The Medium And Its Properties

EdwardJohnston's work to rediscover the techniques of formal penmanship relied in great part on a deep understanding of the properties of the materials, the media, used: that understanding was arrived at through a long series of experiments. It's been observed on JazzProgrammer that good musicianship involves a direct involvement with the medium, and some would suggest that ExtremeProgramming says the same about software development.

But, given the example of the deaf Beethoven, it may not always be clear what the medium is that is to be understood and engaged with. If software development does require this sort of direct involvement with "the medium", just what is that medium?

I've dabbled, perhaps too much, in a number of different media, so here's my theory on it:

: The feedback you get from any given medium offers you insight into one fragment of truth. Each fragment is valid, but incomplete. So try to balance depth with breadth; learn a few media, but not so many that you gain nothing.

Each medium - fiction, computer code, electrical engineering, adobe huts - has its own properties, and to be truly effective, you have to listen to the medium. You can't go barging in with your preconceptions of the properties of adobe or capacitors; somehow, you have to learn those properties, and you have to constantly hone your understanding of those properties as you continue.

For programmers here on WardsWiki, this might be most familiar in the concept of the CodeSmell: The code has a form that it wants, and it gives you feedback. But this notion is not unique to software. When I studied art in college, a number of my professors - in different media - talked about the dangers of preconception. Don't just have a rigid idea and do it. Listen to the work as you create it.

However, each medium has its own properties. Someone who works in avant-garde dance receives feedback from the work that may completely different from the feedback you get when you're a chemical engineer.

In art school, it found it striking how different types of artists had, in general, notable personality differences. For example, I noted a difference between ceramicists and printmakers. From what I can tell, clay is a medium that requires a sense of instinct and gentleness - if you push clay too hard, it will simply fall apart - while prints involve precision and calculation. And the printmakers really did seem more cerebral and calculating than the ceramicists.

Of course, you can say that predisposition falls into it: Certain types of people are likely to find ceramics more enjoyable than printmaking or vice versa. But perhaps the causality also works in the other direction. What are the printmakers learning from their prints? What are the ceramicists learning from their clay?

In a spiritual sense, I think work is important because it offers a set of broader lessons about life and reality. If you tuned your heart so you could listen to clay, what else could you listen to? If you sharpened your attention so you could work with prints, what else could you sharpen?

Of course, you learn different things from different media. These lessons are different, but not at all mutually exclusive. It's simply our way of grappling with the enormity of truth. We break truth up into focused, fragmented bits, because trying to learn it all at once is too monumental a task.

Maybe this is all an elaborate justification, though; I've recently decided that it's okay that I'm interested in a million different media. There are pragmatic constraints, of course, but I feel less nervous about it now that I've decided to pay a lot of attention to the sense of balance I get from what I'm doing.

For example, I'm coming to the conclusion that right now I'm working too much in media that are private and premeditated: Prose writing, software, a little electronic music. Perhaps I would learn more if I tried to do something that's public, and forces me to pay more attention to the moment? Maybe I should get back into performing music? Or maybe taking a dance class would be enough?

-- FrancisHwang