Today’s product builders and data scientists shape the way people see the world. The analysis, plots, and UI we create are places where others dwell. Not merely occupy but live and harness the mental space we give them access to. Martin Heiddeger wrote Building Dwelling Thinking(archive.org) in his 1971 book, Poetry Language Thought.
Man’s relation to locations, and through locations to spaces, inheres in his dwelling. The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, strictly thought and spoken
What Heidegger calls locations, I have thought of as places. Places are anything with order and purpose, as thought of by the user. Spaces are not so much the mathematical or physics concepts but more like domains ones. Such as the AI-space, or biotech-space. These spaces come into being as a result of thought extended from the boundaries of places to the explorations enabled by the affordances of said spaces.
A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.
[…]
The location admits the [space] and it installs the [space].
Heidegger addresses thinking only very briefly and from a distance. In the life of today’s knowledge worker thinking is everything. For the knowledge worker to be able to “dwell” they must be able to bring together the act of thinking and building. This is why good visualization, analysis that reveals rather than hides, and products that expand rather than limit the user’s ability are important.
Building and thinking are, each in its own way, inescapable for dwelling. The two, however, are also insufficient for dwelling so long as each busies itself with its own affairs in separation instead of listening to one another. They are able to listen if both building and thinking-belong to dwelling, if they remain within their limits and realize that the one as much as the other comes from the workshop of long experience and incessant practice.
To be able to free the user is critical. Everyone has their expertise and it us usually not in using your product. To make your place so convoluted that the user has to conform and constrict to be able to use it is not kind placemaking. At the beginning of the essay there is a definition of what it means “to free”
To free really means to spare. The sparing itself consists not only in the fact that we do not harm the one whom we spare. Real sparing is something positive and takes place when we leave something beforehand in its own nature, when we return it specifically to its being, when we “free” it in the real sense of the word into a preserve of peace. To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving
My takeaway is that whenever a product/place is built it’s primary concern should be the freedom of the person expected to dwell there. The freedom you provide enables them to explore spaces they care about.
Image credit: Nagoya Castle (ca.1932) print in high resolution by Hiroaki Takahashi. Original from The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.
Aneesh Sathe 
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