The Things We Carry

Laptops are much better suited than smartphones to all but the simplest of tasks, but we’re willing to give up ease-of-use for portability. Smartphones have really, really good cameras these days, but not as good as an actual camera with a lens the size of a rocks glass.

Using a smartphone can be like having a superpower and a disability at the same time. You can access and work with all the knowledge of the world, but only by peeking through a narrow (albeit rather high-resolution) aperture; navigable with only 1 or 2 fingers. And that’s before we consider the quality of any given app.

My pocket tool has a knife (which works great), a pliers (which works pretty well) and screwdriver bits (which work OK, as long as you don’t have to turn them for too long). The idea of having a power circular saw built-in to a pocket multi-tool might sound kind of cool at first, but if my pocket tool had one, there’s a good chance that using it would be either terrifying or incredibly annoying.

The things we carry in our purses or pockets are for convenience (not to be confused with genuine ease), not necessarily for quality.

Avocado, Bagel, Cutting Board

Some of the most common hand injuries admitted to the ER are cuts from preparing avocados and bagels. I don’t have the statistics on the reasons people give to doctors and nurses as they’re getting their wounds cleaned and bandaged, but I can make some pretty good guesses:

“I was in a hurry”, “I wasn’t being careful enough”, “My knife just slipped.”

I can sympathize: I’ve had my fair share of near misses.

The problem with this particular situation isn’t necessarily just underestimating what can go wrong—it’s what happens when you actually succeed. Or, more precisely, what happens right after you succeed.

We tend to look at some tools and technologies as the entire solution to the problem. In the case of cutting an avocado in two, we grab the part of the knife that fits our hand and vigorously apply force to the avocado-problem with the part of the knife that fits the avocado. At this point, however, the line between success and failure is razor-thin if our other hand happens to be supporting the avocado-problem.

Cutting boards are boring. They’re one more thing to get out, clean and put away. But boring things like cutting boards (and parking brakes and hard drive backups) are highly underrated, and it might make a lot of sense to consider a knife and cutting board as forming a system that can gracefully withstand your successes as well as your failures.

Interfaces

Because I’m an engineer, I notice and think about interfaces a lot: touchscreens and buttons and dials and switches for all sorts of devices and gadgets. Designing the interface correctly counts for a lot with a product, because it’s the thing that the user touches, sees, hears. It’s where the rubber meets the road. (OK, bad metaphor… It’s actually where the hands grab the steering wheel. The tires and the road are handled by a different department.)

Anyway, when we put down our phones and get out of the car and walk out into the natural world there cease to be interfaces as we usually think of them. It’s not like trees are designed so we can climb them or lakes so we can swim in them. The idea of an interface, no matter how well a stick or a rock fits in our hand, becomes substantially less relevant.

Until you consider your body. Your body is the thing you use to interact with the world—the only thing you have to interact with the world, I might add. It is your world-interface, and it is the best one you will ever own. Your body is the gateway to all of the sights, sounds, textures, tastes and smells of the Earth.

The best technological experiences can feel magical for our eyes and fingertips, but it’s only because our eyes and fingertips are astonishing in their capabilities to begin with.

Transitions

The other day on a walk, we saw a muskrat swimming along the banks of a creek as we walked over the bridge. We’d never seen a muskrat there before and stopped to watch it for a while. It swam under the bridge we stood on and then pulled up to the bank and started nosing around, looking for… something? It wasn’t obvious. 

Anyway, Cody (a fantastic name supplied by my wife) slipped back into the water and swam upstream a bit more, then back onto the bank, then back into the water and toward us again. Cody seemed equally at home in the water and on land. There was no hesitation or preparatory movements for making the transitions, even though it naturally required a change in posture and head tilt to go between swimming and walking. The forces on her legs and body are very different in the two environments (if they are in fact distinct) as are the movements themselves. But Cody gave no indication that anything changed—she simply entered and exited the water with the same ease with which we walked from the bike path onto the bridge.

After a while, Cody found and decisively nibbled a tall plant into shorter lengths, discarding the stem sections and taking the longest, leafiest part with her back downstream and onto another part of the bank where we couldn’t see her any longer. The leaves could have been for dinner or a house project. It wasn’t obvious.