Jonathan Jones argues that Science is more beautiful than art:

In the 21st century, art rarely rivals the capacity for wonder that modern science displays in such dazzling abundance.

It’s an interesting viewpoint, but I enjoyed Callum J Hackett’s rebuttal, Science the Usurper, even more:

Art is not just for expanding minds and revealing beauty - that is a demeaning reduction that people too often indulge in, thinking that art is a delivery service for the picturesque and delectable. But art is so much more than that: it is an unbridled form of self-reflection. Art digs deep into every facet of our being - physical, psychological, social - and offers a view of ourselves untainted by comforting romance. Where is the horror in science? Where is the loneliness, the desolation, the unwilling acceptance of mortality? Science is almost too relentlessly beautiful to replace art - it slowly reveals everything we could ever want to know about ourselves, but it tells us nothing about how to interpret and deal with that information. It is all ablaze with the most amazing facts, but void of intimacy, personality and ethics.

Make It So is a new book by Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff that tries to draw some design lessons from science fiction interfaces. It looks really interesting. From Nathan Hurst’s review in Wired:

Science fiction is the province of imagination, which, says Shedroff, is just like design.

“Everything that happens in the design process is fiction until it gets on the market,” he says. “We create prototypes; nobody ever sees them. They’re inspirational, we learn from them, but they don’t exist.”

“It doesn’t mean that everything you see in science fiction is right,” says Shedroff. “That’s why it’s a prototype, and it may or may not survive, like any other prototype in the real world.”

Adam Kirsch’s Neverending stories is a very interesting exploration of fairy tales, and why they’ve had such longevity in our culture. The essay struggles to find its way in the first half, but it picks up steam when Adam starts to speculate about why these ancient stories continue to be so popular. I especially like this theory:

Rather, what fairy tales obsessively conjure up is a world of mutability, in which things and people are not immured in their nature. The frog becomes a prince, the wolf becomes a grandmother, the little mermaid becomes a woman, the beast becomes a handsome man, the 12 brothers become a flock of ravens. So much of the appeal of these stories, in a preliterate, premodern culture, must have been simply in their demonstration of the power of words to defy the laws of nature. In this way, the storyteller enacts the magic powers he describes and possesses the wealth he fantasises about.

All good writing conjures up thoughts and images that go beyond the immediate realities of the story that is being told.

I recently finished reading Paul Soulellis’s essay in Issue #3 of The Manual called “Design Humility”. I’ll write about it more at some point, but for now, phrases like “walking slow, but looking hard” and “amplified vulnerability” are racing through my mind at such speed that I don’t know what to do with it all yet. I love writing like that. Writing that makes you dizzy with sudden understanding and new ideas. Writing that defies the laws of nature.

I’m often amazed at how the people I follow online tend to talk about the same things, even if they are most likely not connected to each other. It happened again this week, with three articles about the value of starting (and finishing) something, even if you’re not sure how it’s going to work out.

First, there’s I cannot design or code a responsive website by Nick Jones:

I didn’t know how to do it right, so first I did it wrong. After I had done it wrong a few times, things started to work. It’s not perfect, but it works. I still don’t know the right way to do anything but I don’t worry about that anymore. Now I just hack and hack and trust that I’ll arrive at a solution. Sometimes it even makes sense.

By ignoring my doubts and trusting my instinct, I made myself vulnerable to attack. The attacks never came. They only ever existed inside my head. It turns out, the guys I was afraid would laugh at my new site, were the first to give respect. Most of my fears were a waste of energy. So are yours. What if you shut out all the noise and just got started?

Then Alex Maughan wrote a great piece called Making is Momentum:

I need to do more and self-criticise less. Critical analysis of oneself is of course important, but it needs to be done with a positive end in mind. I’ve just been beating the crap out of myself. There’s a big difference. It’s not only about replacing the stick with carrots, it’s also about constantly making sure I’m buying the right carrots from sources that prove themselves to be the most trustworthy and wholesome. […]

I need to start being nicer, both to myself and those around me. Making is momentum. Perfection is spurious and stifling.

