The decisive moment… When Chris Mejaski and I waded through the fluff at last year’s NXNW to discover Rich Aucoin for the first time – only because Brent insisted so passionately that I do so. When I was glancing through the Reader and noticed Rich was coming to Chicago – two days before the show’s date. When I decided to go to bed earlier on Friday night and make bread Saturday instead. When I had to wait an extra 1.5hrs for said bread to finish baking before I could leave the house to head to the show. When I kept my resolve to still go out even though it was late and I was going alone. When I turned up Clybourn instead of Southport and almost biked all the way back home before I noticed. When Rich was beyond sick but decided to push through and still play the show rather than cancel it. When I decided flash was necessary.
Why we work at POP, Or, Why I gave myself repetitive stress syndrome from keyboard shortcuts in undergrad
“Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain… How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?”
Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote an excellent essay on the importance of finding work that you love to do and how things are so much easier once you’ve got that figured that out.
If you’re not subscribed to Brain Pickings (where I got this), then you need to sign up asap!
NB: 03-01-2012
An open question: does anyone else besides me find it curious how infrequently we use BLACK white board markers?
I’m in a computer lab at the business school working on my case study for tonight, and I decided to take advantage of the white boards to throw up all my ideas. I’ve been here about an hour and already two students have approached me to ask if I’m preparing a presentation for a class or something. It’s definitely a different culture than at ID where everyone does everything on white boards. I made a comment to a friend the other day that Stuart actually has the best white boards — because no one uses them!
JOHN CAIN HIGH!
Today all four of us went to meet with John Cain at Iota to talk about our ideas for DRC. We were a little nervous since everyone has such strong reactions when you tell them you’re going to meet John Cain. Kim told us to bring our kevlar because he wouldn’t hold back his opinions. Raph just got a huge giddy smile on his face and said how much he loves talking to John.
So we knew it would be epic, but weren’t sure in what way. Turns out the man is just magic. I could gush for a while. It was thrilling to hear that he really liked our theme idea and thought that the format was one of the best DRC formats he’s ever heard about. I loved watching him process thoughts and throw ideas at us and was stoked that I understood what he was talking about and could relate and could contribute to the conversation with my own ideas and examples of what he was saying. Right after the meeting, I marched to the closest computer and dropped Synthesis so I could sign up to take John’s reading & discussion course next semester. I look forward to weekly debates and discussions with him!
In defense of Path…
A surprisingly passionate email about why I use Path that I just sent to Vanda, who thinks it’s too much like Facebook:
I agree that if you start to use it like Facebook, then there’s no point to joining, but I think that I’ve actually been using it more along the lines of how the creators wanted it to be used. I only have like 10 friends and I reject a lot of the requests that I get from people who I might have on Facebook, ysdn kids etc. For me, I use Path to share “moments” specifically with people I really care about and want to know how their day to day lives are going. It’s a nice way for me to feel more connected on a daily level with people that I don’t see anymore living in Chicago. It’s kind of like how, when you’re trying to catch up with someone, it’s hard to have an hour long Skype and feel like you “caught up” on everything that happened in the last 6 months. Instead with Path you know about the day to day mundane things that might not merit talking about in a phone call, but it’s the stuff you would chat casually about if you saw each other face to face cuz you lived in the same city still. I got both of my parents to join Path and they are actually a key reason why I still use it. I don’t have time to call my mom as much as I should, but I can put personal little things in my Path that I know she will see and I don’t have to worry about it being too personal because there aren’t that many people following me. It’s quite remarkable to see her learning how to use it as she posts things, like how I didn’t know she was going to Calgary to see my dad for family day weekend until I saw on Path that they were having dinner at a new Indian restaurant. Stuff like that. This is where I hope Path will continue to go. I’m trying to get more of my best friends to join so I can feel more in touch with them, but at the same time right now it’s a little lonely because only the early adopters are there. I hope you join. :)
What a difference good design makes!
Deep into the 20-odd tabs of civic-engagement-minded installations I have open tonight, I stumbled upon this, the Center for Urban Pedagogy. Its design is refreshingly original, which is all the more astonishing and appreciated when you’ve been skimming through sites for a few hours. It’s also timely as I had just finished looking through the spring RecruitID resume book to see what the resumes looked like and how people were talking about themselves. It’s so hard to be different!
A 24-second jolt of happy
I want to take a quick moment to draw your attention to possibly the greatest concept video I’ve ever been treated to see.
Last night I was really bummed out working on my scenario sketches for prototyping methods. I think I finally understood the frustration people got in high school when they couldn’t get their math homework done, despite their best efforts to do so (math has always come really easily to me, so I never related). No matter how much time I put into these sketches, all I could see was that the perspective was wrong but I couldn’t figure out how to make it right without anyone to help. I went to bed feeling dejected and defeated. Fast forward to class this morning, when Jorge’s little video completely cheered me up. I love that it’s so short and a little absurd and how that combination of things plus the simple facial features on the Nano Pet all work together to create the exact mood Jorge is trying to illicit when you use his product. It’s JUST GREAT.
Things we can look fwd to this summer, or, What do ID students do for their summer internships?
The school’s blog, New Idiom, made this great little video last semester asking people to tell us what they did for their summer internships and with whom.
A Sunday for serendipity
The serendipity of this afternoon’s research on potential speakers for next year’s Design Research Conference, which I am co-chairing, is getting to be a bit giddy much!
Here’s a video by Jason Silva (some crazy, excited guy whose other video Brian Donnelly played to start up his Design Research class that I guest lectured at) talking about patterns and networks. It came up in my google search when I was trying to find videos of Albert-László Barabási (the author of one of my favourite books during undergrad – Linked: how everything is connected to everything else and what it means plus Bursts: the hidden pattern behind everything we do, which I was reading over the break) to assess if he would be a good, exciting, outlier presenter for us.
The working title for our conference is The Adjacent Possible of Design Research, which is also connected to this long slew of things because in Jason’s video, he references Steven Johnson quite a lot, including his passage from Where Good Ideas Come From: the natural history of innovation wherein he brings up the term adjacent possible and describes what it means.
Jason Silva, I love your enthusiasm and energy! EPIPHANY ADDICT YES!