My connection to the problem becomes too diffuse. The object of my attention becomes the system itself, rather than its interactions with a specific context of use. This leads to a common failure mode among system designers: getting lost in towers of purity and abstraction, more and more disconnected from the system’s ostensible purpose in the world.

I experience an enormous difference between “trying to design an augmented reading environment” and “trying to design an augmented version of this specific linear algebra book”. When I think about the former, I mostly focus on primitives, abstractions, and processes. When I think about the latter, I focus on the needs of specific ideas, on specific pages. And then, once it’s in use, I think about specific problems, that specific students had, in specific places.