Philosophy Now Forum

I’m a interface designer and information architect with a long-standing interest in philosophy. I write about issues regarding psychology in the realm of interface design for my day-job in an advertising company (boo!), and about more esoteric matters such as the nature of technology, evolution and consciousness on my own blog. I am both a skeptic and atheist but also strive to make sense of religious and mystical ideologies through the lens of evolutionary history.

Anyhoo, found this forum via the podcast, which I very much enjoy despite the inexplicable pepperings of singer-songwriters.

JamieStanton wrote:about more esoteric matters such as the nature of technology, evolution and consciousness on my own blog

I find the bold word highly misplaced here I think. The Nature of Technology, Evolution and Consciousness are not "esoteric" matters, of course you can give them an esoteric perspective, but esotericism is hardly philosophy by any standard I know. The way I see esotericism it's what you get when people put excess emphasis on matters that seem rather redundant or unchallengeable (by practical or principal reasons, like things that seems to ignore the most solid of the logical framework or if people simply resist its challengeability) and therefore not questionable, on contrary with philosophy, I'd reckon. I know it often tries to hide this fact, and I'm inclined to see how you intend to defend your esotericism, because it usually falls quickly in the face of any standard philosophical game of discussion.

Was meaning obscure relative to the business oriented stuff I write on the Advertising blog, where such topics are not generally of interest to business owners and thus "esoteric".

Business-oriented stuff by this definition can also be quite obscure, and therefore "esoteric". I still think the word is misplaced. Technical terms are often obscure of nature (not that I know what kind of language you use on your blog), whether we talk about economics/business or advertisement or philosophy... all of them build their own circle of people who understand how to understand the specific uses of language and words in the given context.

The fact that the language and understandings of philosophy can to a businessman be obscure, doesn't mean it necessarily is, since to a philosopher the language and understandings of business can be equally if not more obscure. I especially find many English technical words in business hard to remember and sometimes hard to understand as well (though that's usually a very high level, like I have a book from the African Development Bank titled "African Developmental Report 2010", which deals with other things than you of course, but just as an example there are lots of difficult words and advanced mathematics there), to me I don't understand why they don't use simpler and more plain words, which I guess is what the business man would say if he ever tried to read any of Kant's works (not that I have, but I hear they renowned for their technical obscurity)

What you’re saying is that different specialisations have their own tailored terminologies, which I agree. This is to be expected as they are exploring a particular topic in more depth and require more granular use of language. That is not to say that the concepts one deals with in each specialisation are as simple to grasp once one understands the terminology involved, or even that fancy terminology implies complexity. In marketing / advertising, there is loads of specialised language, but the underlying concepts in my opinion are not difficult to grasp. It is just another level of detail on basic concepts, or even be used to make something seem complex when it is not. Often terminology is technical sounding and flowery simply in order to justify a client spending more money, and consequently marketing people convince themselves it is more complicated than it is. Language in this sense is used like a smoke grenade. Now of course there is a certain amount of “the curse of knowledge” here; assuming my own knowledge should be self-evident to others, but there is a difference I feel between learning basic concepts and building upon them over time, to the goal of philosophy.

For me the point of philosophy is to challenge what one thinks, not simply to decorate one’s worldview with longer words. To juggle different ways of seeing the world is more mental work that just picking one and seeking more justifications for it. This is true on a neurological level. Habits - behavioural, perceptual or otherwise, are the low valleys of cognition. The brain carves habits into the neural pathways of the brain in order to save energy, which is why changing habits involves so much hard work. It also becomes harder as we age and neuroplasticity declines. This is made even more difficult if we surround ourselves with others who view the world the same way, as we are driven to fit into the group and are rewarded with sweet, sweet Serotonin when our own perceptions and interpretation of the group worldview are accepted and incorporated.

Philosophy - for me - is to try and tear down one’s biases and step back from the feedback loops of groupthink, to try and see the world from a fresh perspective. Understand other’s perspectives is a good starting point, which is an area in which philosophy has stumbled. When good thinkers are terrible communicators terminology becomes an impediment rather than an aid to understanding. Even given that he wanted to reject the philosophical terminology of the era, Heidegger’s Being and Time was needlessly complicated, a combined result of his being a poor communicator and rushing the book to publication. Likewise, compare the accessible and endlessly quotable Nietzsche to the wordy and obtuse Kant, in terms of general popularity.

