Chalkboard fridge

Fridges are great. They're great when covered in pages from old comic books, they're great bare and I'm increasingly of the opinion that they're great when they double as chalkboards. I say that, of course, because a few months back (call it October 2009 or so), I painted the fridge with chalkboard paint. It's handy for keeping a running list of groceries in stock, shopping lists, or in the case of the front of the freezer at the moment, my resolution for 2010.

Video games as accomplishment substitute

I have a hypothesis and an idea. Bear with me through a series of statements and questions.
The payoff of a task is in the hit of accomplishment gained from a job (well) done.
Video games (everything from freecell to The Sims) give artificial tasks that provide (largely)meaningless feelings of accomplishment.
Time and energy that could be used to accomplish tangible things in the real world are instead used to accomplish the goals set out as artificial tasks in video games.
The drive to accomplish is transferred from reality to video game.
Video games are a more convenient accomplishment engine because they give a series of small, easy to accomplish goals.
How do we use video games as substrates for real accomplishment?
Can the structure of small, easy goals be applied to real things that need to be done?
In short, can we use video games as engines to accomplish real life tasks?

A troubled bridge over water

Here's a problem for which I don't yet have a solution. There's a wonderful canal in Montreal called the Lachine. About 20 years ago, Parks Canada took over its management, cleaned it up, built footbridges over it and built a park and bike path next to it. It has one particularly problematic footbridge. It's at the end of Atwater Ave., near Atwater Market. It's a very narrow bridge with little signs on each end telling cyclists to dismount before crossing. Of course, given its proximity to the market and several other attractions, it gets a lot of traffic. The traffic is mixed. There are pedestrians of all ages, cyclists and even tourists on the little electric scooters that can be rented at some of the shops along the canal.

What's the problem? The bridge is wide enough to accomodate two directions of pedestrian traffic. Even so, it gets cramped. The majority of cyclists, who are progressing at speed along the bike path, apparently want to get across the bridge and onto the next path as quickly as possible. All of this means that very few cyclists obey the sign and dismount. The cyclists speeding across the bridge pose a threat to pedestrians. Even worse, the renters of electric scooters don't dismount either. Their vehicles are heavier, faster and take up more space than those of the cyclists. So, because very few people obey the sign, the bridge becomes congested and dangerous.

I've thought up a few solutions to this, but none of them are sustainable. There's the citizen action approach. I could start personally mentioning to cyclists, whenever I happen to be crossing the bridge, that there is a sign telling them to dismount. But that doesn't work because I don't cross that bridge nearly enough to make a tangible difference. Then, there are institutional approaches. They could get bigger signs, although I really don't think that would work. They could install speed bumps, but that might not properly discourage all cyclists, might cause injury to some, and would inconvenience everyone.

Basically, I'm stumped. I can isolate the problem and even explain why it is actually a problem (and not just me being grumpy) but I can't figure out a good, sensible solution.

Two bits about tactility

I've had the relationship between tactility and design/creativity on my mind lately (see: Tactile interfaces for digital making). And of course, when I get to thinking about something, I find that I start seeing it everywhere. This week, I've seen two interesting things relating to tactility: one an article, the other an event (both via BoingBoing)

The Case for Working With Your Hands is a thoroughly thoughtful and thought provoking article in The New York Times Magazine. I found that it really highlights some of the issues of working in a knowledge economy, namely lack of self-determination and tangible feedback. The feedback issue is, of course, one of the important cases for tactility.

Next, at Internet Week New York, there's going to be a tangible interfaces hackday. This is a good thing. I can't wait to see what clever new ideas for interfaces come out of it.

Tactile interfaces for digital making

I've got a problem. I've had a lifelong obsession with building things by hand. I love the sensation of seeing something come to life through my efforts. In physical making, there's a certain amount of feedback and consequence. I actually enjoy having to clean the ink out from under my fingernails after screen printing. These days, however, the majority of my work is digital, with very few protrusions into the physical world and with little to no non-digital making. That's gotten me thinking.

I'm planning my day. On my to-do list, I've put the words "update website." I know that I have a meeting later that I'll have to drag myself away from my work to attend. Here's the problem: when I'm only working digitally, it doesn't feel as if I'm actually pulling myself away from anything. The majority of my life, work and leisure time involves interfacing with a screen. Fixing my website doesn't feel like an engrossing task. There isn't a feeling of immersing myself in one thing, mainly because I'm not. I know that in the browser I have open to test my changes, I'll also have tabs going for email and Twitter. I also know that when I leave to go to my meeting, there won't be any tidying up to do. I'll just have to fold down the laptop and go.

