STORYTELLING-FIRST DESIGN

In Design, we often strive for minimalism—using as little as needed to get a job done or a message across. A key tactic in that aim is to avoid redundancy. [...] But adding game feel requires just the opposite. Our digital products are trapped behind a hard pane of glass. We use the term “touch”, but we never really touch them. To truly Feel a digi... See more

The more complex or valuable is whatever you’re trying to sell, the more important it is for you to build a world around that idea, where other people can walk in, explore, and hang out – without you having to be there with them the whole time. You need to build a world so rich and captivating that others will want to spend time in it, even if you’... See more

My point in sharing all of this is that sometimes I feel like we get too caught up in the words, and forget to disregard them. Especially (in the context of this essay) as builders of new technology products.“How will I describe this to an investor, or at a dinner party with friends?”"What’s the one-liner that describes why this will be better?”“Wh... See more

To begin, it’s important to see that mediums can be designed, not just inherited. What’s more: it is possible to design new mediums which embody specific ideas . Inventors have long drawn on this unintuitive insightSee e.g. Douglas Engelbart’s 1962 “Augmenting Human Intellect” for a classic primary source or Michael Nielsen’s 2016 “Thought as a Tec... See more