In 2023 I recorded a voice note about a drawing I wanted to make. The drawing was of an ape, facing us, sketched loosely, with one strange feature. Instead of a flat face, it had a face shaped like a cone, a long, narrow funnel pointing at whatever it happened to be looking at.
The ape is us, obviously. The cone is our perspective.
What interested me was why the cone felt necessary. When you draw a normal face, the viewer assumes a wide field of view, something close to 180 degrees. And visibility carries an implication with it. A face that can see broadly suggests a mind that thinks broadly. A conventional face implies clarity of vision, of thought, of ideas.
In reality, it does not matter how capable our brains are in other respects. Our perspective can become extremely narrow, and it narrows constantly, based on context, based on whatever coincidental subject has captured us in the moment. The cone-faced ape is the honest portrait. The wide, confident face is the flattering one.
The flashlight on the road
Another version of the same image: a person walking at night, holding a flashlight that lights up one narrow patch of the road. Not the surroundings, not the terrain, not the turn coming up ahead. One patch.
That is roughly what focused attention feels like from the inside, in my experience. The beam is bright and useful, and everything outside it might as well not exist. While I am deep in one file, one paragraph, one bug, the rest of the project is dark. I do not merely ignore it; I lose the sense that it is there.
The trouble is that we design tools as if the whole road were lit.
The flattering assumption
Look at the software we use every day and ask what kind of person it was built for.
A conventional file manager shows you the inside of one folder at a time and assumes you remember the rest of the tree. A browser shows you one tab and assumes you remember what the other forty were for. A chat app shows you the newest messages and assumes the decisions made two weeks up the scroll are still fresh in your mind. Each of these tools quietly assumes a user with a wide perspective, reliable recall, and a holistic view of their own work.
That user does not exist. I have never met them, and I have certainly never been them. The person actually holding the tool is the ape with the cone-shaped face, seeing one bright patch at a time.
So here is the design principle, stated plainly. Most tools are built on the assumption that we have a wide perspective and can retain information. Honest design assumes neither. It starts from the premise that we are really limited, and then asks how to help.
Filling the cone
If you accept the narrow cone, you cannot fix it by widening it. Attention does not widen on command. What you can do is change what falls inside the beam.
This became the founding premise of FileMap, a tool I built that lays files and folders out on one zoomable spatial map instead of showing one folder at a time. The reasoning was never that people should see more because seeing more is nice. It was that if the cone is narrow, the environment has to compensate. Put the whole map of the things you care about in front of the cone, with enough visual clarity, and even a narrow beam picks up a sense of the big picture. Related things sit next to each other, so context arrives through proximity instead of through memory.
The same project in a conventional folder listing and on a spatial map. The listing shows one slice and asks your memory to supply the rest; the map keeps the whole process inside the beam.
The general principle travels beyond file management. A well-run kitchen hangs its tools in view, so nobody has to stop and remember where anything lives. A construction site pins the master drawing at the entrance, so every worker who walks past it is reoriented. In each case the design absorbs a burden that would otherwise land on someone's recall.
The cone has an altitude too
The narrowness is not only horizontal, across subjects. It is also vertical, across levels of abstraction, and this shows up most clearly in communication.
I noticed this constantly in client conversations during my years as an architect. Pitch a project too abstractly, all vision and principles, and the client's beam finds nothing solid to land on. Go too concrete, all dimensions and material codes, and the beam is buried in gravel. Both failures are the same failure: the content sits at an altitude the listener's cone cannot hold.
Good communication, like good interface design, means choosing the level of abstraction that fits inside the other person's cone right now, and then moving up and down from there deliberately. The listener cannot hold every level at once, any more than the flashlight can light the whole road.
Let the beam wander on purpose
There is one more thing the flashlight image teaches, and it is the cheerful part. The beam moves.
Notice what your eyes do in front of a painting. They do not settle; they meander and oscillate across the canvas, and the sequence of glances changes what the whole thing means. Look at the same painting twice and you take a different path through it, and the painting shifts slightly with the path. The narrow cone, sweeping around, keeps producing new readings of the same material.
Design can work with this instead of against it. I think of it as creating opportunity for the coincidental: carving pockets of looseness inside an ordered process, the way a good brainstorming hour is a deliberate patch of chaos inside a structured week. On a spatial map, the mechanism is even simpler. When everything relevant is laid out, the thing next to the thing you were looking for enters the beam for free. You went in for one file and came out having noticed a forgotten sketch beside it. A single-folder view can never give you that, because it only ever lights the patch you already asked for.
So the narrow cone is not purely a defect to be designed around. It is also the reason a well-arranged environment keeps surprising us.
The honest portrait
I never did make the drawing of the ape. But it has become a test I run against anything I design: is this built for the wide, confident face, or for the cone?
The wide face is who we imagine we are when we plan. The cone is who shows up at four in the afternoon, tired, mid-task, holding a small flashlight on a long road. Which one is your tool designed for?