I've been thinking about the extreme of this - free-writing on paper. I do a great deal of "programming" on paper, sketching designs, making notes, asking mysel

I've been thinking about the extreme of this - free-writing on paper. I do a great deal of "programming" on paper, sketching designs, making notes, asking myself questions, making lists. The free-formness of it is critical to fast, intuitive thinking. Humans are naturally intuitive thinkers. Rigor must be trained. We see the struggle all the time, with unsophisticated computer users trapped in some nightmare of a form that they can't understand or use effectively. A lot of communication is lost that way, and a lot of time and mental health. Coming from the other end, I have the rigor of an experienced programmer, but also the mind of an artist. Music, photography, and other pursuits keep me deeply in touch with my intuition. Being able to think rigorously about intuition is pretty useful! Many years ago, I took jazz theory lessons. My teacher emphasized what he called four-way learning. I was to read the chords on paper, say their names out loud, watch/feel the shapes my fingers made on the piano, and listen to the sound the chord made. These overlapping inputs, he said, were vital to memorizing such complex material. And committing it to memory was the key to accessing it intuitively, on the fly - to creating complex things (in this case, music). To this day, it's why I prefer pen and paper as my first data capture for ideas. Even if I never look at that page again (and I usually don't), the physical sensation of writing it that way, the visualizations I can create, lend power to my ability to memorize and synthesize the ideas. So what does this have to do with tablet forms? Well, in many cases, the data we need to capture isn't rigorous or easily structured. Imagine a situation where, say, a doctor is trying to get a description of pain a patient feels. Imagine the patient can draw that pain, rather than translate to words. Wouldn't that be useful? But that's not really accessible, either with the physical limits of paper forms or the rigorous content and inputs of online forms. So yeah, I like this article. Made me think.