(highlight:: Understanding Results from Playing with Information, Not Just Consuming It
Summary:
Only 5% of people can solve this puzzle, but it's not because our brains aren't powerful enough.
We need to actively engage with information to truly understand it.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
95% of the people who get this puzzle just can't do it. And if I gave these to you as a series of Scrabble tiles, and I had them in front of you, you could take those tiles and you could move them around. And just moving them around would sort of jostle and put a couple of things together. And then you would come up with a word like maybe you'd get T and O next to each other. And then maybe you'd put the E there and you'd realize, oh, it's toenail. The point of that is that of that story is that we think that our brains are super, super powerful. And then when it comes to the information, we just need to take it in. We need to read it. We need to see it. We need to listen to it. And that alone will allow us to understand the information. But there are a whole host of ways in which our brains just simply can't do that very effectively. We need to do something to the information. We need to change it. We need to modify it. We need to draw it in a new way. And a lot of this book is about this idea that we figure things out. We don't just passively take in information and therefore we have understanding. We do things to the world around us, the information that we have. And that is how we create understanding.)
- Time 0:04:35
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(highlight:: Pragmatic and Epistemic Actions: Changing the World To Change How We Think
Summary:
There are two types of interactions: pragmatic action, where the purpose is to change the world, and epistemic action, where the purpose is to make mental computation easier.
Epistemic actions involve changing the world to change one's understanding of it. This concept applies to various scenarios, such as playing chess, where moving pieces physically helps with strategic thinking.
Epistemic actions are common and can be viewed as a partnership between the mind and the environment.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And so what they argued was that there were two ways of two different classes of interactions, broadly speaking. One was what they called pragmatic action. So the purpose of changing the world is simply to change the world. You make a change because you want to make the world a particular way. And this is the way we normally think about interaction. Otherwise, why would you interact at all? You only interact to change the world. The other one was what they called epistemic action. Epistemic as in epistemology, as in knowledge. And this was a way of interacting with the world to make mental computation easier or simpler or more reliable. So an example here is chess. Think about this. This is the analogy they've proposed. Imagine that you're playing chess and you've got a bishop. And you pick up the bishop and you move it. And as soon as you move it, you put your finger on it, keep your finger on it. And you realize, oh, that was a bad move. And so then you move it back. As a designer, as an interaction designer, you look at that and you say, well, you did two actions. I did one action to change the world. And then I pressed undo. The world is now unchanged. Therefore, it's a mistake. The skilled player would never learn to do that. And it's true that grandmasters do learn to do all this stuff in their head. But it takes an incredible amount of practice to get there. They argued that an epistemic action, this is all an epistemic action. Because what's happening is when you make that change, when you move the bishop the first time, suddenly you can see the world in this new state. You change the world not to change the world, but to change yourself, to change your understanding of how you saw the world. And they argued that epistemic actions are probably everywhere. They're all over the place. And you can think of lots of little things that example I gave earlier with elation and toenail. Why would you not be able to do it in your head? Because your brain is not that powerful all by itself for many kinds of problems. It's a lot easier to move these pieces around in the world. And these things become sort of form of partnership.)
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(highlight:: Current Tools For Interacting With Information Are Extremely Limited Compared to What Could Be Possible
Summary:
Interacting with digital information is limited compared to what could be possible.
Despite advanced tools, Post-it notes are sometimes better. Technology will continue to evolve with embedded computation and richer interaction.
Information could become more interactive than physical objects.
This book provides a conceptual toolkit for navigating current and future technologies.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And over the last 10 years, it's become increasingly clear, I think, to many people that the way that we interact with the information that we have through our digital tools, especially, Is still, even with the most advanced tools we have, very, very limited compared to what could be possible. There are still many cases when a Post-it note or a wall of them is vastly better than anything you can buy, no matter how much money you have. And so, I think that there's a lot of... These technologies are going to continue to change. They can continue to get more embedded in every nook and cranny of our life, literally embedded computation throughout the world, new kinds of sensors, but also new and richer ways Of interaction. I think this is one of the major things for me that I've seen is that information could be dramatically different and more interactive in ways which begin to approach and then surpass What we can do with physical objects right now, which creates a whole new opportunity for how we use the physical world around us, including our bodies, and artifacts, and space, and Everything else. And so, this book in many ways, I think, one of our big ideas is giving people a perspective, a conceptual toolkit, a vocabulary that will work to some extent with the world of today, for Sure, but will also continue to be useful for them as new technologies come on scene, no matter what they own.)
- Time 0:21:29
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