Many years ago, I watched this video of Bret Victor’s talk—The human representation of a thought.
Bret’s talk makes us think about the evolution of thought, the scientific references, to the modern digital products. It makes us think about how we think, and there is no real lifecycle of a thought. In its journey, a thought ceases to be a thought if it inspires an action or a decision, or even to another thought.
I highly recommend that you watch the video before reading the post further.
A thought is often a unit of a performance.
While watching Bret’s video (see it here in their Vimeo), I recalled watching a few episodes of TV shows—the masterchef series, the country has got talent, or Indian Idol in India.
When a participants sings, their whole body sings. When a chef presents their best dish to the judges—the dish and the chef—both are a performance to that challenge. When an artist performs, the performance and the art frequent swap positions for which is higher.
When a magician makes a prediction about the card in a participant’s hands—that moment of thought is their performance.
Its journey from being a thought to the performance is a fine mix of structure, spontaneity, and judgment.
Structure—our practice in a specific skill or art helps us give the structure to the thought.
Spontaneity—our experience and our confidence bring the right spontaneity in our response system during this journey.
Judgment—Our belief system and our standards build our judgment, the conviction in our performance.
In most of our digital work whether while we are working on the API code, the metadata for search experience, or Figma designs, or the content models in a Miro board–—we are often caught in a thought, or wrangling the multitude of thoughts, and it becomes our performance.
PS: For deeper exploration of Bret’s work in readers’ behavior, see Explorable Explorations. One of our jobs is to enable users’ performance, or to prepare them to prepare for a performance.
