Strongly Emergent Systems is Brighid: coder, writer, designer; native to San Francisco, living in Seattle.

What I care about: connecting computers, humans, and narrative.

Narrative is one of the basic mental tools that humans use to make sense of the world. Computers give us tons of data about the world and new ways to organize that data. We need narratives to make the best use of the data that computers give us access to. The limit to the usefulness of computers isn’t CPU power, disk space, or bandwidth: it’s narrative. Computers are only as useful as the narratives that let us understand and make use of the data that they give us. Better computers can give us better data, but they cannot by themselves increase our understanding. For that, we need narrative.

We create systems that give and teach users good narratives. Only IT people and developers want to actually use a computer. Everyone else wants to accomplish a task that they happen to need a computer for. Good narratives ensure that users direct their whole mental effort to tasks they care about instead of having to worry about their tools. This is why so many of the computers that make our lives easier aren’t seen as computers - they have become invisible, which is what good technology should do.