“The important thing isn’t thinking about computers or programming as they are today, but thinking about moving from a static medium like marks on paper to a dynamic medium with computational responsiveness infused into it, that can actually participate in the thinking process,” he says.
“The bigger part of it is just in finding the right ways of thinking, finding the right representations of abstractions, so people can think thoughts that they couldn’t think before.“The example I like to give is back in the days of Roman numerals, basic multiplication was considered this incredibly technical concept that only official... See more
Products are easier to reason about when you think of them as functions. They transform an input situation into an output situation.This lets you describe what the product does as a transformation of the user's circumstance instead of a bundle of features.
We're biologically programmed to respond to them. They contain a lot of information. They have social power. They connect us to other people. So they're like a kind of candy that we're fed when we consume political information, when we read novels.
Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.
It's easy to think of ourselves as separated from everything, but this is not true. We are as much the universe as a neutron star or a black hole or a nebula. Even better, actually, we are its thinking and feeling part: the centre organs of the universe.