I love ideas, and that’s why I care so much about software.

For a bit of background: I had originally written this as a section of my WWDC 2012 student scholarship application. I’d recently looked back over it, and thought it would be interesting to post. Quick point: I’m not totally sure if I’m right here. That’ll be the case with just about everything I put up. You very likely have more experience than me, and I want to hear how that applies. I’m @orbuch on Twitter, and I want to hear where I’m wrong. What better way to learn?

[After re reading through this and making some small edits: It’s really broad and essence-focused—I gave pretty much no specific examples in this section, but I think it has some conceptual value. Perhaps?]

“We believe technology is at it’s very best when its invisible--when you’re conscious of only what you are doing, not the device you are doing it with.” Sound familiar? It’s the beginning of the promotional video for the New iPad. That quote is one way to frame this elusive idea surrounding software, one that I truly believe in. I have another way to think about it, a concept that helps to guide me as I approach creative software design. Nearly all software, at a core level, is intended to allow the user to express ideas. Well, yeah, obviously. But rather than use a word like “express,” I see it as that ideas “move.” People have ideas in their heads all the time, that’s the easy part. We have those ideas in our heads whether we want to or not. The critical piece is how these ideas leave someone’s head. Inside someone’s head, ideas are two things: They are undiluted, they have not been tweaked to account for anything--no physical restrictions, no monetary restrictions, nothing. Ideas that stay exclusively in this form are fun but useless. You can think about them, but that’s it. No one else can see them the way you can, and you cannot yet decide to move towards the creation of your idea. At this point, you have one choice if you think the idea is worth pursuing. You put your idea on a “vehicle” and move it out of your mind. By doing so, you proactively turn it into something physical that can be shown to other people.

I mentioned a “vehicle” before. As I think of it, a vehicle is anything that actually moves this idea, whatever you decide to use as the mechanism to release the idea. (Though important, I’m not considering here a verbal vehicle, speech. I’m discussing ideas that need to be drawn, and to a greater extent, demonstrated). The important thing here is that the good part of having an idea exclusively in your own head is that it isn’t limited by any physical restrictions. Once you put your idea on a vehicle to make it a physical idea, you choose to accept some limitations on the idea. What you have the most control over is what vehicle on or through which you decide to place your idea. Specific vehicles can hold specific parts of an idea, while other parts are completely lost. When a part of your idea is lost while moving the idea out of your mind, it’s totally gone. If that part is not included in the representation of the idea you show someone else, you can’t “bring it back”--it was something lost due to the limitation of the vehicle you decided to use. What would be an example of something a vehicle couldn’t move, a piece of an idea that would be lost? Well, cave paintings aren't three-dimensional. You can’t dynamically show cause and effect with a pen and paper. There is no interactivity in anything I’ve discussed so far, and I assure you cause and effect, dynamic systems, interactivity, and even beauty, none of that can be expressed truly with any of these vehicles! These hugely important pieces, these genuine ideas are pretty much lost, simply due to limitations the best vehicle that was around to express them.

How does this apply to now? We aren’t painting our ideas on cave walls. What vehicle are a huge number, a huge variety of people using now? Some form of technology...a piece of software. It’s the best vehicle there is. Who dictates the terms of this vehicle, sets the limits on what it can and cannot hold? Who determines what pieces of people’s ideas will come through, what pieces will be lost? Those who make the vehicle. Those who make software. Us.