It may seem absurd, but I want a way for my digital activities to be a little more demanding. I want to actually need to concentrate and prepare. I want the little rituals that come along with more physical forms of making. I mark things on a physical to-do list because stroking out an entry with a marker feels more satisfying than just clicking on a box. I keep a drawing board because some things are better sketched out by hand than drawn on a computer. How can I make my digital activities more tactile, beyond the standard idea of drawing with a tablet? Why can't I hook a block of clay up to a 3D modeling program and work with hands and knife? And, the big question: what's the tactile analogue of a natively digital activity like web design?

Bring back phone booths

I don't want to look like a fiend for nostalgia, but I think we need to reintroduce phone booths to the urban landscape. Why? I'm sick and tired of having private conversations in public. Cell phone saturation is high. More and more phone conversations (and important ones, at that) happen outside the home. There are very few quiet places to go when taking a phone call. I'd like to see phone booths, without phones, back on every street corner. It might just lower the incidence of people yelling in the street.

Print has problems

I'm catching up on my reading, going through a textbook about advertising and promotion, reading the bit about social networking sites as promotional tools. As is so often the case with textbooks, the information is out of date. Here's the problem: the book was published in 2008. Important news for textbook publishers: It's impossible to write about the internet in print. By the time the books gets to print and into the hands of readers, what was good, current information is out of date and outmoded. Print isn't fast enough.

What's the solution to this problem, then? A couple things. Thing one, I'd like to see my purchase of the textbook give me access to a pdf of the book as well. (A good example of a publisher doing this is The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Ubuntu Kung Fu, for example, offers a pdf option, as well as couple other neat things that I'm about to talk about.) Offering a pdf version means giving readers something searchable and easier to navigate than a physical book. That's important when the book in question isn't a novel. Thing two, I want to see online errata and updates. I know it's impossible to expect publishers and authors to constantly revise their books, but I'd really like a little community and challenge to build up around textbooks (for an example, look again at Ubuntu Kung Fu). Give me an errata section that users can contribute to, give me updates on the subject matter, give me a discussion board. In short, give me an online portal for the textbook. Make it relevant and timely. For marketing especially, things don't lie still. Timely subjects need timely textbooks, not a new version every couple years.

A Manifesto Stub

Everyone needs access to information, not just those of us with good vision, full mobility, high level language skills and shiny new computers.

Brain Training

People are just so darn interested in training their brains these days. We come up with all sorts of clever, synthetic ways to keep our brains in shape. We play brain training video games and live in houses that are meant to break the occupant out of normal behaviour. I think we do all that because we've stopped opening ourselves to the organic challenges that we should be encountering. Our lives are so boring and predictable that we feel the need to find ourselves fake challenges.

Subway Ceilings

I avoid looking people in the eye on the subway. In turn, they avoid looking me in the eye. When the subway is packed, there's nowhere to look but at the floor or ceiling. The problem is that I can only stare at the ceiling for so long before I get bored. I never think to bring a book and don't really like the tabloid newspapers they hand out at rush hour.

Solution: Commission art for subway car ceilings. Give commuters something interesting to stare at. Print a magic eye or Where's Waldo sort of graphic up there. Art, puzzles, poetry, whatever. Just no ads. I don't think that subway riders should be abused that way.

Unbranded grocery stores

Assumptions: Food is a necessity. Without food, human beings can't live. Most people do not have easy access to farmer's markets or community shared agriculture schemes. Most North Americans shop in supermarkets.

Observations: It's impossible to look anywhere in a grocery store without seeing invasive brand messages. Okay, that last sentence was a tiny exaggeration. The ceiling is almost always free of brand messages and in most cases, so is the floor. The remainder, on the other hand, is generally quite thoroughly visually cluttered.

Solution: There needs to be a completely unbranded grocery store. I don't mean that there needs to be a store that sells only their own brand of food. I mean packaged goods in the unbranded store need to be blank except for the name of the food, the country of provenance, the nutritional information and the ingredients.

Think: Many of the necessary foods can already be found brand-free. Vegetables and fruits, more often than not, aren't branded (although there seems to be a trend towards branding them). Some stores have bulk sections which allow for the purchase of ingredients like flour that aren't branded.

