cataloguing and classifying and experimenting, and that this habit eventually gets beaten out of them by schoolroom traditions of rote learning. I think that by emulating Leonardo and being better documentarians in our daily lives, many of us could rediscover the personal rewards that come from exercising our innate curiosity and creativity.
Unfortunately, you can’t simply flip a switch and “think like Leonardo” (though there is a good book that will help you get closer). And if few of us can see as acutely as Leonardo did, even fewer have his artistic skill or the obsessive patience to put everything down in a journal. That’s where our technology comes in. We are finally at the point where our mobile computers can turn us into proto-Leonardos, by making it drop-dead easy to capture, edit, annotate, and share our life experiences digitally.
Consider the iPad, the tablet I’m most familiar with. It’s shaped like a journal. You can write or draw on it like a journal. You can use it to record sound, from voice memos to birdsong. And with the iPad 2, which hits stores in the U.S. next week, you can take photos and record videos. (Using a camera may keep us from actually seeing things in the world quite as thoroughly as if we slowed down to draw them, but let’s face it, photography is a far more practical alternative for most people. Leonardo certainly would have used cameras if he’d had them.)
On top of all that, the iPad’s multitouch interface makes it easy and fun to manipulate the media that you capture and arrange it in attractive ways. Moreover, the iPad is wirelessly connected to the whole universe of digital information, meaning you can quickly find and copy information related to whatever matter you happen to be documenting in your notebook, and effortlessly publish your own notebooks for others to share.
If I had my way, the Leonardo’s Notebook app would have a retro-futuristic feel to it, mixing the yellowed-parchment-and-vellum aesthetic of Leonardo’s actual notebooks with an array of sleek yet unobtrusive controls for tasks like arranging photos, drawings, text notes, and other scraps on a page. It would be a crime to embark on designing this app without spending some time with Leonardo da Vinci, a superb multimedia CD-ROM created in 1996 by Corbis, the image archive company founded by Bill Gates. I confess that my love for all things Leonardo, and my conviction that Leonardo’s ideas can be amplified through modern technology, dates back to this disc. And obviously, some of the features and elements of my proposed Leonardo app are already out there in other mobile apps: I would point to iPad apps like Evernote, Springpad, Penultimate, and eJournal, and also to Inkseine, an experimental program developed for the Tablet PC platform by Ken Hinckley of Microsoft Research. Speaking of Microsoft, the “Courier” dual-tablet project, which made a brief splash in 2009 and early 2010 but was then either shelved or taken back underground, seemed to be going in similar directions, but who knows if the company is still working on it.
So there you have it. The basics of this idea have been rattling around in my head for about three years. When Apple announced in early 2010 that it was going to introduce a tablet computer, I got pretty excited. Given the company’s tradition of building elegant, intuitive user interfaces, it seemed likely that the device would have capabilities that made creating and curating content far easier for average users. Alas, the omission of cameras in the original iPad crippled it, from my point of view, as a platform for the Leonardo app. So I put the idea back in cold storage for a while and waited for the technology to catch up.
Obviously, making an app like this work would require both some serious user interface-design chops and some database design experience. I’m not under any illusions that somebody will read this column and go build the app next week. And I’m not sure what the business model for this app would be. I think you could charge a fair bit for the app itself, maybe $4.99, and perhaps offer extra cloud storage as a premium subscription service, the way Evernote does. I’ll leave all that to others to figure out. But I had to get the proposal off my chest, and the arrival of the iPad 2 and its Android equivalents have finally brought us to the moment when the idea seems feasible.
