The useful thing about defining good design as a form-context fit is that it tells you where you will find the form. The form is in the context. To find a good relationship, you do not start by saying, “I want a relationship that looks like this”—that would be starting in the wrong end, by defining form. Instead you say, “I’m just going to pay attention to what happens when I hang out with various people and iterate toward something that feels alive”—you start from the context.

The context is smarter than you. It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it.

If you want to find a good design—be that the design of a house or an essay, a career or a marriage—what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what unfolding is.

The opposite of an unfolding is a vision. A vision springs, not from a careful understanding of a context, but from a fantasy

Anything that increases the rate and resolution of information you get from the context will help. And anything that makes it easier for you to act on the context.

A common reason we filter information and become blind to the context is that we bundle things when we think. Thinking about our career, we might think in abstractions like “a job.” But really a career is made up of a bunch of different things like a salary, an identity, relationships, status, a sense of meaning, and so on. It is often easier to find a fit if you unbundle these things, and think about the parts that matter to you individually. Do you actually need more status? Or can you find a better fit if you go low status?

Another common reason the feedback loop of unfolding often works poorly is that people have decided on a solution already. They have turned on their confirmation bias. They have decided that a certain solution is off-limits. Let’s say you are 34 and haven’t found a partner but want kids. If we unbundle this, it is clear that the problem of having a kid and the problem of love are not the same thing, so you could solve your problem by having a kid with your best friend instead. But this feels weird. It is not the vision you have for your life. And it seems dysfunctional. Observe that feeling—it is, perhaps, a part of the context. There is some information there. But to unfold, do not write off any solutions. Leave them all on the table; let them combine and recombine. Many good ideas look bad at first. To increase the rate at which you understand the context, you want to develop a certain detachment. When the context thrashes one of your ideas, you want to say, “Oh, that’s interesting.” It takes practice. But it is worth getting better at. Reality is shy—it only reveals itself to those who, like honest scientists, do not wish it to be something else.

The faster you can collide your ideas against reality, the faster you get feedback.

The school system is centered around visions, not unfolding. You are asked to make decisions about realities that are five, ten years down the line, and you get no feedback on your decisions.

you’re less torn by anxious attachments when you recognize how something must naturally and necessarily unfold.

Knowledge is freedom from getting mad at facts.

Detachment does not mean you don’t care what happens. It just means you don’t care whether a specific thing happens or not. You want to know the outcome of the coin-toss (you care), but you don’t care whether it is heads or tails even if you’ve bet on heads (you’re not attached to a specific outcome). The important thing is that something happens, which means you’ve successfully kept play going, but without keeping score.

Emotional Self-Management: I like to think of this as accepting the emotions you have instead of having emotions about having emotions in an endless stack.

Fear. Not fear, plus anxiety about fear, plus guilt about anxiety about fear, plus shame about displaying guilt about experiencing anxiety about having fear. This is emotional focus. Instead of retreating from an emotion through layers of additional emotions until you find one you can deal with, you experience the actual emotion for what it is.

our truly quirky dimensions are never really grasped by these recommendation algorithms. They have all the dullness of a Demographics 101 curriculum; they sketch our personalities with the crudity of crime-scene chalk-outlines. They’re not wrong about us; but they’re woefully incomplete.

The metaphor suggests precisely what to do: If you want to have wilder, curiouser thoughts, you have to avoid the industrial monocropping of big-tech feeds. You want an intellectual forest, overgrown with mushrooms and towering weeds and a massive dead log where a family of raccoons has taken up residence.

For me, it’s meant slowly — over the last few years — building up a big, rangy collection of RSS feeds, that let me check up on hundreds of electic blogs and publications and people. (I use Feedly.) I’ve also started using Fraidycat, a niftily quixotic feed-reader that lets you sort sources into buckets by “how often should I check this source”, which is a cool heuristic; some people/sites you want to check every day, and others, twice a year.

Other times I spend an hour or two simply prospecting — I pick a subject almost at random, then check to see if there’s a hobbyist or interest-group discussion-board devoted to it. (There usually is, running on free warez like phpBB). Then I’ll just trawl through the forum, to find out what does this community care about?

Inspired by biological form and motion, the Dynamic Island is designed to feel like a living organism, with a deliberate elasticity that serves as a playful contrast to the fixed nature of the hardware it embodies.

Meaningful additions to the world rest on novel connections among pre-existing concepts, objects and situations, not self-indulgent originality for its own sake. What we glorify as flashes of brilliance are usually astute observations about the world, improved by critical thinking and critique. And observations often begin from a question.

because many of us have been rewarded and praised for having right answers and clever ideas, in school as well as in professional life, the questioning and critiquing part of design can get very uncomfortable.

