Tuesday, 9.28pm
Sheffield, U.K.
Concern for man and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations. – Albert Einstein
I have to give a talk in a few weeks and I’m trying to think of ways to get my point across.
When I was younger, I used to do work and make things.
Well, create code that did stuff anyway.
I still do stuff with code but most of the time I try and figure out what needs doing rather than how to do it.
In the field of Operational Research that kind of work is labelled problem structuring methods.
Which some people object to because it’s not really about problems, it’s not really about structuring, and it isn’t really about methods.
But you don’t need to know that.
The point is that a lot of the time we don’t know where to begin – what is it that we ought to do?
That question almost always leads to standing in front of a whiteboard.
Or, in this digital age, starting with an application.
I recommend MyPaint or OpenBoard on a GNU/Linux platform.
The trick is making that first mark and being comfortable that it doesn’t have to be anything – not perfect, not done, just a beginning.
The trick is realising that the thing you make on the whiteboard is transient, ephemeral – it’s done and then wiped away.
Well, it used to be anyway.
We draw to make what we think visible, to clarify what is unclear, to make a thing out of thought that we can manipulate, and to explore and create. We do this because it makes thinking and working together easier (Cherubini et al, 2007).
A whiteboard is used to support conversations between people and the ideal software tool lets people just talk and express their ideas fluidly and unselfconsciously – using the tool doesn’t get in the way of being able to think and talk. (Pederson et al., 1993)
The difficulty I suppose is learning to be comfortable doing what you do now on paper using digital tools.
That used to be a steep learning curve.
But it’s a lot easier now, the only thing that stands in your way is confidence and practice.
We see too many examples of perfect and forget that perfect is often not the thing we want or need.
What we need is to be useful.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
References
Cherubini, M., Venolia, G., DeLine, R., Ko, A.J., 2007. Let’s go to the whiteboard: how and why software developers use drawings, in: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Presented at the CHI07: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, San Jose California USA, pp. 557–566. https://doi.org/10.1145/1240624.1240714
Pederson, E.R., McCall, K., Moran, T.P., Halasz, F.G. 1993. Tivoli: An Electronic Whiteboard for Informal Workgroup Meetings. Interchi.
Handcrafted insight 