#genericity

[beyond-mogai-pride-flags]

Abinary Mann Pride Flag

Abinary Mann: An abinary folk referring to emself as a man as one else would call an object or animal by mealexical terms by default; an abinary folk using intrapersonally man for emself in the sense of being human/experiencing mankind.

The abinary golden is more darkened to intermediate red and yellow colors. Mann colours switched to be more visually pleasing. -Ap

[glitch-teoremata]

Epideictics III -- New Histories

Epideictics III — New Histories

Recitativo

We have aimed (or, at the very least, repeatedly claimed) to sidestep philosophy. All along, our main directives — if one’s able to motion-blur the proliferation of so-called technical content — have been GENERALITY and GENERICITY; but in our theoretical mood that eschews argument for bald and torrential assertion, we’ve been using them in ways that break with the philosophical method.…

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[glitch-teoremata]

Epideictics III: Solar Plexus

Epideictics III: Solar Plexus

I.

Why are these texts so lengthily self-referential? Because they ultimately document a style of thinking and a style of theorymaking that are  idiosyncratic (ie specific) to their own writing. But this has a “Rilke problem”: the nonspecific perversion of asemic horizonis to become a journal about itself. Already it only fails to fully decohere into pure self-referentiality because there is…

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[stuck-on-amber]

Build for general concepts then let people be inventive

From Getting Real:

Build software for general concepts and encourage people to create their own solutions. Do the best job you can with the root of the problem then step aside. People will find their own solutions and conventions within your general framework. 

[stuck-on-amber]

Genericity: the Coffee Break channel example in Trello and Basecamp

I've been using two online tools for project and task management in the past months: Trello, and the new Basecamp. Both are brilliantly designed. I'm not talking just about the UI. I'm talking about the concepts that they are built around.

What's remarkable is how they both strive to do with what they have. By that I mean: rather than introducing new concepts, they let the user find creative ways to combine existing features, or make an original use of them, in order to accomplish something new.

This is genericity: the idea that if the core concepts of a product are carefully chosen and designed, the product can be kept much simpler to manage and comprehend, whilst allowing people to do a lot with it (including things the designer had not envisioned.)

Trello and Basecamp put strong emphasis on the concept of discussion. You can start a discussion about anything, any new project task, which in my experience efficently motivates and engages people.

But in any project, you don't want to talk just about work. You'd like to have a more informal channel. A kind of group chat for the project members, but not directly about the project. And you don't want this channel to interfere with the actual hardcore work discussions, otherwise it's a mess.

What I did in both Trello and Basecamp, is simply dedicate one discussion exactly to this: informal things. On both I called the discussion "Coffee Break", so everyone knows what can be addressed in that discussion. That's all I needed, really. Sometimes we use the channel to share news about the tool itself, for instance tips we happen to discover, sometimes to post funny stuff. That's part of any team's culture.

Because the concept of discussion was carefully put at the heart of those tools, it allowed me to use it in an original and straightforward new way. In that sense, these tools are well designed, and that's deeper than just the UI.