And finally, here’s Brian Bailey in The Smallest Way Forward:

In the case of a creative project like a novel, the most important thing to do is to write another page. It will be that way every day until it is finished. To be successful, though, you have to allow for other ways to make progress. Pauses are healthy, but it’s important to pause a specific task like writing the next chapter or implementing payment processing, without pausing the project itself.

It’s not the most important thing each day; it’s anything that moves you forward, that brings this new thing a little closer to being a real thing.

That’s three essays in the space of one week, all about the same thing. About not letting the fear of failure or defeat or imperfection stand in the way of creating something. Perhaps we can sum up this whole topic using the King’s words in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.

Frank Chimero speaks the truth about writing:

Most writers are frauds. We are ignorant and learning out-loud. The written piece is the useful by-product of figuring things out, like how churning butter makes buttermilk. More writing comes from doubt than expertise.

I’ll add that this is a good thing — this doubt. I write when I’m uncertain about something, because it helps to clarify my thinking. Sometimes the words become an argument I believe in, and I hit Publish. But often the foundations start to crumble after a few paragraphs, and I hit Delete instead.

Both outcomes are fine. One gives me the confidence to expose my thinking to the fires of public scrutiny. The other ensures I don’t make a complete fool out of myself by starting a thought that I realize too late has absolutely nowhere to go.

An Elite for Everyone is another thought-provoking piece from Callum J Hackett, whose excellent blog I just recently discovered. He makes the case that maybe we should let go of this idea that everyone can be creative if they just try hard enough:

While monetary elites are deceptive and damaging, a creative elite is arguably essential to artistic culture. For art, literature and music to have any significant purpose in our lives, they depend on the relationship between a handful of creators and a much larger, consuming audience. I think this should be an argument against the incessant drive to democratise creative talent, and the trope that everyone has a novel in them, because not only is it likely biologically impossible (again shifting the blame from lack of possibility to individual failure), it’s also undesirable. I think there comes a time when we have to embrace our own mediocrity, and instead recognise our important place as part of the audience. This might seem bleak and self-defeating, but it sits more comfortably with the real world, and wouldn’t feel like such a bum deal if we weren’t continually titillated with the distant, unlikely prize of publication and fame.

I’m a big fan of Clive Thompson’s writing, and in The Hidden Truth of Counterintuition he explores the increased popularity of what he calls “a seemingly unending series of tomes claiming to upend everything we believe about talent (Talent Is Overrated), decisionmaking (The Upside of Irrationality), motivation (Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us), personality (The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement), and dozens of other subjects.” He ultimately believes that the popularity of these books is a good thing:

Perhaps our willingness to have our basic beliefs overturned is a sign of intellectual health. This mindset is, after all, key to the scientific method. Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein were all purveyors of a “hidden side” to reality, right? (The Principia could have been subtitled Why Everything You Know About Gravity Is Wrong.) Good scientists understand that there’s a good chance today’s knowledge will eventually be proven wrong. And the really good scientists welcome that prospect — they’re thrilled by it.

Even though I usually agree with Clive, In this particular case I’m going to side with Callum J Hackett’s counterargument entitled The Popularity of Counterintuition:

First, it’s important to distinguish between two conceptions of “skepticism” that are often conflated. There is ‘Skepticism’ as a mode of rational inquiry — the kind that relies on logic, evidence, and varieties of scientific consensus — and then there is ‘skepticism’, almost synonymous with ‘cynicism’, that is a mere compulsion to question everything, no matter what logic and evidence underpins it. This is an undiscerning, shotgun skepticism — it questions sound scientific knowledge as much as bad ideas, and is perhaps the cause of problems like climate-change denial in reasonably well-educated people.

If the readers Thompson is talking about have any kind of skepticism, it’s only cynical skepticism — it’s not driven by the urge to reveal the truth without bias, it’s driven by that same urge which craves the unmasking of conspiracies wherever they can conceivably exist.

I recommend both articles, if for no other reason than to witness how it’s possible to disagree respectfully with another human being on the Internet.

