My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they’re both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously. There are endless possibilities as to what a website could be. What kind of room is a website? Or is a website more like a house? A boat? A cloud? A garden? A puddle? Whatever... See more
Most designers set requirements for f() by describing what f() should be, which is a circularity. To be useful, requirements should be defined independent of f() as tests for fitness.
I feel like for these complex problems, it's basically impossible to design a framework de novo. And people try this all the time, but it very rarely works. Instead, what happens is you have an application that works well, and then basically you copy and paste that two or three times, and then you look at the diffs, and the things that aren't the... See more
Before you’ve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. It’s hard to put your attention on them because you don’t even know what you’re looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent. Do you remember the insights that... See more
You can't make a movie and say, "It was all a big accident." No, it has to be a conspiracy, people plotting together, because a story is about intention. A story is not about spontaneous order or complex human institutions which are the product of human action but not of human design. No, a story is about evil people plotting together. So you hear... See more
Organizable. ITEs provide methods for managing thought structure and metadata, including classifying, tagging, summarizing, and visualizing collections of thoughts.
Transformative. ITE apps provide methods for defining and refining thoughts, and providing ways of querying, combining, and referencing that thinking.... See more