Six Levels of Interaction with a System
charlieharrington.com
charlieharrington.com
To carry on with the automotive analogy, I've likely achieved "level 5" of a car: I've done several clutch replacements, rebuilt a suspension, and my living room is full of car parts turned art pieces. But there are still things I want to do that extend the functionality of the car, so it can do things the original designers never intended, but that suit my needs better.
I think this is the critical step in innovation: taking something as it is and being able to extend traditional "mastery" of the subject and create something new and valuable. At that point, the cycle starts over: most people won't use the thing, or some will use it for its first order purpose, but some dedicated group of folks will dive deep and build on what you did to create something new.
Educationally, I used to chat with my professors about how the theory they used to write tests, and the best ones always fixed 100% at something we had not yet learned, but could be derived from what we had been taught. You could still get an A (90%) by regurgitating information by rot memorization, but that extension was what showed you could move the field forward. Not only did it make the tests more challenging, it also made the tests more fun.
My economics professors in college followed the same school of thought for our midterms and exams. So many students couldn't handle the idea that we were going to see things on the test that "hadn't yet been taught" to them. The tests were brutal, but felt like real learning was happening.
I think this is where I like the distinctions below on extension vs invention. Sometimes you're just taking what's there and re-arranging it; sometimes, you're adding new things to replace the existing ones, sometimes you need to clean slate using what you learned from the previous steps.
> Would love to hear your ideas for what you want to re-purpose on your car!
Here are a few examples:
- https://f87.bimmerpost.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1675296 - https://f87.bimmerpost.com/forums/showthread.php?p=26245043
It's a surprisingly good intellectual exercise during quarantine :D
I think that the other critical piece you mention is "having a goal". Most people are only interested in getting from point A to point B, so they stay at level 1 of cars (or computers, or investing). Once you set a goal for yourself, the incentives shift and you're willing to dive deeper into the levels mentioned here.
I often get asked for recommendations on "what programming language to learn" from people interested in learning to code, at which point I ask them "what do you want to do?" Having a goal for which programming is a solution is far more important than learning a language, and the intrinsic motivation will push people to discover the solutions vs the people just doing it because they've been told they should.
I think I would add at least two levels beyond 5: (6) extend (7) design (8) invent
Admittedly level 8 is going beyond the useful purpose of this model. Still, it's how I think of things.
What I can't create I don't understand -Richard Feynman
It's interesting to consider where everyone's personal "wall" is: the stage at which they have trouble going beyond. Many people, for example, are passive consumers who can barely use systems (Level 1), let alone monitor them (Level 2). (If that seems harsh to you, remember that you're on Hacker News, a highly non-representative sample of the population.) I work in R&D, and so I spend a lot of time designing things (Level 7) and improving on existing products and concepts (Level 6-ish). I even like to think I'm good at it, some days. But I rarely have good, new ideas of my own (Level 8), and I don't think I've ever had an actionable one: certainly, I've never had an idea or plan worth founding a startup over, or worth quitting my job to become an author.
It's surprising how wide the chasm separating those two levels seems, at least for me.