finn schubert's blog

From Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen’s How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

(There’s lots of amazing stuff in this article, but this is just what jumped out today.)

Take emotion seriously: Historically, work on tools for thought has focused principally on cognition; much of the work has been stuck in Spock-space. But it should take emotion as seriously as the best musicians, movie directors, and video game designers. Mnemonic video is a promising vehicle for such explorations, possibly combining both deep emotional connection with the detailed intellectual mastery the mnemonic medium aspires toward.

I thought this was interesting in line with yesterday’s thought’s about “lovable” products.

When designing anything, even–especially–systems that feel like they are dry and neutral, we need to take emotion seriously. What does that look like?

The idea of “minimum viable product” never made sense to me, so I appreciated this reframe of “simple, lovable, complete.”

This conversation comes primarily from tech entrepreneurship, where for years, entrepreneurs were encouraged to launch a “minimum viable product” for customer feedback. This never felt right to me, and I appreciated this explanation of using “simple, lovable, complete” as criteria instead.

How can this idea be applied in other contexts to build things with time and resource constraints? What would a “simple, lovable, complete” website for an organization that can’t afford web developer help look like?

What would a “simple, lovable, complete” report look like?

I LOVE the fact that “lovable” is an explicit criterion here – we all want something lovable (to read, to use, to watch) but how often do we use that as a criterion for what we are making?