I kept looking for that one thing that defined me as a creative: you know, that thing that all designers seek. I felt the pressure of needing to have an aesthetic style or skill to stand out as a creative. I wish more people talked about how we don’t have to be pigeonholed, that we can just let the idea dictate the media.

I realized AR requires a combination of disciplines if you want to go beyond “awe.” Knowing how to make 3-D models is not enough. While I used publication design tools to organize information, I didn’t realize how much wayfinding would come into play. In the end, AR requires design for real physical spaces that go beyond a screen. Rules on viewing distance and material design, among other things, became important. Moreover, we experience AR through our mobile phones or glasses—both are experientially different. Having knowledge of interface design helped me navigate that.

For the layman to build their own Folk Interfaces, jigs to wield the media they care about, we must offer simple primitives. A designer in Blender thinks in terms of lighting, camera movements, and materials. An editor in Premiere, in sequences, transitions, titles, and colors. Critically, this is different from automating existing patterns, e.g. making it easy to create a website, simulate the visuals of film photography, or 3D-scan one's room. Instead, it's about building a playground in which those novel computational artifacts can be tinkered with and composed, via a grammar native to their own domain, to produce the fruits of the users' own vision. The goal of the computational tool-maker then is not to teach the layman about recursion, abstraction, or composition, but to provide meaningful primitives (i.e. a system) with which the user can do real work. End-user programming is a red herring: We need to focus on materiality, what some disparage as mere "side effects." The goal is to enable others to feel the agency and power that comes when the world ceases to be immutable.

I hope this mode can paint the picture of software, not as a teleological instrument careening towards automation and ease, but as a medium for intimacy with the matter of our time (images, audio, video), yielding a sense of agency with what, to most, feels like an indelible substrate.

You’re likely seen as a bright brain with a knack for solving problems, and what good are the liberal arts¹ and the humanities² in solving the world’s large, technically complex issues? You want your work to have impact and “matter” — something you know to require hard work, discipline, and things like “frameworks” and “mental models.” Tactical, practical, and efficient. But consider, for a second, your thinking. Where did your thoughts and beliefs come from? What about your conviction, your mission, your sense of purpose on this earth? These questions are why the liberal arts and the humanities, or subjects distinct from professional and technical subjects, exist.

The ecosystem that we inhabit as technologists was not built with humans in mind, it was built to run laps around other industries within the capitalist game, and it does this on the backs of the young people it exploits. In simpler terms: the status quo of technology was not designed to make you a happy, content, morally well-rounded young person. That, however, is precisely the purpose of examining the world through a liberal arts lens. Through this frame of view, we might think thoughts without action items, try opinions on for size, celebrate contradiction, and revel in the pursuit of understanding both each other and the world around us.

At their core, the liberal arts and the humanities serve as aggregated documentation on the human condition — the kind of documentation that is meant to be digested, discussed with others, and revisited from whichever angles serve you best along your journey.

It is difficult to advocate for the liberal arts by appealing to results or metrics. But our bias towards viewing these non-instrumental disciplines through a problem-solving lens is exactly why we need spaces that suggest other ways of seeing the world. While that lens grants impressive achievement, it might also leave you wondering why you were even chasing after the thing you achieved to begin with. Our goal is to show you that the problem-solving lens is one of many possible views you can have on the world. You can treat this view like a pair of glasses, one that ought to be regularly removed and replaced with a more reflective, contemplative, and critical lens.

Games felt like they were about sparkles and tension. Great app UX is about minimalism and simplicity. Fortunately, I found Raph Koster, the author of A Theory of Fun. Raph is known as a “Game Grammarian” and deeply deconstructs how games are made.

Another more modern example is this landing page for PayPal. Notice how the page clearly invites you to choose. Are you a “Personal” user or a “Business” user? As you mouse over each section, the story unfolds, expanding your choices, offering you things you can easily understand and identify with. Each branch has a clear call to action. This is a beautiful story telling sequence that pulls you in and gets you to become an active part of the on-boarding process.

There are clearly 3 distinct versions of jumping going on here: Initial jump. Simple button pressLong jump. Long button pressLanding jump. Timed jump What’s so interesting here is that there is only one ‘thing’ you’re learning: jumping. But by stressing subtle aspects of how to jump, the game builds up variations of it. A basic jump gets you over things, a long jump can “open” and landing a jump can “attack”. A boring app designer like me would assume you’d need 3 different verbs/buttons for this but Super Mario does this with a single “Jump” action.

APPSEach feature is in isolation, how it is done usually has little relation to other features (other that using a style guide).GAMESBuild a game through a single, mechanic that grows in expressive power by adding modifiers like time, special keys, or timing.

APPSJust throw in a bunch of features into a pot.GAMESUnderstand everything is a journey. Work hard to make everything a closely connected arc of events that help the user create a narrative that matches the overall story.

APPSAssume users are at a constant skill level.GAMESUse hints constantly and patiently to move users to the next level.

APPSTend to offer users a large toolbox and let them figure out how to get started.GAMESHave a clear understanding of the journey and say “Start here first”.

The Mac took a very hardware driven concept, turning on your computer, and turned it into theater. Yes it had the boot sound, but it then showed a promise, a compromise of the final desktop and as it booted, ‘inflated’ that promise with the final working model. Why people loved the Mac is often misunderstood. I’d claim that it’s this dedication to taking people on a carefully crafted story, one which allowed users to craft a compatible narrative, that is at the heart of this devotion.

To win the level you must first cross the street. To cross the street requires that you move the frog. To move the frog requires that you understand joystick timing. Each of these sub levels have their own feedback considerations: Street: the cars movementFrog: How it moves, how far it jumps each timeJoystick: Direction and speed of movement (it’s quite slow actually) Games understand that each of these levels has their own set of feedback, motivation and learning that must take place. This level of deconstruction, in a 30 year old game no less, blew my mind. Games were complex! They really paid attention to detail. There was a lot here to understand.

The computer example here is desktop menus. “Selecting a menu item” is actually a fractal cascade of skills where you first start horizontally browsing the menu bar, with a click, you shift into a vertical mode but keep the same basic highlight approach. For hierarchical menus, you need to understand the graphic hint that there is something deeper and then navigate over to reveal and then select that menu. Anyone who has taught beginning computer users the menu system knows how hard it is to master hierarchical menus. It’s takes practice to find, reveal and track over to that menu. There is a fractal cascade of skills required.

Raph has a great quote in his book for this: “Fun is just another word for learning”. In order to have fun, you must learn. I find this inspiring as app design wants your users to learn but we’ve rarely appreciated this could be fun. Games understand that in order to learn you must start thinking in layers. Begin with a basic skill and slowly add more, getting better one layer at a time.

All an “Uncharted” movie had to accomplish — all that it possibly could accomplish — was to capture the glint and derring-do that helped the series port the spirit of Indiana Jones into the modern world. And while it’s true that the best moments of Ruben Fleischer’s thoroughly mediocre (if not unpleasant) adaptation manage to achieve that goal for three or four entire seconds at a time, this generic multiplex adventure falls so far short of its source material because it fails in the areas where history says it should have been able to exceed it. The areas where movies have traditionally had the upper hand over video games: Characters. Personality. Humor. Humanity! You know, the things that films get for free, and video games have to create through witchcraft. The same things that someone up the ladder decided to leave behind when they took a solid-gold brand like “Uncharted” and turned it into an IMAX-sized chunk of cubic zirconia, resulting in a movie that isn’t just less playable than the game on which it’s based, but less watchable too.