Quotes from Stephen Anderson

When everyone zigs, zag

This is the invisible lesson that so many people miss about design thinking exercises. It's not about any particular model or way of sorting things, it's about shifting fluidly between many models and, in doing so, seeing information in a different way. This is what leads to insights and understanding.

Categories are how we make sense of the world and communicate our ideas to others. But we are such categorization machines that we often see categories where none exist. That warps our view of the world and our decision-making suffers.

The goal then is not to abandon categorical thinking—we can't really shift our thinking in this way any more than we can choose to process information like computers (it's not really possible). Instead, we need to learn to recognize when a classification is neither useful nor valid, that's the challenge.

Nearly) all thinking is associative. While it's easy to spot the obvious metaphorical associations ("iceberg"), associations go all the way down to conceptual ideas (up is good) to more fundamental associations that began perhaps in the womb with spatial orientation.

Associations vary in explicitness from concepts highly embedded in our thought processes (simple aesthetic associations) to overt analogies and visual metaphors.

By reframing and redefining what the information space is, we unlock new possibilities

We favor associations that are familiar. We have a bias for new knowledge that readily maps to existing knowledge; things that fit with our expectations and biases don't challenge us to accommodate new information.

The human mind ... operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.

Interaction works as a kind of glue for understanding. It takes all the pieces of an understanding problem—representations in the world, the tools we work with, the space around us, and the computations in our head—and weaves them together.

Sometimes, a different way of representing information is the key to understanding something as complicated as the subatomic world.

Information is cheap; understanding is expensive.

Interaction modifies the world and this, in turn, modifies us and our understanding of the world.

while many of the absolutes we cling to are social constructs (varying across cultures and over time), behind these changing constructs we also find some universal human constants.

The parity principles show how our tools, especially well-designed tools, can profoundly enhance our capabilities to understand. If we define the mind as the brain, we must also admit to its limitations. There is much we cannot remember or learn or analyze or make sense of, until we extend the mind outward. This is why we make tools and technologies, not for their own sake, but to overcome the inherent limitations of our innate cognitive capabilities. This is the work of design.

When we extend information into our immediate surroundings, the space around us becomes a structure for holding information, which, in turn, reduces the individual cost of understanding. By using space in an intelligent way, we extend our cognitive abilities.

Associations among concepts is thinking.