Struck by a market-making provocation from today: "Imagine a world where you love how you make choices and you love how you're directing your attention, because tech inventors are competing to figure out how best to help you live as you intend."
Conversation
It's not clear how to align incentives so that this becomes a relevant design question for tech co's, but I'm enjoying the prompt. It's interesting that OSes have contacts, calendars, docs, etc—yet no representation of anything purposive, of ways of being, of "what matters?"
5
6
43
Funny to contrast the ubiquitous to-do app's model with intentions which might deeply matter to someone, like "I want to make sure I'm taking my ideas as seriously as possible." Tasks are such a misleading way of thinking about intention. But hey, it's easier to build a to-do UI!
7
5
53
I read Getting Things Done, and it struck me that a organisation system for both to-dos and values is independent from any UI.
Also, David Allen's GTD software (which I don't use) is quite ugly, just like the original mindmap software is. It's about ideas not interfaces.
2
2
2
The power of an interface is bounded by the power of the ideas it reifies. (But it's not one-way: by instantiating ideas in interfaces, we can think some thoughts which we couldn't think prior, which may lead to even better ideas, which can then be reified…)
Ok, I do agree with that. I used to work as a student-assistant in HCI for two courses, it's all coming back now ;-). What I meant to critique is that Harris' site and slides look all sleek and fancy, but that surface-level look distracts from actual talk about functionality