Alexander Obenauer: The Interfaces With Which We Think. Binary is how our chips process logic. But the apps, windows, desktops, notifications, and such — these are all constructs of human imagination. This is true of nearly all the systems, metaphors, and interface patterns we’ve built on top of our binary-crunching chips. Today, our abstractions are holding us back.

Part 1

Cracks in the desktop.

*For the first decade of my career, I was deep in the world of email, building products on both sides of the protocols — clients and services.

Email gets a lot of pieces right: there’s a split between client and server, with standardized protocols mediating communication between them*

Those standardized protocols essential to email’s best features are quite archaic, making them tedious to develop on.

Decades’ worth of server implementations scattered throughout the internet impose varying expectations on clients and servers

Plus, users come with their own surprisingly diverse needs and expectations of email

In any email client, lots of code needs to be written which every other email client needs too; the code that lets the email client successfully and efficiently talk to any email server on the ‘net doesn’t need to be different from client to client, yet every developer is doing this double-work

Your email app is a lot of things: a service that uses IMAP or POP to sync the contents of your email accounts to your local filesystem, a view that combines the inboxes from all of your accounts into one list, a message view and a thread view, a compose window

If a developer has an idea for a better way to interact with your inbox that they want to build, they’d have to rebuild every single component of the client. But as a user in email, we experience one even worse: none of this is even possible.

On the flip side, apps and windows have these artificial boundaries: they are each a data silo keeping their things in and other things out. Although an email, a calendar event, and a note might all be inextricably related, you have no way to reflect that in today’s operating systems.

sure, an email client could add “notes” and “reminders” to emails, but these only live inside this app; they wouldn’t integrate with the rest of your system. The problem lies in the operating system,

Our software interfaces are fiercely rigid; they can’t be meaningfully nudged — in big ways or small — to more closely reflect our mental models or meet our individual needs.

(see related (2022-04-04) Ford I Finally Reached Computing Nirvana What Was It All For)

#Part 2

The moral imperative for composable systems.

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 started to wonder: What is important to me on a map?
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 (reflective thinking)

A person should be allowed to adapt their interfaces no less than they should be allowed to think.
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.

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

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

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

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!

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.

And, critically, “Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom.”Ben Franklin, under a pen name, in The New-England Courant (1722)

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. (Tools of Thought)

What’s next? Is a solution even possible? If so, what would it take to get right?