Implementation: The unbranded grocery store needs to take advantage of the existing private label infrastructure. In the same way that Loblaw has food sold under its own name, the unbranded grocery store can implement a private label brand. The only difference is that this brand isn't a brand. It is instead the complete absence of a brand. Of course, it also makes a kind of good business sense to stock a store entirely with private label products. Margins are higher on private label than on national brands and prices can be lower.

Of course, the store would be a promotional disaster. Many consumers take comfort in familiar brands. A store that offered a reprieve from visual noise might not be widely welcomed, even if the prices were lower. But, just at this moment, having grown tired of too much visual clutter in supermarkets, I'd jump at the chance to shop at an unbranded grocery store.

Ornamental humidifiers

Problem: My office is spectacularly dry in the winter. Dry air means dry skin and eyes. Dry skin means excessive use of hand cream. Dry eyes mean discomfort when staring at computer screens. Standard humidifiers are a hassle, and they look ugly, too.

Solution: To introduce more moisture into dry rooms, I've decided I need to build an ornamental humidifier. First, picture one of those little tranquility fountain things. You know, the tiny fountains that you plug into the wall and fill with water? So, take the fountain of your choice and introduce some heat into the works (I'm not quite sure how, yet, but maybe with some sort of well-shielded heating coil or something). Heat plus water equals vapour. Ta da! Something that looks less institutional and appliance-y than a humidifier but serves much the same purpose.

EDIT: Curses! It's been done already.

Plastic books for wet places

I'll admit it: I read in the bath. I'd read in the shower, but I'm afraid that would be basically impossible. This is why I'm thinking that there should be books for showers. Or beaches. Or pools. Or rainforests. Or any muggy, wet place that poses a threat to the wellbeing of books. So, I present yet another entertaining idea: Plastic books for reading in wet places.

Instead of paper, the pages could be made out of thin sheets of plastic. That would save books from puffing up in humidity, as well as from the dangers of shower water or bath time book fumbles. If such a thing existed, I could fulfill my dream of having a bath tub in the middle of a library without endangering the books.

Hot -but not burnt- feet

Right now, I have a problem. I'm using the radiator under my desk as an ottoman. The radiator is on, heating my office. As a result, my feet are slightly too hot. That's the problem.

Solution? I need to build some kind of shelf over my radiator. Something just a couple inches higher than the radiator would eliminate the burnt feet problem. Plus, I could put some sort of cushy cover on it without burning down the house, which is an option I don't have for the radiator.

Landscaped metro stations

I've been researching house plants and humidity. It would seem that one needs the other, but also that the first does a rather nice job of regulating the second. This has gotten me thinking. Plants like humidity. Some metro stations in Montreal are so humid that they literally have stalactites extending from their ceilings. What's the clever, humidity regulating, life enriching solution to this problem? Obviously, the STM needs to turn metro stations into giant, beautiful terrariums. Plants would make the metro stations more comfortable for passengers. And they'd be significantly less drippy, too. The only major retrofit involved would be switching the florescent lights for something a little more grow light-y. Landscaped metro stations? Oh yes.

Instead of art

Boring walls? No art to hang? No problem. Here's a spectacularly cheap and easy way to break the monotony of long stretches of wall: hang your clothes. Just shove some screws into the wall at varying heights and hang your most interesting (or most frequently used) clothing. In my front hallway, I've hung all my outerwear and bags. It not only makes it way easier to find sweaters, but also gives the hall the benefit of some extra colour. Win-win!

The Internet is a Copying Machine

Below is my little lay-introduction to the Internet as the ultimate copy machine. It's altogether too easy to forget that this is an instrument built for copying.

Computers are copying machines. They do the job of duplicating even better than photocopiers. The Internet is the hyperactive child of computation in most respects, but especially when it comes to copying. Everything you so much as look at when browsing the Web (No, I'm not using “Internet” and “Web” interchangeably. Right now, I mean WWW.) gets copied onto your own personal hard drive. Let's say that again, shall we: Everything. That's the automatic aspect of copying on the Internet, as practised by our good friends Firefox and Opera (or their mean brother, IE).

