Another nugget from a chapter preface in Science and Sanity:

“Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance.”
Bell, E. T.

In other words, when people don’t know they jump to conclusions.  Such is the case with evolution vs creation. We just don’t know at the moment, and to rule either out is to make a foolish mistake. It’s ok to not know for the time being.

Evolutionary Psychology is especially guilty of “feasting on shadows”, jumping to wild conclusions about how we have ended up preferring certain things or behaving in certain ways, with no testable hypotheses…

I came across this quote at uni, but only just saw it in connection with interfaces and gadgets:

Introspective psychology and analytical philosophy of the self, of perception and of will, do not seem to take into account that in any well-made machine one is ignorant of the working of most of the parts - the better they work, the less are we conscious of them. Thus it is very unlikely that introspection will reveal those intermediate processes which are most important

Kenneth Craik, The Nature Of Explanation (1943)

The best designs are ones that we don’t even notice. The best interfaces are the ones that seem to have us hovering over the link we need without us even realising we are doing it. I think this is why people get so frustrated with computers, because they are supposed to be a tool, a means to an end, but often fail utterly to help us achieve our ends and it becomes apparent how much there is to go wrong.

Good use of AJAX and jQuery can help make interfaces invisible, especially when they are loading things ahead of time so when you click that link, it is there instantly for you. I am going to aim for invisibility in my web interfaces, and see if other people find them invisible too.

When designing websites for clients, there is often a tug of war between what I think looks good, what the client thinks and what the projected users will think. There is no right and wrong to what makes a site appeal to certain people, but recent research suggests there might be gender differences.

Press Releases - Key Website Research Highlights Gender Bias

The article states that “websites which might appeal greatly to one sex are a total no-no with the other.” This is an interesting finding, but is gender too blunt a distinction? This is likely to touch on individual colour preferences (Maybe by season, as with House of Colour… ), introversion/extraversion and many other personal characteristics. While this research is good ammo for making a point with the less objective clients, I can’t help feeling that it is more subtle than male/female.

I have taken to looking at what my clients are wearing - this can give an insight into their colour preferences. It is important to stress to them that they are not making a site for themselves, they are making it to appeal to their customers. Therefore I need to know who the site is aimed at and what their preferences might be.

There is a lot of overlap between web design and psychology, providing the scene for a lot of crossover research. However, Psychology is still struggling with modernist concepts and Aristotelian yes/no distinctions. Post-modern and constructionist ideas will have much to say about web design and user interface creation.

There are lots of people around, whether it be print, TV or internet that will tell you “how to be…” something or other. Whether it is “How to be romantic” or “how to look like some idiot celebrity”, it’s everywhere. This is fucked up.

Nobody needs any advice on how to be anything. We would all be a lot happier if we stopped “trying to be” and were content with “being”. It’s one of the Buddhist precepts - contentedness. It doesn’t need some blogger or TV presenter to show you how to “be content”. All it takes is accepting that you wish you were more like someone else, then letting it go. It is that simple. Each thought can either be repressed, accepted or fixated on. Repression and fixation lead to Bad Times, so just accept that you want something, and let it go. The feeling will pass.

Just be yourself. Don’t listen to those that tell you to “be like” someone else. Behaving or dressing like them will not make you them. Behaviour is not the person. Just do what you want to do

The book is “Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics” by Alfred Korzybski. Now I am free of the clutches of endless essays, I can go back and read the things I have got wind of while studying. I have been tempted to get this book for a few years now, but with being at uni I didn’t want to get it while I was trying to study.

I don’t really know how to explain what the book is about. It calls for the rebuilding of human thinking. Modern science is based on finding general principles and rules for what is around us. This is all well and good, but can be over-general.
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