Many years ago, I stumbled into an app that allowed users to deeply customize their maps. Naturally, I spent the first few minutes playing around with little cosmetic things. I changed the colors of land, water, roads, and terrain. After a few minutes, I started to tinker with the level of detail shown; how many roads, points of interest, and other markers might appear at different zoom levels. Do I prefer more detail or less? Is it different in different situations?
I started to wonder: What is important to me on a map? What are my particular needs when I’m using a map? How do I personally think about and relate to maps? What is the role of maps in my life, and how might they be designed to better suit my needs?
I had never thought about this before! That was a horrifying realization.This was particularly horrifying as I was actively living in an RV at the time, and heavily depended on multiple digital and physical maps for our weekly travel!
Since we can’t adapt or evolve our digital environments, we aren’t even prompted to reflect on the things we use in our days, considering how we think about them, why they matter to us, and how we might make better use of them.
As more of our cognitive artifacts collapse into the realm of personal computing, this problem becomes increasingly alarming.
A person should be allowed to adapt their interfaces no less than they should be allowed to think. Since it is with these interfaces with which we think, a person is not permitted to think their own thoughts unless they are allowed to construe their interfaces as they wish. Otherwise, they’re left thinking their thoughts but in the manner of another, or worse, they’re left thinking the thoughts of another.
The freedom of thought is a fundamental human right. We may want to be in the business of designing new ways for people to think about things, but not the business of restricting someone’s thoughts to only some pre-determined set of ways (no matter how large the set). We have, in modern personal computing, unfortunately deployed the latter while in pursuit of the former.
Our lives are increasingly conducted in the realm of computing, which today is a realm of rigid interfaces designed by the few for the many. We can’t know for certain, but there are likely many new ideas and inventions that have passed humanity by because of this. Consider the periodic table of the elements, a construction that told us something important about the elements we were discovering, as well as the ones we had yet to discover! It’s often the arrangement of things that lets us interact with them in a new way; it’s the arrangement that communicates underlying insights about the fundamental nature of things, and lets us interact with them not just on external surfaces like the page or screen, but also in our heads.
With a pencil and paper, you can “think any thought”. You can buy paper meant to help you think in a particular way, like a monthly calendar, but it isn’t a restriction intrinsically woven into the substrate of the paper. With the same mechanical skills that you use to fill in the paper calendar, you may just as well design your own interface for planning your days, drawing your new interface on a blank sheet of paper. At some point, that’s what someone did to land on the design we’re used to for the monthly calendar — the grid showing a month with weeks as rows and days as cells. It may seem basic to us now, but as with any cognitive artifact, it first had to be invented, designed, or discovered. Though the weeks and months are ancient inventions, this two-dimensional representation is a fairly recent one, likely well-suited to our modern proclivities.
Today’s digital interfaces and user environments — despite being in the realm of infinite representations — lack this freedom for most users.
These benefits are not only for the individual: it’s these things that would allow us to find better representations, tools, and ideas for everyone! Individuals iterating on society’s cognitive artifacts and tools is one of the important ways civilization moves forward. We do not want to cut off the opportunity for all people to engage in that important work; representation at that table should not be limited to a small subset of the population. Domain expertise exists fractally, and allowing it to collide with the ability to construe the digital realm according to burgeoning new insights is needed for the progress of our civilization. All of civilization’s representations we have today — written language, numerals and notations, calendars, the periodic table, and more — came from someone realizing that the current representations weren’t working for them and experimenting with better ones.
In today’s mainstream interface systems, people lack the freedom to think about the things that matter to them in their own ways. And, critically, “Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom.”Benjamin Franklin, under a pen name, in The New-England Courant (1722)
A person should not have to contort their thinking to work with an interface, rather it’s the interface that should be capable of contorting to support the person’s ways of thinking. We all use the same interfaces, built for the general case, and we are prompted to introspect surprisingly little. Our unique needs, context, perspective, and style are almost entirely missing. We cannot cultivate the tools and arrangements in the digital realm that will support our best.
Fundamentally, it’s important that we think about these things, because these are the things with which we think — as individuals, and as a society. Better ideas mean better thinking, and better thinking means better ideas.
We need better abstractions that let each of us engage the dynamic medium according to our own ways of thinking, our own ways of seeing the world and the things that matter to us, and our own personal needs.
So, let’s say you’re convinced: This is an open problem that matters. What’s next? Is a solution even possible? If so, what would it take to get right?
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