The track of a typical eye movement across a screen or page of text
I am in the middle of a series of signage articles on Slate. The first article in the series, The Secret Language of Signs, is worth reading and got me thinking in a number of different directions.
One road it sent me down was the idea that we are always looking for signs that reinforce our feelings of exceptionalism, be they political, professional or personal. Being special seems to be a psychological imperative.
In the learning and development world, we go so far as to grant post-graduate degrees in instructional design, incorporating ideas from graphics, psychology, organizational behavior, adult learning theory and various bits of technology research and development, among other specialty areas.
It is a truism of IT development that the use cases for which developers create solutions almost always end up changing, often before the development project is even finished. Then clients “bend” the software to entirely new uses or implement the software in unimagined ways. I’ve come to appreciate that making software is a lot like sailing — dynamic, which is to say sometimes exhilarating, sometimes frightening and changing all the time.
In 1965 Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones wrote 