Excited! 13: Useful Knack 🏚️
Hello! It's me again. Been a while, no? Let's talk about the joys of ...uh, slightly broken things.
My car keys give me pause.
No longer is my daily commute simply from one room to the other. No! Nowadays, I'm driving across town for the new job, ...and I've noticed something.
Engine off. Driver's door, exit. Close with elbow! Button under the handle that disengages the hatch. Scoop up the gear, pull down the back. Walking! Hand in pocket, press the lock button on the fob, and listen. Silence. Two cars away now.
Not again.
I read an essay by a high-school teacher a few years back; her students were agitated—despondent about recent events, or angry at protestors, or fearful of what might happen next. Like a tender paleontologist, she chiseled and brushed away at their emotions, uncovering what lay beneath: confusion. When we're confused, she argued, we may have trouble connecting to our emotions. While the easiest recourse might be anger, it's often more productive to let that confusion spark curiosity.
For her students, it was a nudge to explore what their peers were experiencing, to understand why before dismissing them. I keep thinking about the call to curiosity in so many other contexts, though. Every time I feel frustrated, feel a welling aggravation...
Why are things the way they are? How does this system actually work? How can I mend things—or at least, make do?
Did I press the right button? Rummage in the pocket, pull out the fob, and check.
Does it have line of sight to the car's sensor? Where is the car's sensor anyhow? Is it by the rear-view mirror? Stand in the middle of the road, flaaailing the fob at arms length, like an awkward fencing student. Start back toward the car to get a different angle.
Is the fob running low on batteries? (I mean: I don't drive much! Only one battery replacement in the past decade, after all.) Nooooope. Pressing the unlock button works on the first try, every. dang. time.
Is there a trick to it?
The thing I hated most about being a child in the 1950s was that you couldn’t just open the cupboard. There was a knack to it. There was a knack to everything. Nothing fitted. Nothing worked. Nothing did what it was designed to do without some further persuasion, the application–the added value–of massively embedded and localised knowledge you didn’t have....
Writer M. John Harrison calls it the knack, in a short-sweet paragraph that you should go read in full.
(It's only one paragraph, after all. I'll wait here 'til you're back.)
There's a beautiful bit you shouldn't miss in the comments, too:
Knack-based systems are designed to afflict the young, not the old. Age is, as I said, the relief from all that. No longer any need to pretend, the way the four and the fourteen year old are forced to pretend, that the patient acquisition of the knack is the central exercise of a natural epistemology, an inevitable way of gaining knowledge & exercising agency. As you get older you simply begin to expect things to work, and you stop investing your patience & your intelligence in things (or, for that matter, ideas) that don’t.
Harrison's railing against a world of fixable problems, a world of poor design. In the design world, we lump a lot of these issues into a category of friction. Like the physical force, friction acts against your intended direction to slow you down. Most designers want your interactions with their technology to be frictionless—so buttery smooth, the technology becomes invisible!
🤦🏻♂️ You don't want to have to push a pull handle on a door.
🤦🏼♀️ You don't want to reroute for two solid minutes because your phone's compass got confused and the GPS is directing you in a loop.
🤦🏿♀️ You don't want to hav to rtyp an -mail to an important clint bcaus your kyboard's "" ky won't work.
Evvvvvery now and then, though?
COME ON, FOCUS, JASON, back to the keys:
All that is not to say this is an unsolved mystery! Over the lifetime of the keyfob, thanks to a decade of roughhousing, the sensitive area of the unlock button ... migrated. It's no longer under the markings, but slightly down and to the left. I've alllllmost gotten that sweet spot to a science now, months later—but only by slowing down.
Engine off. Driver's door, exit. Close with elbow! Button under the handle that disengages the hatch. Scoop up the gear, pull down the back.
🛑 Breathe.
Do I have everything? Why am I rushing? What kind of day do I want today to be?
Slide the finger over the button with intention. CHK-CLK.
And we're walking.
Do you have tiny rituals you use to refocus? What knacks in your life do you absolutely treasure—in spite of their aggravation? Let me know! I'm curious.
Cheers!
jason
Knack via Robin Sloan's Year of the Meteor #39. Here's Kay Flewelling's essay about confusion and curiosity. Smashing Magazine has a phenomenally thorough article on useful friction in design.
And if you enjoy thinking about the ridiculous-looking flails and flumps and waggles we do to get our technology to work, then OH GOLLY YES are you going to enjoy this old PDF of ethnography on modern rituals, by Near Future Laboratory.
So, you're askin', as I put the words in your mouth: What's the status on all them projects? LET ME TELL YOU WHAT.
- [✓] STRAYLIGHT is officially over, as of some signatures last week. Learned a lot about business, a little about cloud computing, and a fair bit about AI.
- [✓] Got a new day job at this wonderful company (that did thiiiiis 🤩)! I'm now doing the same things I did for museums, but for retail and ...theme parks.✨
- [✓] Learned about internationalization! THREEPIO was a short-turnaround project to help build the website for gamedev.world.
- [✓] Still haven't tidied up a video or writeup for PEPIN—a workshop on machine learning for beginners.
- [✓] HAYNES was a success! Broke even at our first zine fest in Los Angeles. Made a zine on how to drive stick shift (in a zombie apocalypse). Need to get a proper website up.
- [✓] Started the first steps of GAMMON: got my ham radio technician license and began a zine on it.
- [✓] Lasercut a whole slew of place settings for AVENTAIL. Also, became a reverend.
- [✓] SULLY was a huge hit. Might make this into a future craft + zine project.
- [⋯] Working on a zine and workshop for COLCHESTER ...next week.
- [⋯] Helping a friend on PHTHALO. It's reminding me tangentially of this very inspirational project by BERG, even if it's a different domain.
- [→] Very, very behind on BANTOCK.
(Owe B. a very overdue reply. 😬)Sent yesterday, phew! - [→] Made no progress on UMAMI this past year.
- [→] Wrapped up latest release of KIMON, but have been too busy to start next phase. Did research for VANDERCOOK, but they went a different way.
- [→] Behind on BRAUE for a number of reasons. Need to return to it.
- [→] No real progress on BOMBILATE or DIASPORA.
- [→] CALAFIA and CAROLINGIAN are either punted or continuing with other technologists. No news.
- [→] Had to pass on children's museum project LUTRA, but may still advise on it.
- [→] Made some progress early last year on BOWLER and BROECKEN. Need to clean up quite a few things and take off the password protection. In no rush.