Copying on the Internet isn't just automatic. There's also a social aspect to the copying. When you take digitized media, which is what populates the Internet, and put it in the same place as people, copying will inevitably happen. Say I put a photo on my website. You take a look a look at my website (That's what I want you to do, after all. Why else would I put it on a public website if I didn't want you to look at it?). First, your browser, which doesn't have much taste or discrimination, grabs everything my website has to offer and makes a little copy for itself. Then, quite independently, you decide that you like the photo. You like it so much that you download it. Maybe you use it as a background, or even print it out and hang it on your wall. It's perfectly natural. I make my photo available, you see and like. All you have to do to get your own copy is click your right mouse button (or CTRL click, if you happen to be a Mac person). It doesn't feel like work, and I still have my copy of the photo. In fact, my copy and your copy are exactly the same. And the copy that every browser makes for itself when someone looks at my website is exactly the same as our copies. (It doesn't feel like stealing, since you haven't taken anything from me. In fact, it isn't even copyright infringement, since you've only used it for personal study and can claim Fair Dealing. But you don't know that. You just liked the photo and wanted to look at it without coming back to my website every day.) In such a way, the Internet can be seen as a giant (mostly apolitical and amoral) copying machine.

An Easier Website

I was in a design meeting at work today. The complaint: Clients ask for "cleaner" or "more professional" websites. So, the boss muses out loud that we can't just adjust and make a website sixty percent cleaner. It struck me at that point that there should be a way.

Solution: Take a representative sample of people. Give them a word (professional, clean, edgy, etc.). Give them a pile of design elements (colours, layout pieces, whole layouts, typography, all that good stuff). Get them to rate each element on how much it matches their perception of the given word. Look for patterns in the responses. Sort by demographics, psychographics, industries. Take the data. make a website generator with a very simple interface: a white screen with a number of slider bars, where each bar represents a scale of zero to one hundred for a given trait (edgy, contemporary, clean, professional...). Any person who wants a website need only key in a little pertinent information about themself, and then move the sliders to get what they want. Press the button. Don't like the output? Move the sliders some more.

So, I'm sensing another thesis. Doctorate, maybe? The research should be fun and doable. It's just the actual programming that I'm a little scared of. But it could make a good collaboration with a computer science person.

If it actually worked, I'd put myself out of the web design business. On the upside, I'd secure my place in other circles.

Cyclist pants

Fact: most cyclists cinch or roll one leg of their pants so that it won't get caught in the bike chain.
Logical conclusion: Make a pair of pants with one leg shorter than the other.

This blog post may be recorded for quality assurance purposes

My phone company called this morning. That is to say, they called my cell phone at eight thirty in the morning. Let's remember, before I get on with the story, that they're supposed to have the best customer service of any mobile carrier in Canada. They enjoy mentioning that in their ads.

So: eight thirty, having breakfast, getting ready to start working, the phone starts buzzing on the table. I pick up and get the standard period of dead air. They make sure that I am who I'm supposed to be. Next is the ridiculous part. This call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes. They've called me, and they may or may not record the conversation. When I call customer service lines, I expect that. I may not agree, and I may not want my call recorded, but I accept that they've got a bargain going: I call for help, they may record my call. I choose whether or not to call their line for help. When I call them, I decide that I'm willing to have my call recorded in exchange for the help that I need/want.

Where's the bargain in the phone company calling me to ask about my phone bill and informing me that I may or may not be recorded? The only choice I've made is in answering the call. That's not what I think of as informed consent. And what would they do if I said "no" to them? Maybe I'll find out next time.

Adult deterrent retail

I was dragged into a Garage a while back. In case you don't know what it is, Garage is a clothing store aimed at tween, teen, and early twenties women. I think it's only in Canada, and, if I remember correctly, it used to be kind of retro gas station themed. Now, though, it seems that the powers that be at garage have taken a clue from Hollister. To put it bluntly, it looks like a beach house. It's all tiki and dim lighting, and you have to actually make an effort to go inside. Never mind having a store wide open to the mall hallway. To get into Garage, you need to actually go through a little doorway/atrium thing.

It's loud inside, too. I'm not old (heck, I'm in their target demographic!), but the place managed to give me a headache. To work there, you'd have to be the kind of kid who likes clubbing, or who can at least tolerate ridiculous amounts of noise pollution for an extended period of time.

