A Push and a Pull

My jujutsu instructors would remind us frequently that every effective technique has a push and a pull. Only pushing against a joint for a lock or a throw can get you most of the way there, but it’s clumsy and requires too much force. Only pulling on your opponent’s body, whether his limb or his uniform is simply futile most of the time. Ideally, both forces need to be applied with the correct timing to produce the desired effect.

I think the same concept is useful to help solve the problem of how we might re-embody our lives: technology is the push, design is the pull.

Technology has been used to make things nearly effortless. Driving my Honda CRV is nothing like driving the '65 Ford pickup my grandpa had. (And I don’t want to give up the improvements in safety...) Driving the '65 Ford required engagement and effort due to the manual steering and manual transmission. I think we’re at a point now where we could allow the user to select a little more resistance in the steering and I know that some cars allow you to enter a mode where you “shift manually”. We have riding lawnmowers, of course, and almost all of the walk-behind models are self-propelled. But what if those devices were re-engineered so that a moderate amount of effort was required to use them?

The second example doesn’t sound very appealing, does it? I think that’s where design comes in: inviting the user to play. Take, for example the Qwerkywriter USB keyboard:

It’s retro, yes, but it has 2 knobs! And a carriage return lever! The knobs and carriage return lever can be programmed to do different useful things—they’re not just quaint decorations.

These are just a couple of quick examples to illustrate the larger principles: we can change the way that work shapes us by re-engineering our tools to require a little more physical work and making the design attractive enough to outweigh the perceived inconvenience.

Redesign the effort and invite people to play: a push and a pull.

I Wish More of Our Tools Looked Like Hammers

I grilled out tonight. I spatchcocked a chicken and it turned out pretty nice: juicy meat and crispy skin. It’s hard to beat the flavors you get from a charcoal grill. All the tools I used for preparation had handles. You know, for your hands: a shears for cutting out the backbone, a spatula, a tongs, a knife.

A handle is necessary for doing physical work, for manipulating objects and exerting force. Information and digital representations don’t really respond to force, so I guess that’s why phones and tablets and laptops are designed for our pockets and desks and backpacks.

I miss hammers sometimes. What would it take to make more of our problems look like nails, so we could use hammers more often?

Everyday Leverage

Written language helps to make the size of our brains appear larger than they are: it increases our memory in size and duration, and it helps us think more complicated thoughts because we can visualize more information at once in the short term, too.

Cooking helps our digestive system extract more nutrition from food: all kinds of cooking could be considered external pre-digestion. Fermentation, roasting, steaming, boiling – all of these techniques break down some of the more complicated, difficult to digest molecules and make them smaller. (And tastier, too! Tiny, tasty molecules. Mmmm...)

Sports (or Sport, apparently, if you’re British...) and play help our brains as well as our bodies develop and grow to be highly adaptable, responsive and attentive to the environment.

It’s weird to think of these things as technologies, but for the amount of leverage that can be gained from applying them they must be, right?

What’d you say?

Talking to yourself is the verbal equivalent of scratch paper. It’s sketching in the air, especially if you gesture. It’s thumbing through your mental dictionary (or thesaurus). It’s a way to feel your way through your thoughts and think through your feelings a little more deliberately. It is at once a telescope and a microscope trained on your inner landscape.

Talking to yourself out loud is also a check on the voice you use to talk to yourself silently.

Building Blocks

Food:

• Water

• Protein

• Fat

• Carbohydrates

• Vitamins & Minerals

• Fiber

Exercise:

• Pushing

• Pulling

• Squeezing Squatting

• Hinging (at the hips)

Language:

• Nouns

• Verbs

• Adjectives

• Adverbs

Building blocks are important. They give us a way to enter into an understanding of the subject. They suggest useful, first-order approaches for their application to real- world scenarios. But...

A list of nutrients will never be a substitute for wholesome nutrition.

A list of single-joint movements will never be a substitute for engaged activity.

A list of language constructs will never be a substitute for compelling speech or poetry.

Building blocks are important and can be terribly interesting all by themselves, but they’re not the building.

What is Technology?

Whether a branch or a rock, a hammer or a tennis racket, technology is the thing that fits our hands and gives us more of what we want. It’s an expression of our desires and an extension of our capabilities, whether we’re talking about carpet, a lightbulb or a garbage truck. (Yes, technically carpet fits our feet, not our hands: I meant it metaphorically. Let’s agree not to discuss toilets, OK?)

Perhaps, then, technology is a continuation of labor by another means.

The things we create are the stories we tell ourselves made manifest; both good and bad. Archaeology is a thing because it takes the idea seriously that our stuff says something about what we think, what we need and how we behave. Technology isn’t a perfect or complete expression of who we are, any more than our languages are. There are limitations to our skill and our patience. But we are there; in it somehow. We are the foot, the shoe we make and wear, and the footprint we leave behind.

Technology isn’t separate from us, it is us.