When to show the OS

The messaging is always the same…

“Anything is possible.”

“It’s as easy as saying, Alexa, find me a job.”

“Connecting your world with the touch of a button.”

While consumer brands have used the “easy as 1, 2, 3” angle for decades, tech platforms in the last 15 years have extended that to nearly every aspect of daily life.

Their work has largely become about hiding the operating system, masking the actual work it takes to create and interact with both the physical and digital world - this is the mantra of tech giants like Apple, Facebook, and Google, and by extension the startups that dream of becoming them.

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On why belief matters, and how information is coded into experience

Every day I go for a walk and pick up trash.

Although there a lot of reasons for it, the two main ones are:

  1. It needs to be done — (a matter of faith / belief)
  2. There is information coded into the experience that I can’t otherwise get to

That first reason is quite simple to break down: I don’t believe that there should be trash on the streets. 

The second is a bit more complicated, and reaches into a bunch of things— like human centered design / experience design, empathy, entrepreneurship, and how we build ecosystems from an individual up to global level. 

There is an important relationship between the two, and it’s a relationship that’s largely about action, about testing what we believe and what we are most suited to work on in the world. 

In the startup ecosystem this is expressed via investors saying things like “we want founders who are obsessed with solving problems” or founders saying “I won’t rest until I’ve understood and solved this problem for my target customer / market.”

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