The Interface Reassessment; or, Seeing The Nostalgia At Work

It’s been a revealer, this Covid19. Like all great crises, it has revealed the best of the best, and the very worst of the worst. It’s easy to swing between emotions of great hope and great despair towards our collective future, and to swing hard too: just this morning, in the space of minutes one could read news of vaccines that have gone from email attachments of gene sequences in January to phase 3 trials in tens of thousands of people today, to the most powerful person on earth promoting debunked nonsense from a woman who believes in demonic possession. The first a combination of so much human skill and ingenuity across so many areas, from microbiology to volunteer recruitment to logistics to welding, that it will eventually be considered one of the cathedrals of the modern age: a truly sacred endeavour. And the second yet another act of insanity on a pile of the profane indistinguishable from malevolence.

But the reveals can be monumental in a different way. The slow realizations that things we were doing before were kinda weird. And while we can’t keep doing them, that’s ok, because freed from habit we might actually find something better.

Take thinking, for example.

Thinking is a physical act. Not just in the electrical signals running through neurons sense - I mean, I’m not trying to run up against some idea that thought is a magical process that’s not of this earth - but in the way that it’s deeply situated in the body. This isn’t a new idea, but bear with me. See, the physical actions I take as I think changes both the type and the quality of the thinking I can do. I can reach ideas when I think through typing that I can’t reach when I think through speaking aloud, and vice versa. The way I perceive the world, and the thoughts that I can have while I do so, are radically different when I’m walking in the sunshine when compared to sitting at my desk on a gloomy day.

Which, of course, is partly because the physicality of my thought is situated in the wider world. I exist as a person in the environment and so that has a huge effect too: My thoughts are better when I’m in fresher air, or the most appropriate ambient colour temperature. They’re also more rational when I can feel my heartbeat, more expansive when I’ve had enough sleep, and infinitely better when I’ve not absorbed the drama of the world by looking at Twitter. Even the music I listen to has an effect.

All of these facts influence the field that I’m calling Cognitive Risk. Specifically one part of it, the Cognitive Environment. Learning to understand the most suitable environments for the most suitable form of thinking to solve any problem at hand is both an ancient skill - knowing the right tool for the job has been the mark of the master craftsman since there have been crafts to master - but also the most modern of problems. Take today, for example. It’s the end of July, Covid Year One, and many of us have been working remotely for months now. This has meant moving certain types from thinking from their habitual environment, into somewhere far less conducive.

The grinding sounds that have resulted come from two entirely unmatched cogs failing to mesh together. Trying to do the same sort of thinking, with its associated necessary physicality, that you might have done in an office, just doesn’t work when your new environment is profoundly different. Noise, light, distraction, allostatic load, ergonomics, device capability, lack of personal interaction, excess of personal interaction, bandwidth of interpersonal communication, or just the shitty work laptop you were given in a hurry one Friday in March: they all mean that we can’t work in the way we expected to.

But this is the point: if we can’t work in that way anymore, we have to consider that perhaps the nature of the work itself is the only thing that can change. To use an analogy, no matter how hard I try, no amount of effort will make me an Olympic skier. Not only can I not actually ski, but even if I could, I’m in an office in Brooklyn. Someone might dearly wish I was leaning into the curves in the Super-G, but they’re insane if they think that’s a goal worth attempting in the current conditions.

This then leads to a realization and a question. The realization is that office work is, by mutual interdependent evolution, most suited to the office, and the office is most suited to it.

The question is the killer, though: is the work we do shaped in the way it is, solely because we work out of offices? In other words, are the structures that make up the modern organisation there because of the fundamental qualities of the problems those organisations are founded to address, or are we, as a culture, stuffing everything into Modern Office Costume first, almost without thinking about it, and then flailing at it with the wrong tools?

In other other words, it is deeply weird that we tend to think that every problem can be expressed, understood, solved, and acted upon solely through 2D interfaces on rectangular screens set on desks in offices. Even, and perhaps, especially the ones that have always been done that way. Indeed, seen in this light, the purpose of the modern office seems to have been to breed more offices. How clever it was of sheep to evolve shepherds.

Now though, we might do better. More on this to come.