Do you read new periodicals as they come in, and when you don’t have time before a new one comes in, put them in a pile somewhere? Me too.
Occasionally I find myself reading something from years ago and not realizing it at all, as happened yesterday, when I got to the end of the April 2019 issue of Harper’s that was sitting on my kitchen table. That’s where this comes from, the very last line of that month’s Findings column:
People have better working memory if, in their native language, meanings remain, until the end of the sentence, unclear.
(For those unfamilar, Findings reduces complex papers and research to a single line, context free, for a bewildering comic effect.)
Why it’s interesting
When we shared this sentence with a colleague who’s a VUI designer, she balked. “Just reading it was driving me mad,” she said.
Why it matters
Just the other day, talking with a colleague, we discussed the state of so-called “multimodal” design for voice, and our cognitive load threshold. In terms of the pandemic, it made it easy to argue that critical elements in the design that might seem obvious can be missed entirely.
We had experienced this personally, not with voice experiences on devices with screens, but in everyday life. Losing track of time and not joining a meeting back-to-back with the current one. No longer seeing reminders for any app. Emailing not the next day, but the next week.
If you miss something entirely and don’t know it, there’s no recovery.
Personally, our style in both writing and cogitating is digressive, and we’re more than comfortable with collapsing many threads into one, like a braid, or a perhaps a bird’s nest. Perhaps it’s time to consider that might require more resources than can be easily spared right now.
Links
https://harpers.org/archive/2019/04/letters-april-2019/
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