[This letter is part of the Little Letter Republic, a project whose purpose is to build intellectual community out of St. Louis]

Dear Laura,

There’s a cool video I found on Twitter a few years ago which showed a 1994 workstation and one by one each item transformed itself into an app on the computer until nothing was left on the desk except a laptop. Each item, the phone book, the planner, the telephone, the notepad, the sticky notes, the calendar, all disappeared into the laptop. (I very intentionally retweeted this little video so I could find it again, but somehow still I can’t find it on my timeline. Oh well. I’m not very good at using Twitter.)

I wonder whether something was lost in this transition and something else will rise to take the place of all that empty desk space. I hope so. The flattening of environmental information into openable apps seems to decrease affordances and impoverish the physical environment. Even adding in two external monitors can’t fully fix this.

Let me provide an example. Last week I purchased an analog watch. It has the date and time. The first effect I noticed was that it revealed to me the extent to which “checking the time” is pretext for checking notifications. Pulling out my phone every time I want to know the time is a lot of work. And further, a time check on a phone costs a lot of cognitive resources. I am no longer paying the notification tax in order to know the time, and it is great. (Yes, most apps have notifications turned off. Still super valuable.)

So I’m wondering, what else in my physical environment am I missing? What else should I be doing or could be built that enhances our experience of daily life. The influence of Factorio on culture teaches “it is a mortal sin for something that is used less often to get in the way of something used more often.” My pocket, my earbuds case, the side button, and the email notifications were in the way of telling time. Now they are not.

A key term I’m thinking about here is affordances. Affordances come from behavioral psychology as an idea for explaining how the mind picks up on certain environmental cues to perform specific behaviors – very similar to the idea of “prepared spaces.” Whether a space is prepared or not really matters towards what actions will be performed in that space.

And just as spaces matter so too do the tools and their receptivity to the user’s touch and purpose.

I am a Stan fan of e-ink, but I lost my religion when I received a copy of the Daylight computer (which I am writing this on while I fly). E-ink is beautiful, high-contrast black and white — well, it’s pretty close to white. My Boox could last weeks on a single charge and the software was an excellent multi tool with good integrations. But the Boox is like 4hz. The Daylight is 60hz. And that responsiveness makes up for literally 100 hundred unique defects in the device. Reliability and speed and response make a user experience feel embodied and connected, while randomness, sluggishness, and lag do not. Writing on a pad with a pencil has a reliability to it and an immediateness that is hard to replicate.

I find the Daylight experience generalizes. Digital vs physical chemistry experiments are like this too. The virtual lab is not immediacy in a box. A bookshelf is immediate. I love to meditate on the topics contained on my shelves. My displayed books guide and shape my thoughts and what I think about and what I value. I’m a mere man, visually stimulated by these to think about the things I want to think about. I cannot sit in a dark room and expect my thoughts to grow brighter. I need the totems. But I wonder what totems new and old can be brought into the intentionally prepared spaces of the future.

The totems of long cogent word strings are books. The totems of music were once CDs, in our house they are now Tonies and those library book audio things, and vinyl. The totem of math is the abacus, magic square, and calculator, but hey I’m up for learning slide rules. I used to be deft with a soroban, and sometimes I wonder if I should have a separate tablet for every app and app combo… Obviously with a suggestion like “one app one device” I am moving I the wrong direction here… Or am I?

Changing topics back to prepared spaces. Imagine a science house where dozens of experiments are set up and ready to go – a kind of touring tutorial on a single topic. I like to think of it as a library of discovery.

Say I want to explore combustion. So I have a space dedicated to Michael Faraday’s *Chemical History of a Candle*. We have updated versions of all of the experiments in those lectures. Identifying the hottest part of a candle. Identifying where on a candle the fire actually takes place and what it is made of and how the smoke from a candle can be lit and how to show that water is a product of combustion even when there is no water in the air and no water in the candle. All those experiments set up yes, but also giant flippable flashcards of leading questions whose answer are provided after the experiment. A comparison and contrast with the modern equipment with the original equipment used for the experiment.From there we move back to Boyle and the discovery of vacuums. We use pumps to remove air and change air pressure in a variety of pumps and move different sized objects using the power of air pressure and vacuum. We build a piston and crankshaft converting [rotational energy] out of [pressure]. Along the way we reveal several major applications. Water pumps, turbines, pistons.

From there we go to the internal combustion engine room. We take the machined parts of a single piston engine and put it together, then we explore all the design flaws of the single piston and slowly come up with a four cylinder engine. Valves open and close, engine casing, oilng, cooling system, exhaust system each receive their own treatment. At the end such a process, we have explored a huge portion of science and engineering.

The biggest barrier in my opinion to any of this is space. Making good spaces is expensive. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and showcase just what a good space can be and do for learners. I am hopeful for a future where we have the resources to build and experiment with more such spaces – at schools that specialize in this type of work AND rotating exhibits around the country AND “science sites” within a single city spreading the real estate cost across a metro area so that educational institutions can take turns using the same systems.