My Inconvenience is my benefit
If we think within the region where we simply define “Inconvenience = requires extra labor”, activities whose enjoyment is physical labor, such as sports and gardening, could be part of BoI. In this case, can you think of anyone who has to sacrifice something?
For example, in the case of making a PC,
- It’s the process of making the PC that’s fun, (like making models). Using that PC is as most a side effect.
- A PC is needed for a task. Buying one is costly, so (reluctantly) I have to make one.
The two could be grouped into different types of inconvenience. The former is the same as gardening and sports.
However there may not be people who scowl at the thought of making a PC, so, saving the fun for later doesn’t always work. But we can’t deny whether we feel the benefit or not depends on the situation.
What are the criteria for BoI as opposed to plain Inconvenience?
I personally don’t want to group Machines, like ATMs, as BoI because I feel resistance against them, but focusing on the benefits of things that are effort at a glance, like random key placement, is well within the bounds of studying BoI? It’s not that we’re accepting all ATMs as a system for bluntly exchanging money with a machine in order to avoid talking to the bank teller…
Instead of labelling the product itself as BoI, isn’t it about the importance of sorting the interaction when focusing on the purpose and function, and making the users aware of these?
How about this analogy: if, by chance, “complex street placement” worked well, it would gain a lot of attention and we’d think “that’s actually pretty good”. If we intentionally make the streets complex and asked “what do you think?” then, like ATMs whose buttons reorganize randomly, we may not feel all so impressed. If we design the keys on an ATM better, then we’d reach BoI, but we’re in a position where we haven’t quite got the skills yet.
Speaking of drawling lines, there are times when neither Word nor LaTex works as we want it. Personally, I find the former as just inconvenience, but the latter as Benefit of Inconvenience. I asked myself why, but at the time, there are answers to “what are you telling me to do!?” but not to “What are you on about!?”, in other, words, the inconvenience doesn’t link to the targeted understanding, so I labelled word was “just inconvenience”
Does TeX lead to targeted understanding?
Is that understanding of the TeX mechanism??
Even with word, you’ll start to see the personality of Word, so the structure for writing sentences, or characteristics of the text placement- it doesn’t seem impossible to achieve the subtleties are for both (If there’s enough effort to do so (^o^)).
One type of dislike? I feel towards Word, are those set-ups and help packages that I’ve never asked for. Like, “stop doing this without my permission!”.
My way of thinking is similar to the former- the layout of the menus where it’s hard to tell what is where- is just inconvenient if we don’t know it- and even if we just learn it, all we get is the ability to use that function. In TeX, there’s the inconvenience of having to look up the commands until we learn it, but once we’ve learnt it, there’s the benefit of smoothly entering symbols or whatever without taking my hands off the keyboard or stopping my trail of thought. (Also, I can use the editor※ I want, can edit with ssh)
This benefit can’t all be sorted as targeted understanding. As pointed out, if I’m asked whether I’ve fully understood the inner workings of the word processing program LaTeX, I’d have to say, hmmm not really, so for now I’ll turn down the targeted understanding idea.
Regarding city designs, no matter how complicated the streets are, the locals have an idea of the area so it’s not all so inconvenient. On the other hand, non-locals don’t have this, so just find it difficult. So basically, the city design discourse is slightly different to the BoI system theory, or there’s an important factor besides “targeted understanding” and “self-sufficiency” which I haven’t quite found yet. So “Knowing the area” ≠”targeted understanding”
Active problem-solving/targeted understanding (Including towards the third person)/self-satisfaction was only a hypothesis from the start of this project, so we should look for other factors.