A quick and effective fix is to stop brainstorming ideas with your team, and start brainstorming questions instead. Getting together and listing every question you can think of about a problem, a process, or a situation is uncomfortable at first, and then in very short order enhances collaboration, decreases risk and puts you on the path to being a learning organization.

point systems often don’t measure what we want to measure. They artificially simplify or distort our values. Our goals are messy. They’re strange and complex and multifaceted, but then they are collapsed down to scoring systems. And the thing that can happen here is we lose sight of what we wanted and we begin to want what the point system wants

We are being changed by point systems and structures that we’re not taught to see, that often have incentives and logics that are hidden from us

when you quantify in an institution— and I want to stress here, this is not about quantification in any circumstance, right— this is about quantification in bureaucracies and institutions— what you do is you kind of take really context-sensitive nuanced information that requires a lot of background to understand and then you carve out all of the subtle nuance and all the weird little information that needs a lot of shared context to understand.

So in order to make that information travel well, I need to create this neat little informational packet where I strip off all of the weird context-sensitive stuff and just create something simple. In this case, I rank each student inside a pre-established spectrum— F to A. And that information, right, is totally comprehensible to anyone. It aggregates easily. Everyone collects it in the same way. It’s been standardized. It mounts up.So if you have large-scale bureaucracies that need to be organized and function coherently, then you need these kind of simple, nuance-free packets of information. And I think that’s one of the reasons we’ve seen this constant rise of simplified metrical analysis.

He says, large-scale states can only see the kinds of information they can process. And the kinds of information they can process are things like this— standardized, quantified information.So he thinks that only the parts of the world that are legible to the state, that are put in the terms a state can understand, that’s the only kind of thing the state can process, act on, and see. And so the state wants to transform the world into the kinds of things it can work on. The state can’t see my individual feedback about my students, about you know, what they need for their emotional arc. It can see the letter grade average of the university.

If our taste and our values and our interests are varying and wide, and plural and rich, the state can’t see that. The state can’t get a handle on my bizarre taste in the tabletop role-playing games.

one thing I like about analytics is that outside of the context of simply argue about the flaws of analytics, not having them allows you to bullshit yourself a lot. Allows you to bullshit yourself about whether or not people are reading you, what you’re really doing here, are you serving an audience. But then having them allows you to stop seeing anything they can’t measure.

Fitbit can capture steps but it can’t capture your joy and ecstasy and physical emotion. If I exercise and I don’t use any objective measures, then I could just be fooling myself. But if I become obsessed with objective measures, then I’m not going to exercise for any of the things that fall outside those objective measures, like the aesthetic joy of movement.

you can track anything. But at some point, the tracking becomes the point.

People who write about games as an art form, as something special, really get super excited by two kinds of games. One are games like Romero’s game “Train,” because it’s so obviously meaningful and ethically potent. And they get really excited about games that tell stories in ways that are familiar to us from movies and novels.

I’m actually a little worried that this kind of focus loses for us something that’s really special about games. It pushes us towards the kind of games that are familiar to us. Those of us that care about art and have read about the theory of fiction or the— that kind of thing we can recognize. Things like the beauty of a really good puzzle game, or the beauty of rock climbing, or the beauty of chess— those are more alien and that’s the thing that I want to understand.

every art form is a crystallization of some common sense experience. That the visual arts are the crystallization of seeing. That music is a crystallization of hearing. And you argue that games are the crystallization of doing.

when you’re playing a game, you’re trying to get some end state. Like if you’re running a marathon, you’re trying to get to a particular point in space. But we don’t actually care about being at that point in space in and of itself, or we would take the easy way. We would take a lift, take an Uber, take a shortcut.

what makes games special is not just that they create a world or an environment, but that the game designer tells you what abilities you have and what obstacles you’ll face, but most importantly, what goals you’ll have. So the punchline in the book is that games are the art form that works in the medium of agency itself.

What the game designer is doing is creating an alternate self for you, an alternate agent, describing the skeleton of that agent, saying here are the abilities you have, here’s what you’re going to care about.

In the same way that I think we understand some of the art forms as making our senses more acute and our perception of the world more sensitive, games can do that for the way we see the goals and means we adopt in the course of a day.

The thing that was in philosophy that was so delightful and pleasurable quickly and now I have to struggle for four years to get another interesting epiphany. “Baba Is You” is just like epiphany after epiphany after epiphany. You play it for 20 minutes. You solve a level. You had another epiphany. It takes that pleasure and it extracts it and concentrates it.