Garage has, as far as I can tell, turned its stores into fantastic parent repellant. If we're to believe the common perception, loud, dim, and difficult to navigate are turnoffs for a lot of people over a certain age. Does this mean that perents are handing their daughters the credit cards and letting them go at it? Or are contemporary parents into this sort of thing? Or maybe I'm from an alternate universe and no child, ever, would let a parent take her shopping. I could do with some insight on this one.

Twenty million different ways to get the same information

I've noticed something new and exciting. The thing itself isn't terribly new and exciting, but it's exciting that I've noticed it. I've noticed, as the title of this post says, that there are loads of different ways for me to get the same information. I'll give you an example.

Say I want to see what's new on BoingBoing. I could just plug the URL into Firefox and go have a look at the page itself. I do that a few times every day. Another option is to grab a glance at my iGoogle homepage, which has a widget for the BoingBoing RSS feed. Or, and this is increasingly becoming the case for me, I could look in my Twitter feeds and find out what the very latest post is, if there's been anything recently. But wait! There's more. Say I want to watch BBtv. Go to the webpage and look for it? Why bother when Miro downloads it automatically?

One blog, with one set of information, and I look at it in about four different ways. I do something quite similar with the CBC. I'm wondering whether this tendency is a) convenient; b) the wave of the future; c) an obsessive behaviour; d) a quick route to information overload.

Autonomy for customer service representatives

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to terminate my mobile contract with Bell. I called Bell Mobility, in order to find out how much it would cost to break the contract. After being given the automation runaround, I got a fairly responsive human. The only problem was that she followed her script a little too closely. Even after a conversation about contract termination, even after I had explained that I was going to go to a different company, the Bell representative thanked me for choosing Bell Mobility. I was a little shocked at that. After a discussion explaining just why I'm not choosing Bell Mobility, she was required to thank me for choosing them. I asked about it. She told me that she didn't have a choice, she was required to thank me for choosing Bell. I think that in cases such as these, call centre employees should be afforded a little more autonomy.

Spectacularly bad faucet design

I managed to run across some really fantastically bad design today. I've found my new winner for the Least Usable Faucet Award. In the shopping concourse underneath a major Toronto office tower (BCE place, I think), I found a very difficult washroom. The problem with the whole thing was (is, considering that the faucets are most likely the same as they were this afternoon) that the sensors on the water saving, germ eliminating, effort reducing faucets were in the wrong place. If someone gives me a sink, I'm inclined to wash my hands at least partially in it. What the clever designers behind this particular washroom gave me did not really present that option. The idea seemed to be to position the sensor such that the hands of the user would be as close to the faucet as possible. If the hands of the user are positioned within the confines of the sink, the faucet doesn't go. To get the faucet to go, the user is forced to place her hands directly under the faucet. This results in hands pointing towards the edge of the sink. At the edge of the sink, there is, of course, a counter. This means that, due to the positioning of the sensor, water runs off the hands of the user and onto the counter. Result: wet counter. Not good faucet design, by any stretch of the imagination.

Painters in the park, but never graphic designers

It seems that people like watching painters paint in parks. It stands to reason, since people often hold such events, that painters don't much mind painting in parks. They may even like it. Okay, so painters like painting in parks and people like watching them. This leads to all sorts of painting-in-parks events. Why not graphic-design-in-parks events, then? They're both visual things. They both turn out very visual, mostly flat things.

Today, I found out why there are no graphic-design-in-parks events. I took my laptop for a trip to the park today. The weather was nice and I wanted to sit under a tree. Big mistake. I now know why computer geeks like living in dark dungeons. The noonday sun turned my screen into a mirror. While it's great to see that I don't have any food stuck in my teeth, a reflective screen isn't exactly fantastic for doing picky work with colours and curves. I don't think we'll be seeing groups of designers mocking up newsletters or logos in parks any time soon.

Carpets in kitchens

We don't carpet our kitchens. I don't see a good reason for that. Think: What makes a kitchen inherently bad for carpeting? Food preparation takes place in kitchens. It could cause a mess if bits and scraps were to fall onto the rug. Fine, but how many people are actually very messy cooks? Scraps can cause a mess on the way from counter to garbage bin. Fine, but why not just install an opening for the garbage bin in the counter and sweep everything in? Kitchens are high traffic areas. But they're no more high traffic than the rest of the house. I don't see a reason why kitchens shouldn't be carpeted. After all, dining rooms in restaurants are carpeted, and they see far more falling food scraps and foot traffic (with shoes!) than an average kitchen. Yes, restaurants with carpets tend to get vacuumed every night. But as I said before, they get much more traffic than the average home kitchen. I think that carpets in kitchens could be highly feasible. I advocate the use of the kitchen as a secondary living room. Kitchens are, after all, warm and central. They play an important role in life. More carpets, more arm chairs, less utility. Most people don't use the utility anyway.

