Joseph Cohen: Founder & CEO of Universe
Metadata
Highlights
- I think that technology wants a thing, and I think that’s really a reflection of what do humans want? What do humans want? We want to be able to manifest our ideas. We want to be able to explore and live our fullest lives, and have meaningful experiences with the people that we love. That’s what humans want. We want to have agency and control over our minds, over our ideas, over our lives, over the world, over our corner of the world. So over time, technology will do that. At the end of the day, we, humans create this stuff. It’s a reflection of us. (View Highlight)
- “I think the closest thing to [toolmaking that we have] in other fields outside of computing and technology is urban planning. In urban planning, you’re not designing the finished thing. You’re designing a thing that lets other people fill in the blanks.”
At some point, they were like, “Okay, this is the capital of the new world. We need to think ahead, we need to come up with a plan.” What they did was they laid out a grid on the city, and it was a pretty regular grid, but it had a few interesting nuances to it. One was that bifurcating the grid was Broadway, which cuts on a diagonal, so it intersects with the grid at different points, creating these really interesting parks. So like, Union Square and Madison Square Park, these are these chaos moments in the grid.
You also have Central Park, which took prime real estate and said no, no one owns, and also there are parameters. So for example, no one building can span more than one square block. So you could do anything you want in that square block, but you cannot exceed that block. You can make the ugliest building in the world, but it can only be one block large, and that would mean you need to put together all the parcels on that block. Then they did realize that this grid was not just two-dimensional, it was three-dimensional.
So people were going to build up, and if people built up, if everyone just filled the maximum space, you’d end up in a city that had no light on the ground. They said, “Okay, actually there’s an envelope that you need to adhere to in height.” So that’s why the Empire State Building, for example, tapers as it goes to the top, because that fits the envelope that the city laid out in the 1900s.
So, I just think that’s an example of really good city design, because it’s laying boundaries and constraints, but it’s not filling in every detail. I think an example of inhospitable or inhuman or inorganic city design is, and designers love these people and love the aesthetics of these cities, but they’re not actually good, so the Corbusier vision of a city was you’d have these elevated roadways and you’d never need to leave your complex. They were centrally planned, modernist utopias that didn’t allow for any individual expression. The designer knew everything, but the reality is that’s a cold world that no one wants to actually live in. It has no personality. Brasilia was the manifestation of that idea, and it’s an amazingly beautiful city in photographs.
You look at Oscar Niemeyer’s designs and these incredible structures and all this stuff, but it’s just not a place you want to be. It doesn’t have life. It doesn’t have that organic-ness. So I think when you’re designing systems for creation, when you’re designing tools, you’re really playing the role of constraint designer and you want to design really good constraints, and then let people do whatever comes to their mind. So, that’s how I think about it. By the way, programming language designers do that. That’s what they’re doing. (View Highlight)
- So my advice would be intimately familiar with the state of the art of technology, but then go mine the world and go into the weirdest places, the most untrodden places, and figure out how you can put those pieces together to make something unique. They just make a lot of work. (View Highlight)
Joseph Cohen: Founder & CEO of Universe
Metadata
Highlights
- I think that technology wants a thing, and I think that’s really a reflection of what do humans want? What do humans want? We want to be able to manifest our ideas. We want to be able to explore and live our fullest lives, and have meaningful experiences with the people that we love. That’s what humans want. We want to have agency and control over our minds, over our ideas, over our lives, over the world, over our corner of the world. So over time, technology will do that. At the end of the day, we, humans create this stuff. It’s a reflection of us. (View Highlight)
- “I think the closest thing to [toolmaking that we have] in other fields outside of computing and technology is urban planning. In urban planning, you’re not designing the finished thing. You’re designing a thing that lets other people fill in the blanks.”
At some point, they were like, “Okay, this is the capital of the new world. We need to think ahead, we need to come up with a plan.” What they did was they laid out a grid on the city, and it was a pretty regular grid, but it had a few interesting nuances to it. One was that bifurcating the grid was Broadway, which cuts on a diagonal, so it intersects with the grid at different points, creating these really interesting parks. So like, Union Square and Madison Square Park, these are these chaos moments in the grid.
You also have Central Park, which took prime real estate and said no, no one owns, and also there are parameters. So for example, no one building can span more than one square block. So you could do anything you want in that square block, but you cannot exceed that block. You can make the ugliest building in the world, but it can only be one block large, and that would mean you need to put together all the parcels on that block. Then they did realize that this grid was not just two-dimensional, it was three-dimensional.
So people were going to build up, and if people built up, if everyone just filled the maximum space, you’d end up in a city that had no light on the ground. They said, “Okay, actually there’s an envelope that you need to adhere to in height.” So that’s why the Empire State Building, for example, tapers as it goes to the top, because that fits the envelope that the city laid out in the 1900s.
So, I just think that’s an example of really good city design, because it’s laying boundaries and constraints, but it’s not filling in every detail. I think an example of inhospitable or inhuman or inorganic city design is, and designers love these people and love the aesthetics of these cities, but they’re not actually good, so the Corbusier vision of a city was you’d have these elevated roadways and you’d never need to leave your complex. They were centrally planned, modernist utopias that didn’t allow for any individual expression. The designer knew everything, but the reality is that’s a cold world that no one wants to actually live in. It has no personality. Brasilia was the manifestation of that idea, and it’s an amazingly beautiful city in photographs.
You look at Oscar Niemeyer’s designs and these incredible structures and all this stuff, but it’s just not a place you want to be. It doesn’t have life. It doesn’t have that organic-ness. So I think when you’re designing systems for creation, when you’re designing tools, you’re really playing the role of constraint designer and you want to design really good constraints, and then let people do whatever comes to their mind. So, that’s how I think about it. By the way, programming language designers do that. That’s what they’re doing. (View Highlight)
- So my advice would be intimately familiar with the state of the art of technology, but then go mine the world and go into the weirdest places, the most untrodden places, and figure out how you can put those pieces together to make something unique. They just make a lot of work. (View Highlight)