(2024-06-08) Wilson Research Building Community

Lu Wilson: Building community. Over the past six months I’ve been asking lots of researchers the same question— mostly computing researchers but some others too. The question: Is your work about “influencing people” or is it about “solving hard problems”?

The first thing I notice is that most people say it’s a good question, and stop and pause for a second to think (not everyone though). It seems like everyone firmly knows their answer, but they may not have talked about it explicitly before.

And I thought that “use case” would be closely tied to the “solving hard problems” goal. But no, lots of people told me that “real world use case” was tied to “influencing people”. In order to influence people

Why do you think tldraw works so well? Sure, it has a lot of experimental research work backing up its design and decisions. But it also has the thousands and thousands of hours we’ve all spent on SMASHING BUGS in it, and making it work well for different devices and users.

Of course, most people I spoke to are not trying to make something that’s actually useful, but they are trying to make something that could be potentially useful to a real world “use case”.

*It seems like a large part of their work is drawing lines between their work and a “use case”. This link needs to be clear, and it needs to be talked about a lot. Sometimes, a research project gets initiated by identifying a “use case”, and then basing all investigations around that.

I think this is really stupid.*

I think it leads to this top down approach where you restrict yourself too much from the start. There’s not enough exploration or out-of-the-box thinking. You don’t get to explore primitives, and find out what they may or may not be useful for. And your resultant tech is never general-purpose.

And if the goal is to “influence people”, there is far too much time spent on the prototyping the thing, and far too little spent on prototyping the communications.

This is my current answer: I want to promote empathy and make computers better. I only ever build something myself after I’ve failed to convince someone else to build it.