3 ms·

My favorite (paraphrased from audio) quote from presentation specific to principle of immediate feedback: "I can make these changes as I think of them. That is

by jonmc12 15y ago

My favorite (paraphrased from audio) quote from presentation specific to principle of immediate feedback: "I can make these changes as I think of them. That is so important to creative process. If there is any delay in that feedback loop between thinking about something and building on it, there is this whole world of ideas that will just never be. These are ideas that we can't think."

camtarn 15y ago
This principle is one of the best things about learning CSS with modern tools (Firebug, Web Inspector etc): if you wonder why something works, or how it could work given different values, you can just change the values live and see what happens. Firebug allows you to click in any value in CSS, and use up/down arrows to continuously vary it (for non-numeric properties, this scrolls through all possible values). This enables a style of self-guided learning involving forming a mental model of how particular bits of CSS work, playing with them until they break in expected ways (validating the model) or unexpected ways (prompting more experimentation or a visit to documentation, and subsequent improvement of the model). I can also attest to the fact that live web page prototyping is a fun way to impress non-coders/non-web-developers :) Comparing creative works built using a slow-feedback model versus a fast-feedback model is also interesting. With music, fast feedback would be playing an instrument directly; slow feedback would be putting together the output with a sequencer or drum machine, or writing it on paper to be played by an orchestra. The fascinating bit comes when you get sufficiently advanced practitioners of the art of slow feedback - for instance, composers who can hold an orchestral score in their head and imagine how it will sound, essentially having built a sufficiently advanced mental model that they gained a fast-feedback loop within their imagination. Does this suggest that for any given domain, even if there are obstacles in the way of fast feedback, that someone will eventually always be able to transcend the domain's limitations... or does it suggest that if we had better ways of communicating an entire orchestral score in realtime to an orchestra, that composers would generate even better works?

by jonmc12 15y ago

camtarn 15y ago

This principle is one of the best things about learning CSS with modern tools (Firebug, Web Inspector etc): if you wonder why something works, or how it could work given different values, you can just change the values live and see what happens. Firebug allows you to click in any value in CSS, and use up/down arrows to continuously vary it (for non-numeric properties, this scrolls through all possible values). This enables a style of self-guided learning involving forming a mental model of how particular bits of CSS work, playing with them until they break in expected ways (validating the model) or unexpected ways (prompting more experimentation or a visit to documentation, and subsequent improvement of the model). I can also attest to the fact that live web page prototyping is a fun way to impress non-coders/non-web-developers :) Comparing creative works built using a slow-feedback model versus a fast-feedback model is also interesting. With music, fast feedback would be playing an instrument directly; slow feedback would be putting together the output with a sequencer or drum machine, or writing it on paper to be played by an orchestra. The fascinating bit comes when you get sufficiently advanced practitioners of the art of slow feedback - for instance, composers who can hold an orchestral score in their head and imagine how it will sound, essentially having built a sufficiently advanced mental model that they gained a fast-feedback loop within their imagination. Does this suggest that for any given domain, even if there are obstacles in the way of fast feedback, that someone will eventually always be able to transcend the domain's limitations... or does it suggest that if we had better ways of communicating an entire orchestral score in realtime to an orchestra, that composers would generate even better works?