What people haven’t seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It’s not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that’s not true. Obviously it doesn’t matter that much if you’re a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles.
Tim Maudlin
What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology
Classical Mechanics
Classical Mechanics is a field of physics concerned with the motion on the macro scale. As with any metaphor, I think digging too deep causes it to break, and undoes all the good work. So I’ll keep this (kinda) brief.
Fundamentally, it is a study in determinism. It deals with limited parameters and has the ability to infer future and past states based on present information. For example, a ball moving at 10m/s to the left, will be 10 metres away from it’s present location in a seconds time. By the same logic, 1 second ago, it would have been 10 metres away from it’s present location in the opposite direction.
So, it’s a predictable system. Like a lot of systems on the macro scale. I walk the same way to work every single day. I stop at the same coffee shop. I order the same thing. These deterministic routines are part of our lives. In the words of Leonard Susskind; there’s one arrow in, one arrow out, you know where you’ve come from, and you know where you’re going.
We’re not this way because we’re stupid, or boring, or predictable. It’s because it’s easy. It saves time. Imagine you had to find a different way to walk to work every morning. You’d manage for awhile, but it wouldn’t be long until you were repeating yourself or adding pointless ornamentation (skipping instead of walking) as a way of being original.
You can give people a clear, logical narrative without an array of at best, distracting, and at worst, useless options. A path that can be passively learned, simply because it makes sense, and become second nature.
Thankfully though, people are also adaptable. If there’s road works, you’ll find a different way, you might even find it’s a more pleasant walk. This is the unfortunate side of the routine, it can be hard to alter without an external force. Just like that theoretical ball is doomed to travel at 10m/s forever, unless something outside it acts upon it.
This is why routines, including those in our design process, have to be questioned, tested and honed. Cold and logical is entirely appropriate for some interactions. Warm and idiosyncratic is perfectly applicable to others. If you’re really lucky, you’ll get to do coded and puzzling.
Stop worrying about this colour or that typeface. Make sure that people are able to complete actions, find information and enjoy their everyday experience with your artifact in a natural, context appropriate way.
You should know where they’ve come from, and you should know where they’re going.