Many people carry that opinion of what philosophy is. I disagree however, not on the question of "what it is", but in the question of "what we should do with it". I called philosophy a engineering of ideas, as the way in which we produce new and better ideas continuously. And I think that point of view serves greater use than only seeing it as an alternative to whatever is the consensus...

JamieStanton wrote:I’m a interface designer and information architect with a long-standing interest in philosophy. I write about issues regarding psychology in the realm of interface design for my day-job in an advertising company (boo!), and about more esoteric matters such as the nature of technology, evolution and consciousness on my own blog. I am both a skeptic and atheist but also strive to make sense of religious and mystical ideologies through the lens of evolutionary history.

Anyhoo, found this forum via the podcast, which I very much enjoy despite the inexplicable pepperings of singer-songwriters.

What is the realm of interface design?

interfaces are shared software specifications which must be implemented in the use of the specific software framework... for instance, an interface may demand that you implement a property or that you have to implement a value type (like an integer, but where you can specify the value of the integer yourself).

When computer games are made for instance, they all, generally, use industry standard multimedia frameworks, like DirectX or OpenGL or similars, which provides frameworks for computer graphics, sound coding and related stuff, and then everybody must be certain that the code works with the different types of framework, and that the code within the framework works with its own framework, so they make interface's, such that when you derive your own object of code from the interface you have a specific number of things, all of the code from the interface, you have to "fill in", or specify, and when all that is specified, it should, basically, be compatible within the framework, and within other supporting frameworks.

To design an interface would be to figure out what is needed in the interfaces and how it should look like, but I'm excited to hear if this guy has anything more to say about the matter ^^

chaz wyman wrote:

JamieStanton wrote:I’m a interface designer and information architect with a long-standing interest in philosophy. I write about issues regarding psychology in the realm of interface design for my day-job in an advertising company (boo!), and about more esoteric matters such as the nature of technology, evolution and consciousness on my own blog. I am both a skeptic and atheist but also strive to make sense of religious and mystical ideologies through the lens of evolutionary history.

Anyhoo, found this forum via the podcast, which I very much enjoy despite the inexplicable pepperings of singer-songwriters.

What is the realm of interface design?

I design interfaces for websites, apps and other software. They key challenges aren't so much technical as psychological, and most of the research I do looks at the intentionality and goals of people using the interface and aligning this what the goals of the website / app are. The interface must mirror the way people think about your app / company, instead of reflecting how *you* think about *yourself*. For example, a company may want to lay out the site in terms of the structure of the organisation they have which is at best utterly irrelevant to a customer wanting to buy something or sent a support message. Similarly, the aesthetics of the design must reflect the ideals of the user, not the client's personal tastes.

My goal is to reduce friction as the user flows through the system, not making them have to stop and think or scratch their head and wonder what to do next; just immerse themselves in their intentionality and have the system present the right tools at the right time.

The future of this field is exciting; presently content and interfaces are largely static, but in the near future they will mirror how you think about things on a more personal level, and content will rewrite itself based on the reading level of the user, for example, or their particular terminologies, while maintaining the core message you hope to transmit. This is called "personalisation in the wild" and builds on customised advertising based on your search history and other behaviors. This is still some years off, but there is some very interesting research in the field.

why would an interface designer be interested in what the user sees on such a deep level when the user doesn't see the code? (or are you calling programmers "users"?) Isn't it better for the interface designer to try and meet the programmer's needs so that the application programmer can do their job which is to meet the user's needs?

JamieStanton wrote:

chaz wyman wrote:

JamieStanton wrote:I’m a interface designer and information architect with a long-standing interest in philosophy. I write about issues regarding psychology in the realm of interface design for my day-job in an advertising company (boo!), and about more esoteric matters such as the nature of technology, evolution and consciousness on my own blog. I am both a skeptic and atheist but also strive to make sense of religious and mystical ideologies through the lens of evolutionary history.

Anyhoo, found this forum via the podcast, which I very much enjoy despite the inexplicable pepperings of singer-songwriters.

What is the realm of interface design?

I design interfaces for websites, apps and other software. They key challenges aren't so much technical as psychological, and most of the research I do looks at the intentionality and goals of people using the interface and aligning this what the goals of the website / app are. The interface must mirror the way people think about your app / company, instead of reflecting how *you* think about *yourself*. For example, a company may want to lay out the site in terms of the structure of the organisation they have which is at best utterly irrelevant to a customer wanting to buy something or sent a support message. Similarly, the aesthetics of the design must reflect the ideals of the user, not the client's personal tastes.