Conventional media as curator

I'm going to draw a parallel. If I want to see art, there are two things I can do. I could go online and do a search for "art." I'd get over a billion hits (check it yourself if you want to make sure). I'd get to sift through a whole world of art, opinions about art, art history... (Suspend your comments for a moment, if you will, about the non-originalness of the art online. I know that I won't get to see the real painting. But that's not the point of my argument. Forget about it.) My other option would be to go to an art gallery. Doing that would give me access to a limited amount of art, filtered through the perception of a third party. For it to show up in an art gallery, someone has to curate it. I get to look at what they think is interesting.

I think that it would be good for conventional media to operate that way. Let's have an example: Before the internet, it was alright to show one TV show in one country and a different one somewhere else. That's still how it happens, but I'm not sure it's okay any more. If a TV show airs in the UK but not in Canada, and I want to watch it but have no legal way to do so, what am I supposed to do? Am I meant to just not watch it at all? Or do I wait for the DVD to come out and then break the encryption? Or subscribe to digital cable for one show? That's no fun at all. It means that as much as I may want to watch something, there's no sensible, legal way to do it. Why don't they show me what I want to watch on TV? The standard channels only have so much space in their schedules. They have to make decisions about what they think will be successful. They don't have the resources to cater just to me. And yes, I know I could just get BBC Americas or something, but it comes with a large cable package. In order to get one show that I want, I'd have to sign on for a whole lot more. Not very sensible if I don't actually want to spend my free time in front of the TV. So, there's no easy way for conventional media to get my viewership without alienating another large chunk of the viewing public. There simply isn't enough time in the day to accommodate me.

There is, however, another medium that can target individuals quite well. Guess what it is. Did you say The Internet? You're quite right. The internet has all the space necessary to show everyone just what they want to see. That's pretty great. But there are some problems. For one thing, with enough space to make everyone happy, it's sometimes hard to find what you want. Take the art analogy above. A billion hits for the word "art." I'd have to narrow my search down quite a bit to find something that I actually wanted to look at. But that's another problem. Going to the art gallery, or watching TV, or listening to the radio gives me the opportunity to find new things. I might not have known that I'd like it, but when someone else presents it to me, wow! It's a whole new world.

We've established the strengths of conventional media and new media. Conventional media is good at filtering things, at presenting new things to viewers, at curating. The internet, on the other hand, is far better at distribution. You can actually fit all those individual tastes onto the internet. I think that the answer, then, is to make the two work together. Conventional media should become an arbiter of taste, a more curatorial venture, and should leave distribution to new media. Both media could play to their own strengths instead of the constant fear and competition that the current model provokes. Wouldn't that be nice?

The chicken or the egg

I'm sitting around, reading a book on my computer. It's a .pdf that I'm looking at in KGhostView. I've got the whole page, that's two pages of book on one page of the .pdf, displayed on my screen. That means no scrolling, except to go to the next page. And that's what's got me thinking.

There's no button clicking. Every time I want to hit the next page, I just move my middle finger a little on my scroll wheel. Just a little, though. It's a tiny fraction of an inch, just dragging the little bit of mouse wheel that comes into contact with the very tip of the pad of my finger. Just one drag. I don't need to go back and drag again, I don't need to extend my finger to the end of the wheel and drag the whole thing. It's perfect, it's lovely, it works with minimal effort. And like most things that work well, I didn't notice it when I was doing it right. I only noticed what I was doing when I accidentally scrolled too much and skipped ahead two pages instead of one. It's like the computer/mouse/program/mouse driver is teaching me to be subtle.

That's where the question comes in. I'm trying to decide whether the way my computer asks me to do things makes me more subtle, or whether humans just are subtle and computers are designed to work with that. I can't decide whether it's teaching me, or we've taught it. For me, because I lack the insight that would give me the real answer that I'm sure exists, it's like the chicken and the egg. Is the computer subtle and teaches us to be, or are we subtle and teach computers to be? I know that I possess the ability to be subtle. I know that the computer does, too. I just don't know who's driving that subtlety.