When is a great explanation a bad thing?

This blog post is hypothetical. Any resemblance to any individuals, software, or greek alphabet programs is strictly a figment of your imagination.

Let’s say, hypothetically of course, that someone explains something very well, and they go ahead and do that. So that issue is now explained. Fantastic. I love it. No purple required.

But what does that say about the thing that needed explaining? Was it too complex to begin with? According to Jeff Ray,SolidWorks is supposed to be “as intuitive as a light switch”. Light switches don’t need much explaining.

Let’s say you have a simple concept. Color.We all get color. Color doesn’t require any explanation. Easy enough. Light switch simple.

So take color and make it complex. Maybe you could call it something like, say something less specific, something that requires an explanation, something maybe a bit ridiculously vague, like, say – “appearance” or something like that. Besides having too many syllables and being difficult to spell, the word “appearance” requires some explanation. Even as a metaphor, “appearance” doesn’t translate into any useful information as relates to a CAD model. Philosophically, you could say “appearance” could mean “how something looks”. But that is rather vague, because there are a lot of different elements to how something looks. One such element would be color.

Now we come to a philosophical argument. CAD is “abstract”. In this context that means that you represent a real object with some sort of 2D display, and the computer allows you to change the image in a way that it appears to be 3D – looks like a real physical part, but there is no gravity, no momentum, no mass, no support. So the computer display is a metaphor for the real thing – it is an abstraction. Working in 2D is very difficult because it is more abstract – you have to do more mental processing to see the real part in your head.

Sometimes when you have a real physical part in your hand, you might wish for a little abstraction – like fingernails that turn color, or a t-shirt with an animation. So abstraction is not always a bad thing – it allows you to do stuff you can’t do in real life. 3D CAD in the last several years has had the tendency to try to look more “real”, and perhaps revel in the good parts of abstraction a little less. I suppose there are times when “more real” may be helpful, but I prefer some level of abstraction. For example, I would not want all the cast iron parts of an assembly to look like real cast iron parts. I want to assign a color to each, because the break between parts is more important to me than trying to look “real”. Oh. Woops. I said the color word. Sorry. Appearance. Ok, are you happy now?

So, if someone went to some amount of bother and created several highly informative videos explaining “appearance”, they would be a hero for disseminating information. But honestly, the need to be a hero is created by the fact that “appearance” is too nuanced an idea for CAD. Appearance is: Color, Texture, and (not really material). Material contains Appearance. Sounds like circular logic to me. There is no advantage to making color a complicated thing, or to lumping it together with texture and (not really material).

When does a great explanation become a bad thing? When it takes something intuitive and complicates it unnecessarily. Kinda like this blog post.