GRAVITY TWELVE -- Sunday, September 27, 1992

Intuition isn't a lot of semi-mystical hype. It's an important means of
discovery, well known in detective movies: the gut hunch.

Looking back through my design books, I see several lists of terms that have since been discarded: feature, slot, link, reference, push, pop, stack, number, process, kernel, stream, value, script, form, version.

Many many times over the years, I've thought I had it down. I thought I finally got Gravity under wraps and could publish it to the world.

Then I'd get a gut hunch that things could be simpler. My brain would say, "But of course you need a stack." My heart would tell me, "Chuck it out."

So I'd take a step back and try to design the impossible. David Thornburg in his book Zero Mass Design tells us that we should start our designs so simple that they won't work. Start with the impossible.

It's a wise idea. You throw out your preconceived notions and must then concentrate only on essentials. You're forced to follow your instincts.

One result of this design ideal is the four aspects of information: text,
image, sound, and system. I call them aspects, rather than types, because they're not really distinct, or shouldn't be. Words spoken are sound and text. Words read are text and image. Words arranged (as with hypertext) are system and text. Movies combine all aspects: text, image, sound, system.

For purposes of this discussion, I'll define exactly what I mean by each:

     Text is a one-dimensional sequence of symbols.
     Image is a two-dimensional arrangement of colors.
     Sound is a three-dimensional arrangement of frequencies and amplitudes.
     System is a four-dimensional collection of names.

It started as a hunch that the dimension of an aspect defines it.
My brain kept saying, "Add this. Add this." I didn't.

Tomorrow: text.