design for the free soul

as I’m writing this, I’m sitting in the passenger seat of a car, with my girlfriend driving us home.
2024-12-28
- we pass a Toyota C-HR on the highway, and I get my first good look at that car. so far I’ve only seen it in passing and while I was driving, so I couldn’t really take a good look at its design. but this is the first time I’m seeing the car from all angles.
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  - a thought surfaces in my head… “this car is built like a frickin’ Evangelion.”
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    armoured to shield you from the elements, protect you from crashes, and provide a comfortable driving experience.
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  - I’ve never taken a good look at the C-HR other than its weird looking back. but when you see the whole car like that, you can start to see the appeal. it just looks like a really frickin’ rugged solid car.
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  - but the rugged solid design makes me think… you must really feel boxed in when you’re inside it, no?
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this prompted me to think about designs evoking the feeling of being boxed in or otherwise claustrophobic.
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- I’m not sure what a car for the free soul would look like. would it be a small and nimble car? an aerodynamic one? perhaps it wouldn’t be a car, but a motorcycle?
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  - perhaps… a bicycle could be called the vehicle for the free soul? there’s no roof to box you in, no engine noise to drive you nuts… just you and the elements.
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    being able to experience the zen of nature, the world as it is… the warmth of a late summer evening, the cold of an early winter morning. the soft breeze, or the whizzing wind, the calm showers, or the roaring thunderstorm.
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- humans build constructions to protect themselves from the elements, but maybe that takes away a degree of freedom? a degree of freedom… of the soul?
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I wonder how this concept of freedom of the soul can be expressed in software design.
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- one example immediately comes to mind; that of the infinite canvas. can you possibly feel more free than on an infinite canvas?
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  - and in a similar vein, you could think of infinite open worlds in video games. like in Minecraft.
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- but ultimately, we add constrains to our software to make it more predictable and useful.
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  - a text editor has the constraint of not allowing negative (row, column) coordinates, because the top-left is a useful anchor to start writing text from. you can start writing text from a single point, and it will not expand upwards or leftwards; only downwards and rightwards, the latter most often being bounded even further by word wrapping.
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    this is of course a property of Latin-based writing systems in general; our text editors just implement those constraints.
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  - programming languages impose constraints on the developer to make it easier for rigid computer algorithms to check the correctness of arbitrary code. there’s little assumptions you can make about arbitrary machine code, but there are a lot of rules a Rust program must follow to be valid.
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    which makes me think, languages can give your soul more or less freedom of expression, depending on their design. C is a language with very few constraints, giving you lots of freedom to express yourself, at the risk of shit breaking down horribly if you make a mistake.
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maybe next time I’ll be designing something, I’ll take the idea of freedom of the soul into mind.
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© riki moe / リキ萌

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