I’ve had Esther Dyson’s article Technology’s Mental Frontier on my mind for a few days now. She raises some great points about education and technological advancement:

Indeed, perhaps the biggest culture/value challenge of all is short-term thinking. Around the entire planet, we are approaching some kind of singularity, with the market pandering to our fundamental short-term natures by offering us instant gratification and long-term destruction.

Education does the opposite. It enables us to improve our lot by building things — using first fire and wood, and now computers and machines — to overcome our physical limitations and to create technology to extend and enhance our lives. Will technology and learning prevail, or will our susceptible, long-evolved weaknesses overcome us?

I think she raises a question that is more important than we might think. One of the things I worry about is that the instant gratification Esther talks about is making us less likely to be curious about increasingly difficult problems. I’m not arguing that Google is making us stupid. Instead I’m arguing that the ability to get answers to almost any question we can dream up has consequences. By filling our brains with easy answers we become less likely to go after those wicked problems — problems that are “difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize”.

To combat this issue we need to cultivate curiosity in our schools and workplaces. Cap Watkins recently mentioned how curiosity is one of his hiring requirements:

If you’re intensely curious, I tend to worry less about other skills. Over and over I watch great designers acquire new skills and push the boundaries of what can be done through sheer curiosity and force of will. Curiosity forces us to stay up all night teaching ourselves a new Photoshop technique. It wakes us up in the middle of the night because it can’t let go of the interaction problem we haven’t nailed yet. I honestly think it’s the single most important trait a designer (or, hell, anyone working in tech) can possess.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher also talks about this in her article On Content and Curiosity:

Curiosity keeps us hungry. It leads us to tackle new challenges when the easy questions have all been answered. It makes us wonder how things could be better — even when they are, if we’d just pause to admit it, pretty damn good already.

If answers come to us too quickly too often, we lose that essential sense of curiosity that drives us to solve difficult problems. If you don’t believe me, just spend some time with a 3-year old. Sometimes when I build puzzles with my daughter I get carried away and help a little bit too much. My daughter always responds by slowing down her own efforts, eventually declaring that she can’t do it. But when I hold back, and give her just enough guidance instead of solving the problem myself, her curiosity — the need to see that final picture — takes over until she forces herself to figure it out.

We need to cultivate this on two levels. First, we need to guard ourselves against a loss of curiosity. Skip Google and think instead. Don’t use an app to help you with Words with Friends (it’s ok, we’ve all done it). Solve the problem the long, hard, stupid way every once in a while.

Second, we need to do everything we can to grow curiosity in those we have influence over — employees, co-workers, kids, etc. And how do we do that? I think Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said it best in his French poem Dessine-moi un bateau1:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

I’ll let your curiosity drive you to figure out what the “endless immensity of the sea” looks like for your situation.

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1. Link via Kevin Kelly ↩

Scott Adams in Rewarding Work:

Whenever you see the x-factor in someone’s output — that little extra something that turns the good into the awesome — it’s a marker for intrinsic motivation. Monetary motivation plateaus at the point you think your work equals your pay. For most people, that happens when the product is good but not awesome. To get to awesome you need to think you might be changing the world, saving lives, redeeming your reputation, attracting the mate of your dreams, or something else that is emotionally large.

Birth of a Book is a beautiful video of a book being created using traditional printing methods. Watch it before you continue reading:

Birth of a Book from Glen Milner on Vimeo.

Merlin Mann often defines a priority as an activity you both care about, and are willing to sacrifice something for. That phrase — care and sacrifice — immediately sprung to mind as I watched this video. You can sense the care that goes into the book’s creation, and you can easily imagine the time sacrifice needed to make sure it comes out perfect.

I am not on some kind of crusade against ebooks. I read way more ebooks than traditional books. But there is still something exciting about opening and reading physical copies of books like The Shape of Design or The Manual. The level of care and sacrifice becomes tangible, and transfers from creator to consumer. It’s why I still buy vinyl, and prefer a manual coffee making process.

As much as I live online, I recognise that there is a level of tangible craftsmanship to certain physical things that can inspire us in ways that an Instagram filter just can’t do.

(video via Daily Exhaust)