The Hindu-Arabic numeral system; the arch; McCarthy’s Lisp; Photoshop’s layers; and so on. All these inventors understood something very powerful about their domains and created abstractions designed to exploit them. This, rather than “usability” or polished visual presentation, is the deepest and highest-leverage form of design. Understanding this extends the scope of design, from the type of thing IDEO does, to include the work of people like Ed Boyden.
Michael Nielsen first helped me understand this. See Maps of Matter and Thought as a Technology
Now, what does it mean that (visual) design is “laying out buttons and text”? It seems a little like claiming that Shakespeare was merely laying out letters of the alphabet in a particularly well-chosen fashion. There is some sense in which that’s true. But the point of design, as with Shakespeare and great writing, is to discover powerful higher-order ideas. Those ideas are then reflected in the layout. In fact, the very best designers invent amazing new abstractions.
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Design at its best is all about the discovery of such powerful ideas, like the arch, late binding, software objects, and so on. I greatly admire Bret Victor’s work, and one of the thing Victor does better than almost anybody is create new visual abstractions, abstractions made from pixels. To what extent can we do the same for matter?
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At its deepest, design is about inventing entirely new types of objects and of actions. It’s the type of thinking that results in someone conjuring up the rules of chess; or inventing topological quantum computing; or in developing the polymerase chain reaction. ==In each case we take the rules of reality and find latent within them some other very different set of rules, a set of rules for a new reality, one that generates beautiful patterns of its own==.