Handles, how to make them and where to use them

In my article From story to science, I talked about how people use the words they associate with a particular idea or situation to change the way they think about it and reveal insights that were previously hidden. In another article, Ladders and Levels, I explained that one of the ways that I walk things up the automation ladder is by adding "handles". This article will go into detail about what exactly those are and what we do with them.

What is a handle?

Handles are any tool, process, conceptual framework, or other action or understanding that influences the outcome of a particular thing. For example, it is entirely possible to bike without handlebars. We've all seen cyclists moving along without touching the handles. How? The handles don't make things like turning possible, they just make it easier. They influence the outcome and, in that specific case, they make people who have weaker cores or balance issues better able to control the movement of the bicycle.

With physical objects, handles are anything that make the object state more easily manipulated by humans. In the case of cups, a handle allows more people to be able to handle it than a cup that doesn't have one, especially when we consider people with limb differences, mobility differences, movement coordination differences, strength differences, etc. Why do baby sippy cups have a handle on each side? If you answer that question for yourself, you're understanding exactly what I'm getting at.

Sometimes the difference of ease in using an object with and without handles is dramatic. It is possible to climb a ladder with no handles, provided that both of the vertical poles are stable. You can grip one pole and climb straight up. You can wedge yourself between them, back to one, feet on the other, and walk your way up. You can wedge yourself between them, each hand gripping a separate one and each foot braced against a separate one and sort of shimmy your way up. However, it is radically easier to just be able to step up using rungs. This is the point of handles.

Process handles operate in a similar fashion. We all have some things at work that we know as easy and others which we know as difficult. Often, the "easy" processes are those which have a lot of handles, a lot of accommodations that make it easier to think, easier to complete actions, easier to track progress, etc. When you're at the gym, it is easier to understand your progress towards your goal time on the treadmill or bike if there is a timer there, and it is easier to stay on it if there is a TV in front of you. It is easier to ensure your safety if there are rails to either side and a stop button on the treadmill.

At work, these process handles will often take the place of infrastructure. Forms that allow simple and comprehensive coverage of everything needed for a handoff between stakeholders in a workflow, or checklists ensuring requirements are complete.

Great examples of process handles are found in games. Add a counter, add bonuses, add dopamine triggers. Make it easier for a person to achieve. Remember Madlibs? Add the infrastructure and make it easier to plug something into that slot.

Conceptual handles are where the real value of handles comes in though. The people who master the art of creating and leveraging conceptual handles often are elevated to a status of guru-hood in their chosen discipline or field of practice. These are typically people who are able to make concepts as simple or complex as needed to express to a given audience. From my personal learnings, several names come to mind. Richard Feynman being the chief among them, lauded as one of the best science communicators in history. So what the heck are conceptual handles?

Conceptual handles are the equivalent of physical and process handles but in idea space. Where physical handles make it easier to grasp, manipulate, move, activate, and use physical objects, and process handles make it easier to perform, interact, initiate, and track processes, conceptual handles make it easier to do thinking operations for a given idea. One conceptual handle that everyone is familiar with is the question.

Questions and answers

When a concept is new to us, it's like a large perfectly smooth sphere. Just imagine a ball 10 feet tall that only weights a pound but the surface is so smooth that it's slippery even when it's dry. Every attempt you make to lift it fails because you can't get a good grip on it. With ideas, we have no access. It's like jargon. If someone says "fundamental attribution error", you might meet them with a response of "Yes, those are all words in english but they mean nothing to me together". There is no place to gain traction on that idea, no place to put it and no way to use it.

Questions aren't our first line of attack in these cases but they are the most popular. Questions dig into the guts of an idea and also allow us to properly contextualize it. The answers add holes to the sphere, allowing us to stick our fingers in and move it around like a bowling ball. Context puts the sphere in a cage so that in order to lift the sphere, we merely need to grip and lift the cage it's in.

The common questions allow us to establish common, simple understandable idea parameters.

What is this? - What existing categories can I use to understand things about this new thing without having to know too many specifics about it.

Where is this? - What about its placement in the environment would give me a way to understand or use this idea?

Why is this? - What originating action or motivation for this thing would give me greater understanding of its current state?

You get the idea (pun not intended). Questions are the main handle that most people consciously use to understand ideas but not the only one. Observation is another powerful handle that we regularly use.

Observational handles

Observational handles are most frequently used, in my experience, with vision and speech. When someone uses an unfamiliar word, we are all taught to look for context clues to understand the meaning. If someone says "You know, they tried to get me to file a DF5960. I'm not that kind of person. That's just not my grablflak.", you don't need to specifically know what a DF5960 is and you don't know need what know what a grablflak is. You can guess, based on how the words are used, that a DF5960 is a form and grablflak is some sort of thing or state of being that relates to identity and identity-consistent activities. So, you can decode that sentence that centers on words that are indecipherable into something like "They asked me to do something. That's not my thing." That would be you creating handles, or it would be the person talking giving you the opportunity to create handles.

With visual observation, for concepts expressed with images, if motion is involved, we focus on the motion. If context is involved, we focus on the items around it and how they interact with it. That tells us something about the nature of the concept. This is more difficult the more abstract a conceptual representation is. A picture of a person riding a train through space and shining a flashlight in front of him is dramatically easier to understand than e=mc^2.

Adding handles

I hope that my explanations of what the types of handles we're dealing with has been comprehensive enough to answer the question of how you create them but, on the off chance that it wasn't, here it goes.

In order to create physical handles, you think about how you want to interact with the object, you think about other objects that are manipulated in a similar way and you copy the design.

If you want to lift something, or lift yourself up on something, you need either some form of knob or some form of rung. You can also use holes if you want to do it on hard mode (like rock climbing). Think about ladders, tea kettles and bowling balls.

For something that will need to be pulled, we add a sort of thin rung, so that our hands can form hooks around it, or a harness, like for animal-driven plows. Think about a pallet jack, a suitcase, or a sled at the gym.

For something that will need to be activated, we use a button, switch, or sensor. A quick action in a single direction should be sufficient to do this. Buttons and switches both imply binary states (on/off). Think light switches, the power button on your phone, the button to summon an elevator, the sensor for a door.

You get the idea.

To create process handles, you do almost the same operation. What are we trying to accomplish at this step and how have we seen this done before? Does information need to be transmitted? Form, e-mail, or phone call. Does information or matter need to be transformed? In what way? How are others doing that? CNC, lathe, excel formula, program, etc.

To create conceptual handles, the objectives are always the same. Find out how to use this. Make it easier to use.

Finding out how to use a concept involves finding out relevant information about it, asking good questions. What type of thing is it? How is it interacting with other ideas? is it a process, a process artifact, a description of a phenomena, a name for a person or a place? What is it? How is it used? How are others using it when they present it in the idea space or, if you're the person creating the concept itself, how are you using it?

Making it easier to use is also an exercise in answering questions. What does this idea remind me of? Can I use it similarly? What is this different from? what can I learn about how to use it better based on those differences?