ESS.001 — The Verb: Basic Observation Unit.

Nobody has ever wanted a toothbrush. You want to preserve your mouth. A drill is not desired: what is desired is the shelf on the wall—and sometimes not even the shelf, but the order it promises to hold. Nobody turns on a flashlight for the sake of the flashlight; they turn it on to stop being afraid of the dark.

Beneath each object lies something someone wanted to do. The object is the way they found to do it. Objects have names. We people live through verbs.

What is a verb here

It is worth saying soon, because it is the key. When verb is said here, grammar is not being spoken of. A verb is not the action a product performs: it is the human thing that the product enters.

The noun is what we design. The verb is what the person was trying to do.

The product has a function. The person has a verb. They do not always match.

One object, many verbs

The same object sustains many verbs, and design almost always addresses only one.

We design a chair. The person, on the other hand, may be trying to rest. Or wait. Or recover. Or think. Or work. Or simply stay.

We designed a phone. The person might be trying to make a call, remember, escape, coordinate, belong, calm down, or start.

We designed headphones. The person might be trying to listen, concentrate, isolate themselves, calm down, walk, keep going.

The same object. Different verbs. And each with its price.

The seismograph

I learned this from my body. I have Parkinson's.

Parkinson's did something strange to my relationship with verbs: it made them visible. To walk. To start. To turn around. To speak. To get up. To keep going. Things I used to pass through without noticing became events. The verb remained the same. The price, did not.

A working body pays the price of its verbs without noticing, like firm ground does not feel small tremors. A fragile body is a seismograph: it registers what others fail to feel. It is not that illness invents the cost. It is that it puts it on the needle. Fragility does not weaken the sight: it sharpens it.

And what the seismograph measures applies to everyone. Every verb has a price, whether it shows or not. It is not always paid in money. It is paid in attention, in time, in memory, in decisions, in energy, in patience. Starting also costs something, even if no one charges for it out loud.

The interface changes the price

This is where what Human Notes observes comes in: between the person who wants something and the verb they are trying to perform, there is almost always an interface. And every interface changes the price of that verb. Sometimes it lowers it. Sometimes it makes it possible. Sometimes it moves it somewhere else. Sometimes it charges you in a currency you aren't looking at.

Google Maps makes the verb arriving almost free. No one gets lost anymore. But, without warning, it makes another one more expensive: orienting oneself. You stop building the map in your head, and the muscle of knowing where you are without looking atrophies. The verb arriving became cheap; the verb orienting oneself quietly became expensive.

Mobile banking makes paying and transferring cheaper. But for those who don't use the app—and there's always someone—that same design makes an action that used to be free more expensive: walking into a branch and having someone assist you. The cost didn't disappear. It changed bodies.

That is why the phrase that underpins all of this no longer sounds like a metaphor: every interface changes the price of a verb.

Three lines

Three lines, and with them one enters:

People do not live among products. They live among verbs.
Every verb has a price.
Every interface changes that price.

Human Notes look at what happens between three.

The order

And once you start looking at it this way, an order appears. First the verb: what is the person trying to do? Then the cost: what does it cost them to do it? Then the interface: what changes? And then, two questions that this text only leaves open: the cost we have removed from one place, where does it end up? And the person, when they let go of the object, how much capacity are they left with?

An object is judged by what it does. A verb, by what it allows to be done afterwards.

No one, in the end, wants the object. We want to be able to keep going.