Minimize conceptual load:
The best way to minimize conceptual load is to design a simple set of commands and operations that gives good coverage in the problem domain. Then, instead of adding a lot of bells and whistles to cover special cases, just stop. The challenge is to find simple sets of commands with good coverage and power. Most of the conceptual complexity of many systems is created by nonessential commands and operations that could be integrated into the rest or just eliminated. Consider allowing the bounds to be set by the choice of a (powerful) external myth. We suggest building systems that have direct commands with 80 percent of the basic actions, and leaving it at that. Of course, completeness requires that the remaining 20 percent of functions, if really required by the application, be achievable through simple combinations of the basic operations.
States in conceptual models:
There are two requirements with respect to states: that they be few in number, and highly visible to the user. States must be minimized because they are a source of complexity in the user interface, and thus in the conceptual model. The more states there are, the more situations the user has to recognize and learn to use. The user's conceptual model needs to contain information about what defines a state, what changes it, and what remains constant from one state to the next. States must be visible by inspection to keep the user informed about what's going on. The visible indication of state can be spatial as well as verbal. It is easy for people to recognize configurations on the screen or in lights without much conscious attention.
If users don't recognize it for what it represents, it might as well not ...
Couple notes from the chapter on conceptual models:
A system is the designer's way of communicating an idea to the user.
To allow the user to create the intended conceptual model, the designer must construct an effective external myth.
Consistency of myth, then, is the foundation of a clear conceptual model.
Users must be able to develop a set of expectations that are met by the system, even in new situations. In other words, the system must behave predictably.
People have a much harder time dealing with variable response times than with slower but predictable responses. Variability in response times results in many unfulfilled expectations, and thus frustration.
"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, they clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it."
With the proliferation of means of movement and communication, and with the lure of always being elsewhere, we are continuously torn from the here and now. Hop on an intercity or commuter train, pick up a telephone – in order to be already gone. Such mobility only ever means uprootedness, isolation, exile. It would be insufferable if it weren’t always the mobility of a private space, of a portable interior. The private bubble doesn’t burst, it floats around. The process of cocooning is not going away, it is merely being put into motion. From a train station, to an office park, to a commercial bank, from one hotel to another, there is everywhere a foreignness, a feeling so banal and so habitual it becomes the last form of familiarity. Metropolitan excess is this capricious mixing of definite moods, indefinitely recombined. The city centers of the metropolis are not clones ...
Paine begins his article, Of the Term 'Liberty of the Press,' with a quote by Thomas Jefferson concerning English Newspapers:
"...the licentiousness of the press produces the same effect as the restraint of the press was intended to do. The restraint of the press was to prevent things being told, and the licentiousness of the press prevents things being believed when they are told."
Paine then relates this to American government run federal papers:
We have in this state an evidence of the truth of this remark. The number of federal papers in the city and state of New-York are more than five to one to the number of republican papers, yet the majority of the elections go always against the federal papers, which is demonstrative evidence that the licentiousness of those papers are destitute of credit.
It takes almost as much creativity to understand a good idea, as to have it in my first place. — Alan Kay
With regards to the Parthenon:
There has been nothing like it anywhere or at any period. It happened at a moment when things were at their keenest, when a man, stirred by the noblest thoughts, crystallized them in a plastic work of light and shade. The moulding of the Parthenon are infallible and implacable. In severity they go far beyond our practice, or man's normal capabilities. Here, the purest witness to the physiology of sensation, and to the mathematical speculation attached to it, is fixed and determined: we are riveted by our senses; we are ravished in our minds; we touch the axis of harmony. No question of religious dogma enters in; no symbolical description, no naturalistic representation; there is nothing but pure forms in precise relationships.
Pure forms in precise relationships. Something worth striving for.
The lesson of Rome is for wise men, for those who know and can appreciate, who can resist and can verify. Rome is the damnation of the half-educated. To send architectural students to Rome is to cripple them for life. The Grand Prix de Rome and the Villa Medici are the cancer of French architecture.
Intelligence and passion; there is no art without emotion, no emotion without passion. Stones are dead things sleeping in the quarries but the apses of St. Peter's are a drama. Drama lies all round the key achievements of humanity. The drama of Architecture is the same as that of the man who lives by and through the universe. The Parthenon is moving; the Egyptian Pyramids, of granite once polished and shining like steel, were moving. To give forth emancipations, storm, gentle breezes on plain and sea, to raise mighty Alps with the pebbles that go to form the walls of men's houses, this is to succeed in a symphony of relationships.