In the world, our goals and our abilities and the world— a lot of the times they don’t align. You do what you want. And to get what you want, you have to do something incredibly boring and repetitive. Or you face problems that are way beyond you.But in games, because the game designer manipulates what you want to do and the abilities and the obstacles, the game designer can create harmonious action. They can create these possibilities where you’re— what you need to do— the obstacles you face and your abilities just match perfectly. So this is the weird sense in which I feel like games are like an existential balm for the horror of life. A lot of life is you don’t fit. You have to do things. And it sucks and it’s horrible and it’s boring.And in games, for once in your life, you know exactly what you’re doing and you know exactly that you can do it. And then you have just the right amount of ability to do it. It’s a feeling of concentrated, crystallized action. For me, solving puzzles, or balancing over in a rock climb, or seeing a trap ahead in chess, this is ecstasy. And it’s an ecstasy I get once in a while in my non-game life. But game designers have sculpted these little action universes so that we can step into them and just have this ecstasy over and over again.

they are taking what reality is, which is we are constantly opting into these different systems with incentives, and structures, and our skills, and they have to match the means to get to a goal, and distilling that down to a small core.

I think the most important thing about games is the way they manipulate our agency. The way we enter into this alternate self. And that’s I think where you can see the greatest power of games and their greatest danger. The greatest power of games is that you can explore this landscape of different agencies. The greatest danger of games is that you can get sucked into this experience of just craving and wanting to be in a clear, crisp and gentle universe where you know exactly what to do and exactly how well it’s measured.

So when you play chess, you get really sucked into this kind of agency where you are thinking ahead and calculating linearly. When you play diplomacy, you get sucked into this agency where you’re constantly thinking about how you can lie to people and misrepresent yourself. And when you play rock climbing, you get sucked into an agency where all your powers are about balance and fine precision and motion.

the body of games is a kind of library of agencies. The real promise of games, if you take them seriously, is that by playing a ton of them, you can traverse all the different possibilities of agency

The

The biggest danger that I’m worried about for games is if you spend your life playing games, you’ll expect that value systems will be crisp, clear, well-defined, and quantified. And then you leave games, you’ll start looking around for— I don’t know— things to do, or institutions to be a part of, or jobs to do where the outcomes are clear, crystallized, quantified, and shared between people. I’m worried about getting stuck in the world of maximizing your clicks or Wall Street finance just because you have an expectation that what it is to act in the world is to act for clear externally well-defined points.

What might be true is if you spend all your time in point-scoring environments, you will become used to life being about scoring points. And you will begin to adopt that approach and begin to adopt those values without even realizing it. You’ll become habituated. The game will change you. That is a second principle I want to put out here— that games change us.

“Twitter shapes our goals for discourse by making conversation something like a game. Twitter scores our conversation. And it does so not in terms of our own particular and rich purposes for communication, but in terms of its own preloaded, painfully-thin metrics— likes, retweets, and follower counts. And if we take up Twitter’s invitation and internalize those evaluations, we’ll be thinning out and simplifying our own goals for communication.”

you can care about all kinds of things going on on Twitter. You can care about having fun. You can care about connecting with a few people. You can care about getting knowledge. You can care about getting understanding. You can care about connecting.But those things aren’t measured by Twitter. What Twitter measures is who clicked like, who clicked retweet, who clicked follow. And what you might think is, oh, because people click like, then that’s just a good proxy for all these other values. They’re only going click like if you actually successfully communicated something. But clicking like is a really narrow information capture.

So I think if you look at what a lot of people in politics and media think they’re doing on Twitter, they are writing things that on their face are meant to be persuasive. A gloss on a news article. A tweet about democracy, or single payer health care, or how Joe Biden is bad, or whatever it might be. But that tweet is then attached to a scoring system that has nothing to do with whether or not you are persuasive to the people you need to convince. It’s whether or not that tweet is applauded by the people who already like you.

These little worlds where every mechanism is something you can internalize, and you can make a plan that encompasses every single mechanism the game has and it all fits.

When you read people who are excited about a conspiracy theory— like the flat earth conspiracy theory— one of the things they say over and over again is they felt so disempowered before the conspiracy theory. And once they became a flat-earther, or something like this, they felt empowered. And the reason, I think, is the conspiracy theories fit inside your head. They’re the right size for you just like games are the right size for you to take some kind of action.

If you believe in a conspiracy theory, now you have total intellectual agency. You don’t have to trust other people. You don’t have to do this awkward weird thing of trusting somebody and trusting who they trust and then trusting all the million things— people they trust. You can think everything through yourself and then come to a conclusion using this engine that’s so powerful that lets you explain anything.

Games are exciting when they test us and they put us right at the limit of our abilities. And then we push through and then we can make it. The games are beautiful when our whole practical self fits the challenge.

