In a roundabout way, because of dolls’ houses, I’ve been thinking about special modes in software to let you learn by playing and teach by showing.
The 17th century dolls’ houses are found in the Riksmuseum in Amsterdam just around the corner from the Vermeers and the Rembrandts (including his Night Watch, freshly extended by 2 feet using AI).
Here they are: They’re beautiful. I stay so long to look whenever I’ve been. They’re models of real houses, and not toys; they were a hobby, the equivalent for women of the collection cabinets kept by men.
One particular dolls’ house, collected by Petronella Oortman, has furniture made using the same materials as the regular sized versions: Her dolls’ house cost as much as an actual house on a canal!
So these are objects of art, meant to convey taste and wealth.
I heard somewhere (I can’t remember where) that the models were meant to be closed up and carried with you when you travelled. An effective way to show off your domestic style to your friends in the days before photographs.
A dollhouse nowadays is often a toy. Often exquisite, yes, but primarily a canvas for the imagination, mostly for kids, a place for fantasies and stories and play. The dollhouse-as-art still exists, but it’s not what I think of first.
There is a third type of dollhouse, historically, as this article in The Atlantic says: simulation.
Beginning in the 17th century, “Nuremberg kitchens” might contain a hearth, cooking pots, a straw broom. These all-metal houses were designed without ornament, for purely utilitarian purposes. Used as teaching tools for girls, Nuremberg kitchens allowed mothers to show daughters how to set up and control a house. All about learning rules, a Nuremberg kitchen was the opposite of a dollhouse as a dream world of fantasy. It was a place where girls learned to manage not only the objects of the house but also its servants, where girls would learn to become the lady of the house.
Homes are complex organisms! I can imagine seeing the flows of goods into the kitchen, where the butler sleeps, what happens below stairs when you ring the service bell; how the clockwork hangs together.
What a wonder to have a demo version to play with before running your own for real.
The original SimCity game (1989) hit these same three notes:
Score. A place to create detailed cities to show your skill.
Storytelling. A backdrop for fantasy and play – what else was the “monster” option in the Disaster menu for? (And of course The Sims later went hard on this.)
Simulation. A sandbox for learning about complex systems – I vaguely remember that the game was used by people in local government to get a grounding in the intricacies of urban planning.
ASIDE: TWO LINKS:
You can play a port of the original SimCity in the browser. It’s super low-fi but no less addictive for that. Here: MicropolisJS.
It’s possible to max out your score. SimCity 3000 (1999) was beaten with a totalitarian hellscape called Magnasanti. It’s quite the effort: The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City (Vice, 2010).
Imagine if Twitter had a simulation mode.
Social media is already a place to socialise and tell stories. The sites are mere backdrops.
MySpace showed that these social spaces should also allow for customisation, construction, and skill. It’s a crying shame that Twitter and Facebook don’t do likewise. I would love to decorate my profile with images, FAQs, links to my favourite communities and so on (others would share music and creations). This is a common lament when you get a bunch of old school social software nerds together.
But training?
What would a “Nuremberg kitchen” version of Twitter look like?
What if every social network also had a single-player “learn how this works” mode. All the accounts would be deepfakes with machine-made faces, all the posts procedurally generated. When you posted, you would get realistic responses. It could teach you, by use and example, how to identify fake news or pile-ons or toxic content. You could experiment yourself in a safe sandbox where everything is thrown away at the end of the session and invisible to the outside world.
By letting you act out and take things to extremes, would you develop a better intuition about what’s worth taking seriously on Twitter… and what’s not?
Back when I was building Job Garden(which is sadly no longer), one of the first features I built was DEMO MODE.
Here’s the write-up: All products should have a demo mode (Week 9).
It was an admin-only feature in the top nav that let me quickly construct job boards and navigate them in different ways. I found it invaluable to
quickly give anybody I was talking to an interactive, guided tour of the site. Because it functioned just like the real site, I could take whatever route I wanted around it, adjusted my narrative to the flow of the conversation. But because it was in a sandbox, I could delete and edit to customise without fear.
on my own, experiment with how the site looked in different scenarios, rapidly assembling a job board and seeing how it felt with live data.
My favourite Demo Mode feature was “share.” It worked like this:
If at any point in the demo I created a configuration that the person I was talking to liked the look of, I could hit the Share button and it would generate a code I could email to them, or even write down on a bit of paper. Using that code would lead them through the account setup process and then transfer the configuration they had seen into their new account. It was the most effective onboarding technique I found.
