About: Human Notes.

Human Notes can be read from two places: the gut and the mind. One feels what is happening. The other tries to understand why. Between the two is where Human Notes lives.

From the guts

Human Notes is about this: there is a body —mine, which some days starts up and other days just won't budge— watching how the world is designed by measuring everything except the human element.

How the professional devours the person. How we call it inclusion to fit someone into a system that was never designed for them, freedom to choose among options that others have already decided, and personalization to ask you to adapt yourself, over and over again.

How do we expect diverse bodies to all function the same, and unpredictable humans within perfectly predictable systems.

How we try to eliminate all friction from life until life itself starts to feel like a mistake. How we make everything faster without asking where the fuck we are going.

How a solution can solve the problem and leave you worse off than before. How we measure what comes in, what goes out, what converts, and what works—but almost never what remains.

Parkinson's is not the issue. It's the calibration. A body where the price of everything goes up every morning finds out before anyone else what things actually cost. This son of a bitch gave me the best seat in the world from which to watch.

Someone has to tell it. It fell to me. Bad luck for you.

At Human Notes there is no editorial line, there is a nervous system. There is passion, pain, joys, laughter, trembling, rigidity, irony, beauty, absurdity, design, cunts, sex, anecdotes, framework, systems, toilet, Sonos, jerking off, algorithms, kisses, technologies, hugs, interfaces, objects, fables, criticisms, animals, bots, Apple, doctors, engineers, designers, consultants, schools, inclusion, exclusion, identification, goodbyes, encounters, iris scanning, motherfuckers, family, friends, disability, aliens, questions, hypotheses, assertions, Ikea, metrics, movies, music, transfer, anticipated users, observations, rehabilitation, balls, more balls, ambition, desire, failure, chairs, Google, hospitals, scales, memories, love...

No filter. No order. No anesthesia.

Because a nervous system doesn't choose what it feels: it transmits everything, pain and pleasure down the same wire. It's the same here. You don't separate theory from the wound, laughter from the tremor, or the framework from the pussy. All together, because in a body it goes together.

Read it. Enjoy it. Share it.

Human Notes has Notes about bodies, interfaces, technology, systems, design, love, sex, disability, music, toilets, algorithms, hospitals, memory, metrics, crying, and a few other things…

There is no specific order. Start wherever you want.

If something makes you laugh, cry, think, disagree, feel, or drop an F-bomb — send it to someone.

That's what it's for.

And one day, when you least expect it, I'm going to drop something so sweet on you that you're going to get pissed off.

I love you all!

From the mind

Every interface changes the cost of a verb. I have Parkinson's. I live with interfaces. I observe what changes.

Human Notes observes what capacity an interface leaves in a person. The verb is how one looks. Capacity is what is at stake. The rest—notes, essays, feedback—is what that gaze reveals.

It started with my body. Parkinson's made visible actions that I previously went through without thinking. A fluctuating body became a seismograph. From there, observation expanded to objects, systems, and services. The question remains the same: what changed in the human.

An interface is not just a screen or an object. It is that which modifies the conditions of a verb. A chair, a pair of headphones, an app, a hospital, a procedure, a waiting room. The product may not change. The body may change. And when the body changes, the verb it needs changes. Capability does not reside in the object. It appears—or not—in the relationship.

Human Notes doesn't start by judging the interface. It starts by observing what happens to the person who lives with it. Yesterday I walked without thinking. Today I managed to walk. From the outside, it's the same action. The cost, however, is not.

There is a confusion between measuring and understanding. First the body. Then the number. The statement, at the end. Not to diagnose. Not to lose what happened.

In the interface notes, what is observed sometimes returns to the person who designed, prescribes, or controls that condition. The body is the first evidence. It is not a review. It is feedback. What an interface did to a life returns to the interface.

Human Notes is not a substitute for research, diagnosis, or specialized knowledge. It observes what those languages may leave unnamed: the small change in what a person is still able to do.

Sometimes the most important thing an interface changes is not what it does. It is what remains when it disappears.

Human Notes makes the verbs visible. Then asks what they cost.