Thinking Surface

What is this?

This site is a kind of personal computing tool built in the lineage of Notion and Jupyter notebooks: a system of blocks for thinking, connecting, writing, and coding all in one. Think of it like the eccentric notebook of a designer, where each page is an expression of my curiosity—rather than expertise.

What I mean when I say designer

I like to start with the idea of shape: designers shape.

An architect shapes space, and is accountable to form and how it meets physics. The designer shapes tools, and is accountable to how those tools meet human minds. Where the architect compresses behavior into space, the designer compresses action and human faculty into tools.

I like the comparison because it places design in a tradition of form and function in service of humanity. A designer can't escape shaping form—be it the form of an idea, an image, a story, a tool, an artifact that compresses a sequence of actions—the job.

Design, in this sense, is one of the oldest of human crafts. Long before we had a word for it, the first humans shaped a stone into a blade: compressing faculty into form.

But what is a tool?

Tools are compressions of our abilities and aptitudes into an artifact we can wield. In other words, a tool is something we could have done by hand but instead encoded and compressed into an artifact. Mark making, counting, communicating, writing, remembering, seeing, thinking.

The alphabet is a tool: a collection of symbols that, assembled together, codify sound—speech in any language—into a medium that outlives the speaker. A pencil is a tool: it enables humans to record symbols on physical material. A kitchen knife is a tool: used to divide material into discrete units. Excel is a software tool: used to model relationships between numbers and quantities.

Exceptional tools are general. They're universal. Each of the tools above is exceptional—designed for a specific job, but applicable to many.

Sometimes generality is the gift of the designer, and sometimes it's the gift of time.

The kitchen knife and the pencil became universal partly through centuries of anonymous use, refined by hands that never thought of themselves as designers.

Yet, the designer who works deliberately toward generality does so by traversing from the branches of a particular problem toward the trunk they stem from. Specific problems stem from more general ideas. To design is to find those general strands in the particular, and use them as the bedrock of the tool's functionality.

Done well, a single tool can be used to achieve many ends.

Written language, numbers, and the computer are, perhaps, the most universal tools we've ever invented. The kitchen knife, chopsticks, the pencil, a general programming language, Excel—a close second.

To design is to think deeply about problems, extract their universal strands, and shape them into artifacts that let humans achieve old ends in new ways. In this way, design is recursive. The better the tools we design, the better we design.

AI in particular makes obvious that tools exist on a spectrum of cognition. The designer of a doorknob shapes a static object; the user brings all the cognition. The designer of Excel shapes a system whose behavior is fixed, but whose outputs are open-ended. The designer of AI shapes a tool whose system is itself inherently cognitive.

When the tool itself thinks, the designer is no longer just shaping how a person reaches through an artifact for a job. They're shaping how a person thinks alongside something that thinks back. They build interfaces for thought, interfaces through which a person meets cognition.

The faculty being extended is no longer the hand, or the eye, or the memory. It's judgment itself. And judgment is the faculty by which we decide what to do with all the others.

If the strand running through design's history is the compression of human faculty into form, then the design of cognitive tools is the compression of human judgment into interface.

Design now is about the kind of thinking a tool invites, and what kind it shuts out. What it makes easy, and what it makes effortful. A tool that thinks back affects not just the output, but the user themself.

In McLuhanian fashion, never has it been truer that we shape our tools, and our tools shape us.

Thinking Surface

What is this?

Surfaces:

Thoughts:

About me:

What is this?

Surfaces:

Thoughts:

About me: