by CJ Quines • on
Professional vision
domain-specific perspectives
Crystal Lee’s post, What “The Devil Wears Prada” taught me about research, introduced me to the concept of professional vision:
This is what linguistic anthropologist Chuck Goodwin calls professional vision—a way of looking at the world shaped by and codified through social practice. It is a method of close reading cultivated through apprenticeship and cultural norms, where professionals don’t necessarily learn to “see better” but to recognize patterns, practices, or social dynamics that a community finds meaningful.
I rather like this phrase, professional vision. It’s not merely about looking at the world with a particular perspective or a different lens. Rather, it’s about using a lens informed by some sort of domain-specific knowledge. Some of my super everyday experiences:
Analyzing font choice is one of my common ones, as you might see in my Fonts of MIT blog post. I’ve been playing Cult of the Lamb recently, and its pairing of Lapture with Fira is gorgeous and daring. Both fonts have strong calligraphic influences, Lapture being old-style and Fira being humanist; this grants some measure of warmth, even cuteness. Yet Lapture’s flared serifs (and to a lesser extent, Fira’s strong stroke contrast) evoke a sharp, even sinister undertone.
Spotting tree phototropism is something I picked up from How to Read a Tree. Plants often display phototropism by growing toward light sources. In particular, branches of trees grow longer in the direction of more light. This leads to the avenue effect, where trees that grow next to a street tend to have longer branches toward the street.
I’m sometimes amused by looking for turn-taking signals when listening to a conversation. People vary in how much they backchannel to pass a turn, or how often they break eye contact when starting a turn. Timing considerations mean that, often, the longest pauses in conversations happen between a speaker and themselves, rather than a speaker and another speaker.
Design-y stuff feels particularly universal: I often look at tools and think about their affordances and mapping, or I look at graphics and think about alignment and contrast, or I look at a website and think about border radius, or I look at a room and think about shearing layers, or I look at a game and think about player agency.
Despite all the math and code I’ve done, the ways they’ve changed my view of the world are subtler. I guess common knowledge comes up every once in a while, and from time to time I’d look at something and realize it’s a monad.
Maybe I’d see more economics-y stuff if I knew more about it. Something something, decoupling, incentives, information asymmetry, markets, risk, something something.