The vision

So, let’s talk about Pine’s design goals.

For those who know me, Pine signals a shift in how I think about knowledge management. To put it briefly, I’m less interested in externalizing sense-making to knowledge bases like Roam or Notion, and I’m more interested in improving my ability to remember what I’ve learned.

Future research diaries will unravel this a bit more, but I first want to introduce Pine’s guiding design pillars:

Game-designed, not gamified

I’m a fan of historical grand strategy games (GSGs) like Crusader Kings and the Victoria series. What separates them from many games is that they offer a complex simulation of real-world situations while still providing players with sensible tools to handle them.

In a similar way that these GSGs express a theory of history that is interesting to alternate, I want Pine’s systems to express a theory of memory that’s engaging to interact with.

This theory is currently reduced to a memory score that each card has, with each score simulating the encoding, consolidation, and retrieval phases of memory processing. For example, the negative modifiers in the retrieval phase use Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve, which models the decline of memory retention over time. These scores are then aggregated over a deck and workspace level, with your overall score determining your place in a global community leaderboard.

Flashcard-focused

In earlier experiments of Pine, I tried to integrate note-taking with flashcards. I’ll maybe write a postmortem about these attempts, but I just couldn’t direct the user experience in a way that felt focused. That’s why current iterations of Pine are almost exclusively focused on flashcards, with other data models acting as an abstraction over them.

While Pine’s interface might seem intimidating, it really only steers you towards either creating new cards or reviewing existing ones.

Approachably complex

Funnelling the user experience into specific workflows allows me to add unique interactions into unsuspecting areas.

For example, the concept of time is obviously central to how Pine works. Creating a card today will schedule it for review tomorrow, next week, and so on. In turn, Pine helps you preview your review schedule by highlighting each card's review trajectory in the sidebar calendar.

This makes forecasting busy review periods as simple as looking at your calendar’s colour density. In my case, hovering over the 1st of February reveals that I’ll have 77 cards scheduled for review:

I’ll leave it there for now, but I’m really excited to start keeping a public record of this development journey.