In an old brick mill building, Manchester

How many rewrites does it take to reach something like this?

"Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn't. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters."

-Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

Living room sofa. Darkness.

Designing anything is easier for me if I start at first principles -- for example, the model of human cognition and behavior you're using as a basis for thinking through the cognitive and behavioral consequences of each design decision you make. I believe that all design proceeds from a model like this. Many times the model is implicit, and even the designer isn't fully aware of it. One of the widespread models implicit in our thinking is the "mental world" model, which assumes that people have an internal system (mind) that is separate from the world external to them, and that itself models that external world. Decartes explicated this way of thinking pretty well. I think it's dangerous nonsense when used for designing anything important, from a building to a piece of software. The mental world model leaves out the enormous complexity and depth of the interrelationships among people and every aspect of the world encounted by them. George A. Miller produced a body of work based on the mental world model, including Communication, Language, and Meaning (one of the fundamental texts in my field) and which strangely enough turns out to be (or have been) a fundamental text in AI. An analysis much deeper than mine, but along the same lines, is found in Phil Agre's Computation and Human Experience .

Hampton Library (the study desk all the way back in the corner)

Current thinking about interface design often tends to emphasize "ease of use" above all other values. In fact, in some cases designers don't seem to recognize that there are other values that could be addressed in designing software for use. There are some exceptions to this -- most notably the "Flash everywhere" subculture of commercial web design -- but even there a great deal of lip service is paid to "ease of use." Nevertheless, ease of use isn't everything , and can even introduce problems.

One interesting area in which [one conception of] ease of use may introduce problems is software development. Many programmers use "visual" development packages that greatly simplify some aspects of creating new application software. But they pay a price for that simplification.

There are useful white papers on user experience and design here and here . The second talks about converging UML (Unified Modeling Language), usage-centered design (by Constantine and Lockwood), and the process of building abstract prototypes to model user tasks.

Keeping ahead of the learning curve is a pretty constant effort these days (as if it was ever different). I'd suggest that in the areas of design and usability, instead of studying the latest software tools, we should study architecture , theatre , learning , and writing .

Starbucks in Portsmouth

There's an interesting treatment of insanity in the work of R. D. Laing : he describes insanity as a two-stage process that can start with ontological insecurity, a state in which you doubt that you really exist. Insanity is the state in which the individual decides to destroy his or her own personality ( , R. D. Laing). Laing saw psychosis as a problem stemming from social origins, and it's an interesting exercise to turn these notions toward social trends. For example, a common thread among the more extreme conspiracy theories bouncing around American culture is that various government institutions don't really exist; we're ruled by black helicopters, aliens, or you-name-it. This might be a form of (collective) ontological insecurity. More on this anon.

Home office

Most of the companies that produce the highest quality products in the world understand that the performance appraisal process reduces product quality and organizational effectiveness . Not sometimes, not a little, but inevitably and significantly, performance appraisal steers organizations toward mediocrity. Here's a list (not mine) of some of the things wrong with performance appraisal:

1. Disregards and, in fact, undermines, teamwork.
2. Disregards the existence of a system. It encourages individuals to squeeze or circumvent the system for personal gain rather than improve it for collective gain.
3. Disregards variability in the system and, indeed, increases variability in the system.
4. Uses a measurement system that is unreliable and inconsistent.
5. Encourages an approach to problem-solving that is superficial and culprit-oriented.
6. Tends to establish an aggregate of safe goals--a ceiling of mediocrity--in an organization.
7. Creates losers, cynics, and wasted human resources.
8. Seeks to provide a means to administer multiple managerial functions (pay, promotion, feedback communications, direction-setting, etc.), yet it is inadequate to accomplish any one of them.