visions of johanna

Every Index Card tells a Story, don’t it: the Atoms of Mann (part-2/2)

(sung to the tune of Every Picture Tells a Story)1

Link to Part 1/2

Episode 362 is the latest installment of Back to Work3 and has the sweet title, Writing on the Wind.4 It is about a Merlin Mann idea, the time/attention graph, whose units of resolution are measured according to focal length. Episode 36 is also about Index Cards, –the unlikely thread connecting Mann to design methodology and enabling focus.

The entry in the book of knowledge5 for User Story6 actually specifies that “user stories, they are written down on a note card(s) (e.g. 3x5 inches or 8x13 cm)…”.

Observation: The insistence on Index Cards seems like a rather dictatorial formulation for a process that professes to remain ” open to interpretation”, but I am hardly qualified to support this claim.

An Index Card is the instantiation of a mass produced commodity consisting of: semi-rigid paper that is 3 inches high by 5 inches long and printed on one side with a single red line at the top, followed by 10 blue lines continuing to its bottom. Apparently, the card’s quality is discernible by the paper’s smoothness, which in turn effects the ink. Any one Index Card can be transformed into a singular, unique entity when inscribed with a symbol or combination of symbols using either pen, printer, pencil or crayon.

Index Cards are modular entities, thus enabling them to be arranged in groups by creating uniform piles that can be organized according to pre-defined or emergent themes. Note Cards also have an atomic quality that permits any one group member to mutate by “pull(ing) (a card) out (of one pile) and toss(ing) it in another (pile)”, as the technically inclined Dan Benjamin correctly points out.

I’m getting to the point…

There remains a fatal paradox in the Index/Stories/User/Cards nexus that neither a story or an index card can resolve:

But, a Project, whether it’s software, a building, a song or a gadget, is not just the sum of its parts. While perhaps framed by these stories, a Project is only discernible through its essence, whose perception can be expressed through the ineffable qualities that it elicits: –its meaning, an atmosphere, a sensation or emotion, or even that which can be accomplished by using this tool-thing…7

But how does one actually use Index Cards as a project tool? I imagine them turning into semi-transparent leaves, each leaf containing an atom, an idea. By superposing one semi-transparent leaf on top of another, ideas are compounded and mixed to form idea-aggregates: the combination of idea-atoms that compose project fragments. These combinations are based on contextual, temporal or intuitive logic, giving each fragment an ephemeral quality, something (an idea, an image…) that must be seized before it is replaced by another combination. Thus, a project is generated from a sequence 8 of fragments whose perception composes its essential, ineffable quality. Like writing on the wind…

Re-epi(b)logue

Thanks to Daring Fireball I became acquainted with The Amazing Type-Writer.9 while finishing this post. This app resonates with the content of this post…