## Metamuse interview Education is mostly about sparking the fire of self-sustaining interest and passion. https://buttondown.email/geoffreylitt/archive/function-follows-form/ question for software designers. In your design process, do you choose to emphasize use cases, or structural form? DiSessa describes a “nightmare bicycle” where the gears are labeled not with numbers, but with icons describing the best situation for each gear: smooth uphill, smooth downhill, gravel, crossing railroad tracks.... This designer did a good job following the rule “make form follow function” by empathizing with the user and thinking about specific use cases first. Rather than label gears with cryptic numbers, they put friendly names on the gears that normal people can understand. And yet… as anyone who’s ridden a bike can see, something is deeply wrong with this design. How do you find the right gear for a situation not listed, like going downhill in gravel? How do you quickly find any of the gears, for that matter, since they seem to be listed in a some kind of random order? “There is no sense of systematicity or completeness in the mechanism.” Reading these days Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong: It seems obvious that literate cultures think differently than oral cultures, but I’m shocked by how deep the differences go. This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, by Nicole Perlroth: Thrilling and terrifying tales of modern cyberwarfare. Didn’t realize how much things had escalated over the past couple decades. Exhalation by Ted Chiang: the best kind of thought-provoking sci-fi. You just read issue #2 of Geoffrey Litt. Geoffrey Litt uses tempo for email. What is dat. Spreadsheets are cool because there's a very smooth learning curve where you can learn in lots of small steps. Issue with browse extensions is that there's a big gap between hacking in dev tools and publishing an extension. Where is the very strong demand for real time interoperability? Personally I think it might be collaborative writing. You can make all the tech demos you want, but I'm interested in finding the niche where people are desperate for thise to the point where they would abandon their familiar tools. Partially sighted people have big troubles with Google docs. Underrated benefit of interoperability: you don't have to switch tools, you can invest in having a great setup with your favourite tool for a decade, between jobs etc. Programmers often use same ide for decade. Platforms wars. Litt thinks that VSCode has won. Book rec: changing minds by Andy desesser. Numbered bike gears Vs pictures for different use cases for each gear. Ppl can pick up a generalised understanding of the underlying system and that helps them respond to unforeseen use cases. There's usually a spreadsheet person in an office. User programming community. Litt: very bearish on possibility of making brilliant software for anyone who isn't very similar problems as you.