From Tools to Environments by Stefan Lesser

A good environment gives us agency. It empowers us to explore, discover, change, and shape it. It will support our agency, and the more agency we have in this place, the more comfortable we feel there, the more we feel that we belong here. As we discover its preferred ways of doing things, it will also graciously adapt to our preferred ways of doing things. (View Highlight)

We are in a feedback loop of reciprocal realization with it, whether we are aware of it or not, and whether we want to be or not. We are in a fairly close being mode relationship with it. (View Highlight)

A consequence of this for a product design process is a requirement to create a livable environment as soon as possible. I need to be able to live in it, before I can make good judgements about how I want to change it to improve my experience of being here. And I have to be there to experience it. No planning process can deliver even a fraction of the depth and fidelity of experiencing reality yourself, here and now. (View Highlight)

Building software for ourselves means we want to live in it as soon as we can, and we will probably make exactly that happen relatively quickly. And once we have done that, we immediately sense everything that’s clearly wrong or subtly not quite right, because it doesn’t feel good. And because we care about what we use ourselves, we put at least some effort into making it feel good. (View Highlight)

However, if you are living in your own environment, paying close attention to how it feels, you can attempt to improve that experience directly — and you can do it using both analysis and intuition! If you are proficient in using both, you can get the best of both worlds, combined. (View Highlight)

The process of respecting and extending and creating the whole, and the process of using feeling, are one and the same. Real feeling, true feeling, is the experience of the whole. (View Highlight)

You just know that it’s the right thing to do, because it obviously is better to do it that way. But you may not know why it does. And so you can’t explain it. (View Highlight)

If your design process demands analytic proof, you’re screwed. Of course, not every intuition leads to a deeply insightful design decision. In fact most of them likely do not. However, a process that categorically disallows intuition-based decisions will filter all such insights out up front, leaving you with just what can be analytically inferred and is justifiable through propositions. (View Highlight)

Many of us have become so numb to the constant disappointment and frustration that we have built powerful coping mechanisms that we no longer realize it. We have successfully unlearned to respect our intuition. (View Highlight)