Hi, all! First, a timely reminder that the second April office hours is tomorrow (Google Calendar link; iCal URL):
After a lot of Quantum Country data analysis early this year, last month I switched back into design mode, focused on creating new primitives for the medium which give readers much more control (yet without creating burdensome interaction cost). See these two letters for more background there.
I have a new set of interactions which are holding together well in my "paper prototypes" so far, so I've been working on a talk which will include extended live demos of prototypes in action. I hoped to finish that this week, but that's not happening—so in recompense, I recorded my morning prototyping session.
It's more than five and a half hours long, so I don't expect anyone to watch it all the way through, but many of you may be interested in the opening few minutes of remarks about how I see the role of demo presentations in the process of inventing new user interfaces.
One more small offering: a little story on the self-inflicted harms of inappropriate time pressure in open-ended creative work.
That story presents a funny contrast, actually. There, time pressure was self-defeating because it actually subverted my own creative goals: it kept me from engaging seriously with the subject matter I was purporting to adapt into my new medium. And how else am I going to know if the medium's really working? But in this morning's livestream, I'm afraid the last two hours are me wrestling with various LaTeX rendering bugs. Those, of course, have nothing at all to do with the actual ideas under consideration, and so time pressure is actually helpful, insofar as it nudges me to give up and use hackier solutions.
Andy Matuschak
2022-06-13 21:04:20 +0000 UTCAndy Matuschak
2022-04-29 17:32:03 +0000 UTC