Interfaces, incentives, emergence, and second-order thinking constitute the biggest differences between platform and application design.
Interfaces are the points of contact between elements, where simplicity and flexibility can lead to efficiency at scale.
Incentives drive the motivation of both platform- and end- users. By designing incentives, we can re-invest users’ energy, amplifying desired outcomes
and preventing undesired results.
Emergence is the open-ended feedback loop that platforms can create and maintain. By designing for emergence, not against it, we enable users to
discover applications we never imagined.
Second-order thinking lets us plan for, and potentially tame, the complexities that threaten to turn platforms into dead ends — or worse.
Second-order thinking requires creativity. Platform designers have to ask: how will interfaces and incentives create emergent behavior? How will those
behaviors change the incentives? What can we build to channel these feedback loops towards our goals?
Emergence presents a unique opportunity in design. When behavior is predictable, we design tightly-tuned experiences (“happy paths”) to realize the best
outcomes for users. When behavior is emergent, users’ creativity becomes a multiplier on top of our own, exponentially increasing the best outcomes for
both users and business.
Platform designers have to understand and plan experience APIs: interfaces both in space (how elements appear beside each other, in front of or behind
each other, inside or surrounding each other) and in time (how elements or entire screens appear before or after each other, how to communicate causal
relationships).
Platform designers have to understand and plan experience APIs: interfaces both in space (how elements appear beside each other, in front of or behind
each other, inside or surrounding each other) and in time (how elements or entire screens appear before or after each other, how to communicate causal
relationships).
Boosts are a reinvention of browser extensions—a built-in way to boost the web by writing your own code (HTML, JavaScript, and CSS) that can run on any website or specific ones that you assign. Check out this example of applying custom styles to GitHub:
Look at that! The webpage on the right is the canvas, and the code on the left is the medium. They’ve even built in visual editing tools such as a color picker.
Webpages have always been destinations, but this invites them to be starting points—blank canvases, even. Your browser now invites you to extend and reimagine the web in whatever way you see fit.
It has always been possible to run user scripts and styles via browser extensions, but the developer experience of creating an extension has never been particularly beginner friendly. I’ve personally never seen extension development integrated so seamlessly and directly into the browser. Arc even implies that working with the web might be just as important as browsing it—in Arc’s interface, the Boost editor sits at the same level as the page you’re browsing, not in some nested panel that feels secondary to the experience.
Under the hood, Boosts are just a folder of HTML, JS, and CSS files. You can zip them up and send them to a friend, if you’d like. One can imagine a way to easily share boosts on the web in some sort of marketplace built right into Arc. There could be entire forums dedicated to sharing boosts around like Winamp skins for websites.
Boosts empowers even non technical users to create with the web rather than simply consuming it. The possibilities are exciting, and it’s refreshing that they’re being explored by a startup in 2022 at all.
I’m interested in software that works for us, our creativity, and our attention. The web is a powerful building material with a variety of textures, and it’s time we had tools that let all of us take advantage of such an incredible resource.
From The Browser Company’s email to Arc beta members about Boosts:
So, what happens to the internet when changing the internet is this easy?
I think you’re in love with poetry itself, the soulful salvation of words that lift you out of the disappointments of the mundane, into a more expansive universe of intense colors and sensations.
What is romantic love, beyond lust and pretty words?
From On Writing by Stephen King:
Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.
If you accept (even partially) this idea that our real power as writers is located in the split-second decisions we make, and in the way these accumulate in a story over many passes through it, then you’ll see that the beauty of a piece of writing doesn’t depend on what we have decided about it in advance, but in the accumulating quality of those split-second decisions (i.e., how in touch we are with our good instincts) and our willingness to go through it again and again.
From I Seem to Be a Verb by R. Buckminster Fuller:
I live on Earth at the present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing - a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process - an integral function of the universe.
Here’s our daily prayer: I’m a regular mortal, not a superhero. The big mistakes I’ve made only make me more lovable, more humble, more sensitive to the trials of others. Today, instead of beating myself up, I’ll celebrate who I am, in all of my delightful imperfections. I have love to give, and I have plenty of time left. My job is to enjoy this day.
It’s just how the creative process works: You have fun and make mistakes, over and over. Learn to enjoy the work itself and you’ll get shit done, full stop.
Queer people don't grow up as ourselves, we grow up playing a version of ourselves that sacrifices authenticity to minimise humiliation & prejudice. The massive task of our adult lives is to unpick which parts of ourselves are truly us & which parts we've created to protect us.
The paradox of modernity is that you can share your entire life and still not have said anything that matters to you. Exposure can be, but often isn’t, the same thing as intimacy.
From A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders:
What a story is "about" is to be found in the curiosity it creates in us, which is a form of caring.
From Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg:
Writing is not psychology. We do not talk "about" feelings. Instead the writer feels and through her words awakens those feelings in the reader.
Don't identify too strongly with your work. Your words are not you. They were just a great moment passing through you. A moment you were awake enough to write down and capture.
When you write, don't say. "I'm going to write a poem" That attitude will freeze you right away. Sit down with the least expectations of yourself; say, "I am free to write the worst junk in the world."
It takes a while for our experiences to sift through our consciousness. For instance, it is hard to write about being in love in the midst of a mad love affair. We have no perspective.
From How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell:
I’ve known for my entire adult life that going for a walk is how I can think most easily. Walking is not simply moving your thinking mind (some imagined insular thing) outside. The process of walking is thinking. In fact, in his book Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, David Abram proposes that it is not we who are thinking, but rather the environment that is thinking through us. Intelligence and thought are things to be found both in and around the self. “Each place is a unique state of mind,” Abram writes. “And the many owners that constitute and dwell within that locale—the spiders and the tree frogs no less than the human—all participate in, and partake of, the particular mind of the place.”
From Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott:
Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.
From Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain:
Assume the worst. About everybody. But don’t let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off your back. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious and corrupt asshole shouldn’t prevent you from enjoying their company, working with them or finding them entertaining.
These days when I think about agency I think about how freedom is terrifying. Because there’s no one to approve of what you’re going after, no one to tell you you’re good for pursuing it. To be free, you have to stop wanting approval. For most of us, approval is the signal that matters more than anything else. It matters more than pleasure, more than satisfaction, more than love. To wear someone else’s fantasy like a second skin is liberation from having your own. To chase after what you can never enjoy is a way of avoiding the question of what to do when you get it.
“Compassion is not a finite good, that you use up when you care for something,” Donath writes. “Instead, it is a practice that grows stronger with use.”
I have long been drawn to the use of architectural, rather than cinematic, language to express my experience of interfaces and have been most inspired as a designer by reading about architecture. I believe this is because the comparison to films misses a central property of interfaces that is so constitutive that it outweighs the other similarities: Agency — it is human action that is indispensable to an interface. Like visitors to a building, users of an interface are given the agency to choose their own path, to move through it at their own speed and discretion: to wander and to linger, to move swiftly and purposefully, or to explore. Another striking similarity is that interfaces are, like buildings, never experienced all at once, but piecemeal: screen by screen, or room by room. Only in the user’s mind are they shaped into a coherent entity, are seen as a uniform whole.
And anything new is by nature without precedent — meaning, without data to know whether it will work or not. So when we approach building new things, we don’t optimize for metrics. We optimize for feelings. Our own, and of those we serve. Because our most treasured, human creations are far from neutral… In fact, they are full of opinions, taste, and subjectivity! That is what gives them their spirit and vitality, so own what moves you and let it run wild in your software!
I find it difficult to read this criticism of the web because, well, I’m a child of the hyperlink. My entire career is based on the existence of the <a> tag; creating, sharing, surfing, making sure that web pages can fit together in just the right way so that people will want to click this blue link over another.
I am a designer because I want to solve problems. I want people to be less frustrated when they use technology. I want to make their lives easier. I don't want to make anyones life more difficult. These two sentiments sound the same, but they are not. I find both are important to consider.
When I sit down to design things I try to put on the veil of ignorance. I imagine a world where I am not who I am right now. And I think about all the things that could possibly frustrate me. Then I think some more.
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” wrote Blaise Pascal.
“We believe that we live in the ‘age of information.’” he writes. “That there has been an information ‘explosion,’ an information ‘revolution.’ While in a certain narrow sense this is the case, in many important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An Unenlightenment. An age of missing information.”
If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I’ve found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I’ve had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.
So, like me, if you were to sit down and say “Forsooth! Today is the fine day I begin my own internet merry-making!” you’d quickly follow up your statement with a existential crisis worse than trying to fold a fitted sheet. You’ve opened the door to the rabbit hole of Pandora’s box, filled with mixed metaphors and some unfortunate and unresolvable questions. Like: “If this is a personal website, what’s my personality?” Or, how about: “What do I want to do here?” Or possibly, “What is a personal website anymore, with Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr etc etc etc?” Perhaps you perfer the classic doomslinger: “Who am I?” Later, you look in the mirror and your face is all puffy, because you’ve been crying about your stupid, meaningless existence for two months. At least that’s what I did. Damn websites.
A minority, however, measured quantity as inversely proportional to quality. James Joyce proudly considered the completion of two perfect sentences a full day of work and Dorothy Parker, an obsessive reviser, even skewed to the negative, once lamented, “I can’t write five words but that I change seven.”
