I was first introduced to the concept of “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” in a sort of pseudo-group therapy practice in the ’90s. A decade or so later, the idea broke into the public imagination with “There are unknown unknowns”, and while the idea has been around a while, it doesn’t seem to have a name. I call it the knowledge quadrant. The idea is that, well, there are things you know, and things you don’t know. And you can further break down the things you don’t know into things you know you don’t know and things you don’t know you don’t know and this is useful in strategic planning and psychology and probably elsewhere as well. Sometime in the previous decade the idea resurfaced to me while doing user interface design work for Subject-matter experts, because the idea as I’ve always heard it described is incompelete. There are things you know. Great, OK, we can move on now right? The things we know are boring, let’s talk about the things we don’t know, those are interesting. We’re putting a lot of work onto the word know, so I’m going to use aware to indicate the second concept in this: There are things you’re aware you don’t know, and things of which you’re unaware you don’t know. Extending this to the other half of know, well, there are things you’re aware you know, and then there are the things you’re unaware that you know, which I don’t often hear people talk about, probably because the idea seems a bit unsettling. There is space for a book that hasn’t been written yet, Zen and the Art of User Interface Design, which would heavily emphasize the idea and importance of Beginner’s Mind. I was introduced to the concept through the same pseudo-group therapy work as the knowledge classification matrix referenced above. Applied to meditation, the idea is approaching Zen meditation as if for the first time, without any preconceptions and accepting the impermanence of things and I have found repeatedly through my work that for any given project, having beginner’s mind is one of the most difficult things to do and one of the most dangerous things to get wrong. The thing about subject matter experts is that they’re so good at their subject, they often aren’t aware of what they know. They will communicate about their subject in a way that presupposes not just beginner-level knowledge but often intermediate-level knowledge as well. “Well, they’re talking to me about @subject , and everyone I talk to about @subject knows a lot about it, so of course I can assume this person who’s trying to help me do @subject on the computer better knows a lot about @subject , too”. The assumption of a base level of knowledge, the taking for granted, is a lack of knowing that one knows a thing. Figuring out what knowledge one is taking for granted when writing for a beginner is incredibly hard and often requires rounds of feedback with people who don’t have that knowledge to begin with, all to help ensure a communication is thoroughly complete enough to be properly understood by its intended audience. Calling something obvious is a tell that one has forgotten what it means to not have the sufficient knowledge to know that it’s obvious. To say one should just do a thing is to forget the experience of having learned how to do it. To try to teach someone how to do a thing and become frustrated and instead do it for them is to give up on beginner’s mind, because it’s both incredibly difficult and somewhat humiliating. It’s possible, if difficult, to cultivate the ability to become aware of the things you take for granted, the things aren’t aware that you know. As our lives become more enmeshed with technological devices, services, and processes, I think that awareness is something which we the technology-wielding should strive for if we want to build a properly humane and empathic world.