Everyone seems to want user interface but they are not sure whether they should order it by the yard or by the ton.

Originally in Persian: When my uncle Shahab died, my father told me sitting on the stairs It's alright, we are fine, I lost my brother when I was 15 and I survived, you'll be fine too.

I think of life as taking a train. We each have our own destinations, each one of us get into the train at one station, and leave at another, life is like that, all we can do is enjoy the moments we have in parts of our journeys that we share together.

McLuhan's claim that the printing press was the dominant force that transformed the hermeneutic Middle Ages into our scientific society should not be taken too lightly---especially because the main point is that the press didn't do it just by making books more available, it did it by changing the thought patterns of those who learned to read.

Though much of what McLuhan wrote was obscure and arguable, the sum total to me was a shock that reverberates even now. The computer is a medium! I had always thought of it as a tool, perhaps a vehicle---a much weaker conception. What McLuhan was saying is that if the personal computer is a truly new medium then the very use of it would actually change the thought patterns of an entire civilization.

One of the implications of the Piaget-Bruner decomposition is that the mentalities originated at very different evolutionary mit es and there is little probability that they can intercommunicate and synergies in more than the most rudimentary fashion. In fact, the mentalities are more likely to interfere with each other as they compete for control. The study by Hadamard on math and science creativity and others on music and the arts indicate strongly that creativity in these ears is not at all linked to the symbolic mentality as (most theories of teaching suppose), but that the important work in creative areas is done in the initial two mentalities---most in the iconic (or figurative) and quite a bit in the enactive.

The work of Papert convinced me that whatever user interface design might be, it was solidly intertwined with learning. Bruner convinced me that learning takes place best environmentally and roughly in stage order--- it is best to learn something kinesthetically, then iconically, and finally the intuitive knowledge will be in place that wil allow the more powerful but less vivid symbolic processes to work at their strongest.

If we agree with the evidence that the human cognitive facilities are made up of a doing mentality, an image mentality, and a symbolic mentality, then any user interface we construct should at least cater to the mechanisms that seem to be there. But how? One approach is to realize that no single mentality offers a complete answer to the entire range of thinking and problem solving. User interface design should integrate them at least as wel as Bruner did in his spiral curriculum ideas.

The ability to "read" a medium means you can access materials and tools created by others. The ability to "write" in a medium means you can generate materials and tools for others. You must have both to be literate. In print writing, the tools you generate are rhetorical; they demonstrate and convince. In computer writing, the tools you generate are processes; they simulate and decide.

In the water-pouring experiment, after the child asserted there was mere water in the tal thin glass, Jerome Bruner covered it up with a card and asked again. This time the child said, "There must bethe same because where would the water go?" When Bruner took away the card to again reveal the tal thin glass, the child immediately changed back to saying there was more water.

When the cardboard was again interposed the child changed yet again. It was as though one set of processes was doing the reasoning when the child could see the situation, and another set was employed when the child could not see. Bruner's interpretation of experiments like these is one of the most important foundations for human-related design. Our mentalium seems to be made up of multiple separate mentalities with very different characteristics. They reason differently, have different skills, and often are in conflict.

Bruner identified a separate mentality with each of Piaget's stages: He called them enactive, iconic, symbolic. While not ignoring the existence of other mentalities, he concentrated on these three to come up with what are still some of the strongest ideas for creating learning-rich environments.

I read McLuhan's Understanding Media and understood that the most important thing about any communications medium is that message receipt is really message recovery; anyone who wishes to receive a message embedded in a medium must first have internalized the medium so it can be "subtracted" out ot leave the message behind. When he said "the medium is the message" he meant that you have to become the medium if you use it.