school age students can go live for a while and learn about community practices together.

The book _[The Nordic Secret](https://www.nordicsecret.org/)_ argues that the invention of the folk high school in the 19th century is key to the rise of the once-poor Nordic societies since then. The “folk-bildung” it developed can be described as “[character formation, cultural heritage and developing a moral backbone all in one](https://nordicbildung.org/folk-bildung/).”

A sense of belonging; a connection with nature; social responsiblity; conscience and morality–how many of these are lacking in our current education systems?

> We should teach our kids sports, music, painting…Everything we teach should be different from machines…we have to teach something unique, so that a machine can never catch up with us. – [Jack Ma](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH-fdIkdL_Q)

Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read

[Great overview](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/01/what-was-this-article-about-again/551603/) of the “[forgetting curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve)”, the way that we immediately forget almost all the information we take in:

> For many, the experience of consuming culture is like filling up a bathtub, soaking in it, and then watching the water run down the drain. It might leave a film in the tub, but the rest is gone.

That describes many of my reading experiences quite well; sometimes I feel like [the characters in this Portlandia skit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JLWQEuz2gA). The key to avoiding this is recalling and re-encountering the information again:

> If you want to remember the things you watch and read, space them out…Memories get reinforced the more you recall them, Horvath says. If you read a book all in one stretch—on an airplane, say—you’re just holding the story in your working memory that whole time. “You’re never actually reaccessing it,” he says.

The most well-known technique for recalling information systematically is [spaced repetition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition):

> Spaced repetition is a learning technique that incorporates increasing intervals of time between subsequent review of previously learned material in order to exploit the psychological spacing effect.

This website has always served as my [outboard brain](http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/01/01/cory.html), but I don’t re-encounter my own thoughts on a regular basis. I’ve tried a few times to set up a system to send me random past posts; worth getting that going.

Learning the basics

> I think learning should be about learning the basics in all the fields and learning them really well over and over. Life is mostly about applying the basics and only doing the advanced stuff in the things that you truly love and where you understand the basics inside out. – [Naval Ravikant](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Naval-Ravikant-TKP.pdf)

When I taught an introductory design class at Stanford, I finished by telling the students, “That’s it! That’s all you’ll ever need to know about doing design. Now, go out into the world and spend the rest of your lives trying to actually do it.”

KidZania

The perfect business model? Parents pay for their children to work and be advertised to. And it actually sounds pretty fun!

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/profiles/state_of_play.php

Nice quotes from the Do Lectures

Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one
— [Michael Forbes](http://doblog.tumblr.com/post/700149267/educations-purpose-is-to-replace-an-empty-mind)

It’s better to fail with your own vision rather than following another man’s vision.
— [Johan Cruyff](http://doblog.tumblr.com/post/687080110/its-better-to-fail-with-your-own-vision-rather)

I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take a game winning shot….and missed. I have failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed
— [Michael Jordan](http://doblog.tumblr.com/post/700144778/i-have-missed-more-than-9-000-shots-in-my-career)

Diversity and design

“Creativity is just connecting things…[but] a lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” – Steve Jobs, 1996