My goal is to reduce friction as the user flows through the system, not making them have to stop and think or scratch their head and wonder what to do next; just immerse themselves in their intentionality and have the system present the right tools at the right time.

The future of this field is exciting; presently content and interfaces are largely static, but in the near future they will mirror how you think about things on a more personal level, and content will rewrite itself based on the reading level of the user, for example, or their particular terminologies, while maintaining the core message you hope to transmit. This is called "personalisation in the wild" and builds on customised advertising based on your search history and other behaviors. This is still some years off, but there is some very interesting research in the field.

How twisted language has become.
When I first studied computing, interfaces were bits of hardware that you plugged peripherals into; RS232. serial bus, parallel etc. no one would have ever used 'interface' to describe software.
It sounds like what you do is the bullshit front-end, of software. masking the banality of the software to lure people into thinking they need the stuff you are peddling, when they actually would be better off not wasting their time on a computer, but rather getting out of the house and getting a bit of fresh air.
The future in computing is based on the skill of providing solutions for which no actual problem exists.

The problem is certainly there, I can assure you Chaz. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean nobody else sees it. To spot a problem is a very good skill indeed, and it is a problem, whether or not, a person likes what they buy, and therefore one should try and make it likeable. I would agree though that it's deceit if the program is designed as to give the impression of doing things there is no big reason to believe it could do, but that got more to do with advertisement industry and any kind of product in general and not specific in any way to computer programming.

People will sell you pills that are supposed to do magic and they will sell you vacuum cleaners that changes your life (NOT! At least not to the positive necessarily), so we're not just talking computer programs. But good User Interface Designs (that is, the way things generally looks on your screen and how it works for the user) are important parts of how we best can access and use our computers.

Compare Windows 8 with Windows 7 and you see what User Interface Design does to user experience. Win8 I don't like in general, too little freedom of choice, but all ones (small list of) favourite programs are easily accessible. The downside is that you have less choice in how you want your desktop to look like, and you have less choice in how to organize things to your liking and to a way you can easily see things how you want to see them and the way which is best for you and your way of thinking and being logical.

The Voice of Time wrote:The problem is certainly there, I can assure you Chaz. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean nobody else sees it. To spot a problem is a very good skill indeed, and it is a problem, whether or not, a person likes what they buy, and therefore one should try and make it likeable. I would agree though that it's deceit if the program is designed as to give the impression of doing things there is no big reason to believe it could do, but that got more to do with advertisement industry and any kind of product in general and not specific in any way to computer programming.

Problem - what problem. A better skill is inventing a problem that does not exist as that is the basis of 90% of what people do on personal computers.
THe advent of computers's impact, considering their power has been rather disappointing. And you are talking to a guy that has lived with computers since I bought my first one in 1980.
THe vast majority of Internet traffic, and mobile phone exchanges is bollocks; the gibbering of inane shite, serving no purpose or need.


People will sell you pills that are supposed to do magic and they will sell you vacuum cleaners that changes your life (NOT! At least not to the positive necessarily), so we're not just talking computer programs. But good User Interface Designs (that is, the way things generally looks on your screen and how it works for the user) are important parts of how we best can access and use our computers.

Compare Windows 8 with Windows 7 and you see what User Interface Design does to user experience. Win8 I don't like in general, too little freedom of choice, but all ones (small list of) favourite programs are easily accessible. The downside is that you have less choice in how you want your desktop to look like, and you have less choice in how to organize things to your liking and to a way you can easily see things how you want to see them and the way which is best for you and your way of thinking and being logical.

To what useful end. Spend a few weeks without a computer, it will make very little difference to your life, except that you might notice something about your life that you had been previously neglecting.
going for a coffee

day at the beach

at the restaurant


Albert Einstein: "I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of IDIOTS."

sounds like to me Chaz you're more of the reactionary type to modern technology. I can agree there's a lot of bullshit on the net, but there's a lot of bullshit everywhere, so it's not particular to the net.

The Voice of Time wrote:sounds like to me Chaz you're more of the reactionary type to modern technology. I can agree there's a lot of bullshit on the net, but there's a lot of bullshit everywhere, so it's not particular to the net.

I use the net a lot. I have no aversion to modern technology. But am disappointed by what utterly pathetic and asinine uses to which it is put.
Take an average user and you have a missed opportunity. And the techno-psycho-designers simply see the masses as dupes who need to be kept clicking, without thinking to much. Just get them looking at advertisements and keep them clued to the mice click , click, click....