- Why am I excited at the work that we're doing at this point in the world?
- When my father died last year, his things, they resurfaced.
- We put so much of ourselves in these things, but they're just things. They're just tools for us to fulfill our needs.
- But they're also sort of totems, symbols of ourselves. They're empty vessels; we fill them up with our stories. They're constantly changing. They reflect our desires, out hopes for the future, our best images of ourselves.
- "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." Marshall McLuhan
- How does television impact our society? McLuhan: "The things we make, each of these things create a new environment." When we introduce a new medium (one of his quotes = "The medium is the message") into a society, it changes our outlook, our attitudes, our feelings about how we related to the world. It changes our politics, or about war. Even the light bulb, which doesn't have content like the television, it creates a new environment. It lengthens the work day, it changes how people interact, it changes how we behave, it changes how we think.
- The car is a visible, notable example of this effect. As a machine, it hasn't really changed that much in 100 years. But think about how much we changed the world around it. We build highways, factories, oil companies, we changed our whole environment to be based around the car.
- "All media are extensions of some human faculty, mental or physical." Shoe = foot, book = eye, clothing = skin, electricity = nervous system. The extension of any one sense displaces the other senses and alters the way we think, the way we see the world, and ourselves. When these changes our made, men change.
- Steve Jobs: One thing that separates us from the rest of the high primates is that we are tool-builders. The condor uses the least energy to move a kilometer, humans are not that efficient. But the efficiency for a man on a bicycle blows a condor away, and that's what a computer does to me. For me, it's the most remarkable tool that we have come up with. It's like a bicycle for our minds.
- Tools are empowering, a bionic extension of our abilities. McLuhan also said something about computers. Think of ENIAC, it's a computer, but it doesn't look like a computer to us. Then computer screen, then computer game. Everything that we do in interaction design revolves around the interaction between a human and a screen.
- Computer + screen + network. We then make things invisible. Wireless networks, then we make the computer super small, and what we're left with is the screen.
- When we think about the future in science fiction, screens are everywhere. We imagine a future where everybody is surrounded by screens. But this is sort of what is happening now? What's the time that we spend without a screen?
- The car shaped our environment in the 20th century, in the 21st century, the screen will shape our environment. What goes on in those screens are important, since the things that we choose to surround ourselves will shape what we do.
- We aren't just building interfaces, we are building an environment where we'll spend the rest of our lives. We're the designers, we're the builders. What do we want that environment to feel like?
- Simplicity: There's no such thing as a simple recipe for someone who doesn't know how a stove works. It starts out by explaining what fruits and vegetables look like. "The only intuitive interface is the nipple. Everything after that is learned."
- As designers, we trick ourselves into thinking that a design is simple, when in reality, they're built on complex sets of information and learned understanding.
- Magazines, we didn't need a manual on how to use these things, but there are a lot of conventions on how to use them. Like flipping through the first few pages to find the table of contents, longer features are at the back.
- Designers are constantly making assumptions about what the audience knows. Things like how to use a mouse, that hyperlinks can be clicked on, that swiping a screen moves you to the next frame. But those assumptions are starting to change faster than it used to. Radio, television, iPhone, Youtube, it takes less and less time to reach 50 million users.
- If the environment is always changing, we need to be always learning. "Who are you?" You think you know, or you think you don't know.
- "At times of change, the learners are the ones who will inherit the world, while the knowers will be beautifully prepared for a world which no longer exists." McLuhan: Check what artists are doing. Pop art tells you the only art form left today is your own natural environment.
- Robert Irwin, artist that changes the way you view things/perceptions. Abstract paintings, people try to see imagery in these (like clouds and shit). Then he create paintings with just straight lines. Then he made paintings of alternate red and green dots. When you go further away, you just see something white, but come closer and you see the dots.
- In the MoMA (New York), he changes the lights with alternating warm and cool colors, puts piano wire at eye level, and a translucent fabric at the back. He changed how the room felt.
- "When we build, let us think that we build forever." John Ruskin. Let it not be for present delight, or for present use alone. Let it be such work that our descendants will thank us for it. We don't tend to think that the things we build will last very long. Websites and apps don't last very long, compared to a house, or a car, or a chair. But we design organisms. A lot of them die, but the ones that survive, they adapt to the environment. They adapt, they evolve, they respond.
- When we design this new generation of tools for this ecosystem of screens, we have a longer horizon ahead of us than just the next software platform or the next piece of technology.
- We make things that change our lives, and we make things that change the world. We're a product of our world, and our world is made up of things. The things we use, the things we love, the things we carry with us, and the things we make. We're a product of our world but we're also its designer. Design is the choices we make about the world we want to live in. We choose where to live, what to surround ourselves with, and what to spend our time and energy on. We make our world what it is and we become the kind of people who live in it.
- When we're gone, all that's left of us is what we've made. What do we want to spend our time with? What do we want to see grow? I think we all have an idea. If we all have something that we want to make, for no other reason than that we want it to exist, something small but meaningful. When we leave here, we make things. Things that nudge our world in the right direction. We get to put a dent in the universe. This is a great job.