Omar Rizwan, Programmer

Omar Rizwan is a researcher, developer and programmer behind projects such as Folk Computer, Screenotate and TabFS.

APOSSIBLE™ is a non-profit bringing psychologists, technologists, artists and creatives together to explore how technology can better support creativity and human fulfillment. In this ongoing interview series we’re discovering what people value, what makes their lives fulfilling, and what kinds of relationships to technology they already cherish.

1. What is a ritual, practice, or routine in your life that is important for your psychological wellbeing and/or fulfillment? Why?

I like walking around the city, from neighborhood to neighborhood, from borough to borough, across bridges… there’s something about taking transportation that is slower than the ‘normal’ way of getting somewhere – taking a train for a couple days instead of flying, walking from one borough to another instead of taking the subway, taking some local buses instead of taking the train.

You notice things along the way; you get the smell and sound and visual texture of those places; you’re knitting the places together in your head (that you maybe had visited in a disconnected point-to-point way before), building up this fabric of how everything fits together.

You’re more in control of your movement; you can stop whenever you see anything interesting and look around and get a donut (which means you also look at the environment in a different way, in terms of places where you might stop or change).

I think that a big contributor to human fulfillment is the feeling of mastery, that you’re getting a grasp of your environment, becoming more capable over time. And these long walks promote that mastery of the environment (and sometimes ‘faster’ travel denies you that sort of mastery, because it’s more like you’re teleporting from point to point).

2. What is a human-made creation that brings out the best in you? Why?

I’m starting to build a portable Folk gadget — a mini-projector, camera, and computer in a single handheld unit — so I’ve been trying out CAD software to design the plastic housing for the gadget. One CAD system I’ve tried is called Shapr3D – I’ve found it surprisingly inspiring as a software tool.

It has a two-handed interface. (It’s mostly used on the iPad.) You control the camera with your fingers on your left hand and you draw/model/edit with the pencil in your right hand. It feels much more expressive and parallel than working through a keyboard and mouse, it’s almost like a musical instrument: I can do multiple things at the same time, make micro-adjustments to the camera (zoom, rotate, pan) while I’m modeling, I’m using a little more of my body instead of just pressing buttons with fingers.

And doing CAD is very non-verbal (at least at the current level I’m at), unlike so much of the rest of my work (where I’m cross-checking documentation & writing code and comments).

It’s almost like a puzzle game, figuring out how to fit shapes together, and I think that makes it fun and satisfying. I can sit in the coffee shop and just sort of go in on it on my iPad for a few hours. (It’s the only real use I’ve ever had for my iPad Pro, to be honest.) It’s refreshing to enter that kind of state of continuous nonverbal adjusting and tweaking. (I think it’s also that it physically, subconsciously feels different from most computing that I do, because I’m moving my hands and holding the computer in a different way.)

Finally, I’ve found both with CAD software and with manufacturing (we’ve used a CNC machine a little bit at work, and a laser cutter, and obviously a 3D printer), once you know a little bit about the tools, it actually changes how you perceive things in the world.

You look around at your own electronic gadgets, or at a chandelier in an office, or a candle holder on a table, and you can guess how it was made (they must have cut a piece of wood in this way; they must have laser-cut these pieces and joined them) and why it’s designed the way it is. So you develop new kinds of attention toward the world around you.

3. When do you cherish the slow or hard way of doing something? Why?

I think this is part of the difference between the traditional conception of art or design, and engineering. Engineering is kind of about correctness: if it meets the specification, you’re good.

Whereas in art, process matters. You can’t just do things at the last minute. Some things inherently take time/attention to develop craft/detail, and people can tell the difference at some level (even if they can’t even articulate the difference).

Especially nowadays, I think it’s important to make the argument that design isn’t just about making a plan in your head and then executing that plan with your tools. So many creative disciplines are really about interplay between the person and some material – paint, musical instruments, chalkboards, film. You change your creative decisions to reflect what the material is telling you; they don’t only flow one way from your head out into the world.

(And this is where that art/engineering distinction may break down – I think a lot of older programming, like game development, was also about working within technical constraints and had a similar back-and-forth with the medium, and I often miss that constraint.)

So I think we need to treat that slow interplay with tools and materials as valuable; we can’t throw that away and expect to get the same results only working inside our heads (which often seems to be the aspiration of digital tools).

4. What is something you appreciate or long for from the past? Why?

Lately, I’ve been printing papers out a lot, to read. It’s a little old-school compared to reading them on a phone or laptop (or even an e-ink reader or tablet).

I print the paper (sometimes shrunk down, like two or four pages per sheet). Then I tape the sheets together edge-to-edge into a big, unwieldy scroll or poster-like object. Sometimes I stand it upright on the desk in front of me.

I like having a field of view that is much larger than you can get on an electronic device – it feels like I’m really using the advantages of the physical paper.

I can rapidly skip between parts of the paper (just move my eyes) and get a spatial sense of the areas of the ‘scroll’ that I’m really focused on (maybe I’m focusing on a few paragraphs in the implementation section 2/3 from the bottom and on some of the results a few inches from the bottom, because I’m trying to get my own implementation of the technique to work, and I don’t care as much about the rest of the paper).

And I can mark the paper up with pens and highlighters. (and I can add more colors, it’s easy to switch between whatever pens are at hand, and I can come up with notation on the fly to call specific formulas or phrases out).

This is commonplace when people talk about digital vs. analog, but it’s still true: I can focus on the printout in a way that I can’t on a device with buttons and/or the internet. It might be the only thing on my desk. Even if it’s not, and I have my laptop out, I can keep my laptop and its limited screen area focused on coding or looking at API documentation and not also be tabbing to the PDF on there. I’m removing the need to context switch on the computer, which can be really expensive and distracting.

Finally, I think that the act of printing and taping-together has some power in itself, like it’s an act of commitment that I will read the paper and center my work around it for at least a couple of hours.