I love capturing the little moments of daily life that happen at street level as I’m wandering around a city, whether it’s a new one an ocean away or my own neighborhood in San Francisco. These are very different from the photos of the Eiffel Tower that every visitor to Paris has somewhere in their phone camera, different from the ones you’ll find on travel guides or city government websites. You can’t easily find the pictures I want on Google Images… The only alternative is to capture them myself.
This reminded me of my own little online rabbit-hole-ing on Google Maps. For some reason, I like looking at places that are at edges, no matter where they are in the world. The most northern or southern points of a country. Borders between countries. Coasts. Foothills.
I zoom in and out, switch from vanilla view to satellite view. Having gotten my fill of the topography, I tap on Photos to sample that experience from the point of view of people, people I’ll never meet and know nothing about.
It’s not only that those are some of the only public photos from those places, but also that they’re photos from everymen and women. They’re unfocused, unfiltered, poorly framed, repeated, obscured by the photographer themself. Regardless, they’re the best – the only – expression of what it’s actually like to be there.
The Kazakh-Uzbek border. Why? Don’t ask.
I have worn out hours and whole iPhone battery cycles on these tours. They wouldn’t seem as real as they do, were it not for the casual, unthinking contributions of thousands of fellow humans.
Wardle realized something wasn’t right when he dumped a massive list of every possible five-letter word into the app’s random-word pool:
“It turns out that these are all valid five-letter words,” Wardle says while displaying the above image, drawing a laugh from the crowd. After testing the worst outliers in his game, he had a revelation:
When players encounter a word they’ve never heard of or used in common speech, they are left with little rational means of guessing what the next letter might be, even as grays, greens, and yellows accumulate.
“What’s fun about Wordle, I think, is what you can tease out, based on what you know about language,” Wardle says. “What the word should be.”
The design solution came thanks to Wardle’s partner “going through a tough time” and wanting a “mindless game to play.” So he turned her into a human machine-learning model by having her rank every single five-letter word in the dictionary—roughly 13,000 of them—with the following ranking system:
So – Wordle’s balance of challenge and intuitiveness is a result of deliberate design choices. One is this above, excluding unfamiliar yet legitimate words. The other is
the very particular design choice to limit it to one puzzle a day, so that everyone around the world is solving the same Wordle. A strong social facet of a game that has no intrinsic social game-play at all
People being asked to return to their workplaces – as the pandemic recedes in the West and Asia – have some new perspective:
“I’m typing this from my office where I’m the only one in my suite and have been all week. More colleagues are physically present across the building but all my work is done on a computer and I have no reason to interact with them in person. It’s just the old logic that you’re not really working if you’re not in the office.
Also on Twitter
“I commute two hours per day, just to sit on Teams meetings all day.”
Hearing this a lot right now. There’s no way to bring 2019 back, how we work has been transformed.
So there’s got to be a planned purpose for in-person work. Not just because it’s a Thursday.
This to me is the most significant way in which work will change in the near future. It’s less about the specific technology we use for chat, calls, knowledge gathering or such. And more about what people interact with each other for.
Once companies begin thinking about these, they’ll very quickly need to deal with more fundamental inter-personal matters, about trust and autonomy, about cultural fit, about incentives. All of these will look quite different from today for a company that wants to move beyond the simple binaries or remote/local, home/office.
Finally, the “metaverse” is a term that several companies, notably Facebook, are using to describe a shared immersive space for people to work in while being physically in different places. While it’s early days, it’s telling that the idea of that shared space is, essentially, a low-fidelity replica of a typical office.
And some photos of a product from the “virtual office” company Challau.
Make remote work social again. Get the team back together in your virtual office. Host meetings, share ideas, make presentations and have fun conversations with your work colleagues.
Having people’s avatars ‘sit’ at an office desk and look at a projected screen, stand before the boss’ table while he/she speak with them doesn’t seem to take advantage of a blank canvas, free of physical constraints. More fundamentally, these designs may reinforce the same obsolete organizational characteristics that we discussed at the beginning of this post.
I think these choices are in part a conscious choice by companies to give people a sense of familiarity as they ‘return’ to office. But it seems to me that truly distributed, global organisations will be structured fundamentally differently and use very different tools.
Decentralised autonomous organisations, or DAOs, seem an interesting experiment. Without getting too deep into their details, governance and incentives for these organizations are typically encoded in ‘smart contracts’, or in code that lives on a blockchain. Per-member rights are weighted by the number of organizational tokens each person holds – as are profits. Projects and tasks are taken up by DAO members because of the incentive of rewards associated with them, making them as close to self organizing as we can imagine today. DAOs transcend national boundaries, and (typically) by existing parallel to existing legal structures, are able to minimize administration.
Now there are cases for which DAOs are suboptimal, or are much too unweildy to operate compared to more traditional organisations. Regardless, they’re interesting examples of trustless, borderless – and maybe limitless – systems for organizing some types of work. For the purposes of this post, the most notable thing about them is just how different they are organised from existing companies.
Whatever the organisations of the future look like, I think the tools they’ll use to collaborate will look very different from Facebook’s office-in-the-metaverse products. Those offices are 2019, and 2019 is decisively on the other side of the watershed.
