Human as a Medium

Hi, everyone.

I just landed my first consultancy job through my website and a solid recommendation through a friend. My professional life is changing in big and small ways, and that has caused me to send this newsletter 10 days after the previous one. But it is on a Wednesday which is the day I want to continue sending for all of future.

Let's get on with today's letter.

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Medium is a container of information, that stores and projects information in space and time. I introduced this definition in the last letter, and called YOU as a medium too.

Human as a Medium

Consider athletes (physical workers). Through daily practice, they essentially acquire “body knowledge”. This is what “muscle memory” is a part of. An athlete orients his body in space and time to react effectively to the situation of a game. The reactions are mostly instinctual.

Now, players consciously act based on the knowledge usually provided by his coach. These are the strategies and tactics that are implemented into the game. A player‘s business is a mix of these actions and reactions in the confines of the game. All products concerned with his business help him to access and absorb information to be a better player.

Here, I want to point out that the information is not literal i.e. language and numbers, but refers to any knowledge.

Zat Rana describes our personal knowledge to be mostly consisting of Abstract, Concrete and Tacit Knowledge. Abstract knowledge is our symbolic representation of the world around us. This is all of what Philosophy is. Concrete is specific knowledge, for example, the how-to of doing something. Tacit is intuitive knowledge. Athletes are mostly characterized by tacit, some of it concrete, and usually little of abstract knowledge. Whereas knowledge workers are characterized by the opposite combination of mostly abstract, some of it concrete, and little tacit.

Now, consider knowledge workers. At it’s core, knowledge workers consume, understand and create information to apply it to certain tasks (concrete) or make novel findings for human knowledge (abstract). They mostly leverage their mind, while athletes leverage their body. Of course, it is a mix of both all the time. But there’s something really distinct in how athletes grow: they grow by practice, incrementally, day by day getting better at what they do. For a knowledge worker, the growth is in a compounding manner, as knowledge tends to compound over each other creating more and more connections.

Knowing this, you can begin to create products that helps humans better at what they create. Especially as digital product designers, innovation happens when you capture information that was not done before, for whatever technical or cultural reason, and then make this information selectively available for creativity and growth.

To help the knowledge workers, there are hundreds of products that can be classified as Tools for Thought. And for athletes, we see a variety of products that gets roughly categorized as analytic or fitness tools. But what they really are Tools for Body. Each of these products communicate in their own way through the medium that is the human.

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📑 Curations

Tools for Thought, or as I like to refer to it as Instruments of Thought, are a new generation of tools made possible by the digital medium. What lever is to the muscle, a computer is to the mind. The first was discovered in the stone age. The second a few decades ago. This notion was inspired from this essay by Naval Ravikant.

Towards a Literate Nation
‍by Naval Ravikant

Tools for Thought
‍by David Perell

Practice Analytically, Perform Intuitively (*MUST READ*)
by David Perell

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🎬 Art Appreciation

‍Nurturing UI animation skills through Film-Editing

​I’ve often described designing products as weaving the common threads that runs through all of your consumer's lives. These constitute stories that I try to imagine while designing. In this context, UI animations is the rhythm with which these stories flow. Now I think it is filmmaking where visual transitions are most explored. This video essay by NerdWriter (Evan Pushack) captures a great example of this.

Scott Pilgrim: Make Your Transitions Count

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Regards,
Abhishek Agarwal
‍Twitter | Website

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