Bradford

The Interventionists: Chapter 4

Summary:

Bradford uses direct examples to explain how his mind works when asked to design a new project. The biggest and most important aspect of design: to really, really understand what it is you are designed past what someone is asking you to understand.

Key points:

• Camden: built a giant blocky model of the city instead of a book so that narrator could walk through, life things, move things, etc.
• Calories: conventions that obscure it’s simplest principle; all calories are not the same and counting whole calories means much less than counting calorie parts
• Plate Tectonics: asked to diagram a book about the subject; a young science with constantly changing discoveries, Bradford had to truly understand the subject matter to be able to design it
• Keynotes: because Cliff Notes was too dense; summing books up into diagrams
• Curriculum Dictionary: re-writing school dictionaries; separating the different meanings of words into groups of similar-senses
• The New Book of Knowledge: job of encyclopedia is to explain, how can we do that best?
• Cosmic comics: linking ideas without words and rather with ideas shown as pictures of symbols

Critical questions:

Analyze his discussion of Keynotes. How does all of this relate to so many of the criticisms of modern information?