I’d like a button on Google Sheets that put my work into a mode where I could experiment wildly and without fear that any of my saves might be overwritten.
I’d like a button, when I get a new hire car, that lets me play with the steering wheel and all the buttons and sticks, and lets me get a feel of the weight of the pedals and the heft of the gears, but without it ever moving anywhere.
I’d like an iPhone mode where I can show somebody how to change settings and sort photos and send messages, and let them play around with all the switches to see what they do, reassured that when the mode closes, no changes will be retained, and nothing actually sent.
I’d like a model of my home to try out solar on the roof, or Airbnb over the summer, or a different kind of budget. A house is a machine for living in and I’d like to better learn the levers.
So I wonder about single-player sandboxes, simulations, demo modes, and teaching tools. They all feel of a kind.
And they all feel like something that dolls’ houses got right and modern technology, so far, has not.
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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In a roundabout way, because of dolls’ houses, I’ve been thinking about special modes in software to let you learn by playing and teach by showing.
The 17th century dolls’ houses are found in the Riksmuseum in Amsterdam just around the corner from the Vermeers and the Rembrandts (including his Night Watch, freshly extended by 2 feet using AI).
Here they are: They’re beautiful. I stay so long to look whenever I’ve been. They’re models of real houses, and
One particular dolls’ house, collected by Petronella Oortman, has furniture made using the same materials as the regular sized versions:
So these are objects of art, meant to convey taste and wealth.
I heard somewhere (I can’t remember where) that the models were meant to be closed up and carried with you when you travelled. An effective way to show off your domestic style to your friends in the days before photographs.
A dollhouse nowadays is often a toy. Often exquisite, yes, but primarily a canvas for the imagination, mostly for kids, a place for fantasies and stories and play. The dollhouse-as-art still exists, but it’s not what I think of first.
There is a third type of dollhouse, historically, as this article in The Atlantic says: simulation.
Homes are complex organisms! I can imagine seeing the flows of goods into the kitchen, where the butler sleeps, what happens below stairs when you ring the service bell; how the clockwork hangs together.
What a wonder to have a demo version to play with before running your own for real.
The original SimCity game (1989) hit these same three notes:
ASIDE: TWO LINKS:
Imagine if Twitter had a simulation mode.
Social media is already a place to socialise and tell stories. The sites are mere backdrops.
MySpace showed that these social spaces should also allow for customisation, construction, and skill. It’s a crying shame that Twitter and Facebook don’t do likewise. I would love to decorate my profile with images, FAQs, links to my favourite communities and so on (others would share music and creations). This is a common lament when you get a bunch of old school social software nerds together.
But training?
What would a “Nuremberg kitchen” version of Twitter look like?
What if every social network also had a single-player “learn how this works” mode. All the accounts would be deepfakes with machine-made faces, all the posts procedurally generated. When you posted, you would get realistic responses. It could teach you, by use and example, how to identify fake news or pile-ons or toxic content. You could experiment yourself in a safe sandbox where everything is thrown away at the end of the session and invisible to the outside world.
By letting you act out and take things to extremes, would you develop a better intuition about what’s worth taking seriously on Twitter… and what’s not?
Back when I was building Job Garden (which is sadly no longer), one of the first features I built was DEMO MODE.
Here’s the write-up: All products should have a demo mode (Week 9).
It was an admin-only feature in the top nav that let me quickly construct job boards and navigate them in different ways. I found it invaluable to
My favourite Demo Mode feature was “share.” It worked like this:
If at any point in the demo I created a configuration that the person I was talking to liked the look of, I could hit the Share button and it would generate a code I could email to them, or even write down on a bit of paper. Using that code would lead them through the account setup process and then transfer the configuration they had seen into their new account. It was the most effective onboarding technique I found.
I’d like a button on Google Sheets that put my work into a mode where I could experiment wildly and without fear that any of my saves might be overwritten.
I’d like a button, when I get a new hire car, that lets me play with the steering wheel and all the buttons and sticks, and lets me get a feel of the weight of the pedals and the heft of the gears, but without it ever moving anywhere.
I’d like an iPhone mode where I can show somebody how to change settings and sort photos and send messages, and let them play around with all the switches to see what they do, reassured that when the mode closes, no changes will be retained, and nothing actually sent.
I’d like a model of my home to try out solar on the roof, or Airbnb over the summer, or a different kind of budget. A house is a machine for living in and I’d like to better learn the levers.
So I wonder about single-player sandboxes, simulations, demo modes, and teaching tools. They all feel of a kind.
And they all feel like something that dolls’ houses got right and modern technology, so far, has not.