the computational

Drafted do-it-yourself illustrations have such a nice feel to them. Beyond that, they carry a strange extra meaning to them in a now digitized illustration world. I recently came across this woodworking book while cleaning an old workshop of my grandfathers. It's actually a field manual for the military, and I found it fascinating to flip through. There's something very nice about the quality and "artist' mark" on each image, that gives it extra weight and a strange sense of validity.

This extra "something", be it trust or intrigue, is a rebellion many of us are having to the digitization of documentation around us.

In the same way, many interfaces and popular tools gaining traction today seem to be veering away from the "all-purpose" do-everything slice-and-dice tools of the past, and focus on doing one thing very well. Most likely, these two shifts in culture are unrelated, but they share an common ground in their intentional constraints.

Right down to the earliest times in my life that I began thinking conceptually, popular thought on the subject of creativity seemed to value taking an idea as far as you could. Perhaps it's just the baseline for an overly analytical person like myself, striving for efficiency, but I find myself continually relearning how to draw out a core concept/idea from a larger entanglement of ideas, features, and possibilities.

To this end, constraints are a valuable property in the lifecycle of a narrative, interface or experience. You try to do too much, and you overcrowd meanings, and stifle intent

[note: I write this while standing in a subway car during rush hour, packed to capacity. There's a reason you don't see buskers going from car to car this time of day, even though a larger population of customers is captive]

The things we use on a daily basis are full of constraints, some intentional (Twitter) while others are inherited (email). Even in our day to day tasks, we could value from limiting our own "features". Treating our own minds as a CPU, keeping track of those open processes (IM, email inbox, music, surrounding noise/music/tv) and projects, while also being realistic about what our output bandwidth is and setting realistic daily goals. I struggle with this balance everyday, and in turn it trickles down into my projects, ideas; even down into my forms of escape and most importantly my interaction with people of value I surround myself with.

it's a hard lesson to repeat, but I think we can all find value in building ourselves a nice wood fence, and staying within it's boundaries. Hell, if you need help with yours, I have a rather handy woodworking manual at the ready!

As is the norm in the nerdy circles I dwell in, much of my daily conversation (be it in the office, over IM and forums, or in atmosphere-laden low light venues) resolves around how people engage in media. Whether for work, play, or simply to escape, we find ourselves in an information-saturated world.

Of course, to my friends and I who daily create interfaces and tools for getting-to/sharing this media, we find our jobs very important. Be it out of sheer ego, we also occasionally (frequently) find the need to argue the finer points of where this is all going, whether or not it's good for us as the collective masses, and making guesses as to what else could be in the mix that woud do better.

To that end, I've been pondering the nature of social networks as of late. If our collective use of a tool/interface is any indication of it's value to us, then we're all passively voting in social tools like Facebook as the new lords of our digital serfdom. As a standard practice, websites will track their monthly site traffic as an indication of its growth/success/stickyness to its audience.  As the recent Techcrunch article reveals, on a daily basis over half of all Facebook users (that's 350+ million by the way) login to the social network.  That is a horrifyingly delicious statistic to behold, and a huge number of people who are daily choosing to enter a virtual space which is inherently and purposefully "narratively agnostic".

But, are we missing the larger possibilities of our collective knowledge on the Internet? The current success of Facebook is it's ability to be a sandbox for you and your friends media and "metadata". Twitter wraps this nicely in a constraint, which people find challenging and simultaneously utilitarian towards consolidating the steam of information passing by them. Do we lose or gain by having this content live in an empty shell.  Are we throwing our collective trash into a huge landfill, and then blissfully walking through it looking for treasure stashed in others' discarded?

Beyond social networks, gamers have seen the rise of the sandbox paradigm over the past few years as well. It seems we as a society are seeking open interfaces, which we can populate and explore, while sacrificing more traditional "narrative" experiences through that content.  If you want to hear some fabulous rants regarding games (consistently snarky against the sandbox experience), I recommend Zero Punctuation, of which this Uncharted 2 and Torchlight review allude to his increasing aggravation over the sandbox use.

For myself, the jury's still out. Its an incredibly powerful gift we have to live in a world where we can build open-ended interfaces and let users create their own meaning. Its simultaneously horrifying what amount of media we (on average) consume in a daily basis. I question whether or not this engorging of content is the new societal gluttony, or if its crucial to us in this culture, towards helping us determine a palette for the information/content we really need. Either way, I either want a big shovel and bucket so I can start making sand-castles, or a magical transportation device that sweeps me off to a more curated landscape.