vernacular systems

/vər-ˈnæk-jə-lər ˈsɪs-təms/ · noun

1. A tool, machine, or piece of software that grows out of local practice and material reality, rather than abstract market demands or fashion.
2. A technology whose workings can be understood, repaired, and extended by the people who depend on it, without any specialized training.

We are a design studio operating out of a timber frame barn in rural Pennsylvania.
Our goal is to resist "the great software quality collapse" by building repairable and understandable technology.

We seek to ever so slightly extend the vernacular; to put a thin veneer of technology around it.
Not as a required failure point, but as an optional extension to the human toolset.

We do not believe in using high abstraction UI to achieve a lay, wide audience.
We believe in low abstraction mechanisms- text, command line, gears, pulleys, and embedded software.
In mainstream computing, ease of use is usually implemented as superficial simplicity, as an additional layer of complexity that hides the underlying layers.

Low abstraction understandability is superior to High abstraction comfort and polish.

We first create great technology, then seek demand.
Seeking demand first, letting the market dictate design, is how we got to where we are today- disposable javascript web apps, $80k trucks that cannot be repaired, "sustainable" smart buildings that last only a few decades.

On Firmware

Firmware is the branch of software engineering that is nearest to the real material world and therefore, we believe, the branch of software engineering that is nearest to the work of tending God's creation.

Programming in C and assembly is a form of monastic asceticism. Renouncing the comfort of abstractions, submitting to mental discipline, repeating simple gestures: Compute, Store, Branch. The holy trinity of computation. Three elementary operations from which all complexity emerges.