So if you expect someone to make a game out of intellectual life, you shouldn’t expect them to make something so complicated that you have to do this horrible trusting thing. And you shouldn’t expect them to make it easy. You should expect them to make it so challenging that it really fully engages people. But it’s just the right size, so if they fight hard, they can actually find explanation for everything.

one of the difficult things about being alive during, as you put it, the great endarkenment, is we are all choosing which explanations to believe, built to some degree on structures of social trust, not a first person verification. We can’t verify a lot of what we believe we know about the world.

how do you develop a sensitivity— not a cynicism and maybe not even always a skepticism, but just first a sensitivity to being able to see all the different game-like scored, simplifying systems that you’ve adopted and all of the values they are pushing you towards? How do you develop game mindfulness?

I’m trying to develop the same kind of instinct in belief systems. Someone hands you a belief system and you’re like, oh, this feels so good. That’s— and then you have to pause and be like, wait, is this designed just to make me feel good? So the short answer is I’m now suspicious of pleasure, which I hate.

thinking about games shows me two possibilities that are like two flip sides of the same coin. And the richness of games is when temporary hyper-focus on a goal opens up all this rich, sculpted, interesting activity, all these amazing movements, or decisions, or calculations that are just lovely. That’s the promise of games.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyAnd the danger of games and the game-like attitude is when we hyper-focus on that goal and we forget about all the other stuff that could happen along the way. And we just narrowly see the goal. And like, games for me are good when you engage in a duality of experience of them. You spend some time buried and trying to win, but you realize that winning isn’t the point. And then you step back and you see, oh my god, the process of doing it was so rich and so lovely.And games are toxic for me when we just get hyper-narrowed on the point system and we never think about the larger outcome of the point system. We never think about what our life is like or what the activity is like under that point system. We never think about what follows from it. The big worry with the impact of highly gamified external systems is it encourages us not to step into a game and step back from it and think about the richness of the activity and whether it was worth it. What I’m worried about is those cases when the point system blocks out everything else from your universe and you don’t see any of the other stuff.

“Taste is the ability to infuse a product with emotion. In a taste-based industry, its products are stripped down to their very core: how it makes its users feel. We see this phenomenon happen in books, music, movies, games and increasingly tech products

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it

Film geeks don’t have a whole lot of tangible things to show for their passion and commitment to film. They just watch movies all the time. What they do have to show is a high regard for their own opinion. They’ve learned to break down a movie. They understand what they like and don’t like about a film. And they feel that they’re right. It’s not open to discussion. When I got involved in the movie industry I was shocked at how little faith or trust people have in their own opinions. They read a script and they like it – then they hand it to three of their friends to see what they think about it. I couldn’t believe it.

Rick Rubin on trusting your own taste: “You can’t second-guess your own taste for what someone else is going to like…Do what’s personal to you, take it as far you can go and people will resonate with it if they are supposed to resonate with it.”

I never had an arts education. I can barely draw straight lines. What I do have is a love for words, the history and delightful orgy of words, and a constant sense of discomfort about how things are hardly ever the way they should be.

I’m thinking now about how school encourages students to bullshit. I have friends who are literature teachers who constantly get frustrated by how their smart students give them stupid but vaguely plausible answers – I remember what it was like to be such a student. The student isn’t interested in being honest about his feelings – he just wants to be done with his homework and go on to play.

higher-level observations around underlying behavior.

If you're pursuing the career path someone else has taken, you're going to be frustrated when you don't get the same opportunities they did.

Material-based software can also have gentler learning curves, because the user only needs to learn a small set of rules about how different metaphors in the software interact with each other rather than learning deep hierarchies of menus and terminologies. In the best case, users can continue to discover new capabilities and workflows long after the initial release of the software.

Take nonlinear video editing software, like Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro, for example. Though they have their fair share of menu complexity, it’s pretty intuitive for anyone to understand the basic building blocks of video and audio clips sitting on a layered timeline. Here, the video and audio clips are composed of a software material that have their own laws of physics: they can grow and shrink to take up more or less time on the timeline. They can be moved around and layered in front of or behind other clips, but they can’t occupy the same space on the same “track” of the timeline. The timeline that runs left-to-right is a kind of “world” in which the materials of audio and video exist.

Poor design meets one need while creating a dozen others. Good design resolves problems without negatively affecting anything else in its ecosystem. We call this lens of thinking "systems thinking." It tends to separate the genuinely great designers from the pretty-great ones. The designers who do tremendous work know that what they're creating does not exist within a bubble. They understand that the context of what they're making plays a vital role in how the team should build it. They know how what they create affects everything it touches, particularly the people. The design is intentional. Trade-offs are known, weighted, and decided on. Not only in the immediate problem space but in the surrounding spaces too.