Research

"Goal is the removal of friction, not gamification" — Lauren Cason on her iterations through AR

But, an even bigger consideration is that of design friction. Friction is anything that prevents users from accomplishing their goals or getting things done as quickly as possible. It is usually the opposite of being intuitive or effortless. However, it doesn’t mean that it’s always bad for users. Are messaging apps supposed to hoist the sustainability flag? iMessage and WhatsApp are all about seamless messaging. Sending a picture just works. Adding an extra interaction to stimulate sustainability adds an 'unnecessary' friction to that experience. But maybe this 'friction in the experience' is exactly what consumers need.

calendar app that overlays to-dos from over the years on the same date like sedimentary rocks to create a personal geologic time scale

We spend time, save time, take time, and make it; manage, track, and save it; we kill time, we pass it, we waste it, borrow, and steal it. We abuse time and it beats us back up, either in retribution or self-defense. It’s a zero-sum perspective of the material of our lives; it makes us prisoners to our own utility. The AI said nothing about love, loyalty, or enthusiasm. When you wrap those up, it becomes clear that the best thing to do with time is to devote it. That is how you get time on your side. When you are working with time instead of against it, every bit matters, it all counts, even the fallow times, the empty times, the time off the path.

be confident in the depth of your curiosity not in the depth of your expertise

In the Graph OS, all of your things are within your system as nodes, or items, within your graph. Emails, calendar events, articles, web pages, podcast episodes, to do lists as well as the to dos inside them; everything. And each thing may have references to, or be referenced by, any other thing. What is the net effect of this arrangement?

the myth of difficulty

Everything is easy.

To fight artificial complexity, you have to internalize that everything is easy.

Artificial complexity is the art of making simple things hard, so that someone can sell you the solution.

Life would be miserable if we only spent time in commercial spaces, because not all value can be captured and supported in a commercial context

Choice and will The digital landscape has an influence on our lives, but we are more directly affected by our personal choices. We must fend for ourselves, whether or not the technology industry chooses to deal with the implications of their work.

The computer of the future is not a product, but a place.

Spatial grocery list Organizing your groceries based on the path you usually walk through the store. Also using this idea to help you remember what to put on your list.

We've had roughly 25,000+ unique visitors since "going live" about five days ago. Cloudflare has served up some 60gb of data, which means folks are clicking through into the images (by design, not much data is loaded until you start viewing images in detail).

Technology only adds more—it is never this or that; it is always this and that. A quick example from my life: Twitter didn’t replace Facebook. The iPad didn’t replace my phone. My phone didn’t replace my TV. Now, I watch YouTube on my iPad, toss the video up to my TV, while checking Twitter and Facebook on my phone. It’s a little constellation of technology. But I keep asking myself: how many more things can I juggle? And for how long?