communication

Inspired in Theories of Communication class by reference to an experiment (performed by one Festinger) which shows that performing a behavior has more effect on one's thoughts/feelings about the behavior than do logic, culture, preconcieved notions, etc, I went back and found this link:
Researcher V.S. Ramachandran - has been doing lots of interesting things which I happened to run across (i think he must be friends with Gladwell) regarding understanding self, such as using mirrors to cure phantom-limbs. His site: http://cbc.ucsd.edu/ramabio.html

The radiolab page where I first heard about it: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2005/03/04

This, as well as the experiment by Festinger, seem to bolster the theory described by John Searle as ephiphenomenalism (which he claimed in one of his books that no philosopher had ever taken seriously), wherein mental states are byproducts of physical processes and don't have any physical repercussions - except perhaps to inhibit actions. The wikipedia article on epiphenomenalism takes the neuroscience a little deeper, but the implication for design/persuasion is clear with just this:
1. frame a goal for a user in terms of avoiding some behavior (not necessarily negative - if the goal is to begin eating more fruit, the designer aims to avoid fixating on the desirability of steak, bread, chips, ... including everything that would fill the user's belly EXCEPT fruit.) As Chuck would put it, 'make it easier to do than to avoid the behavior'.
2. Bring the avoided activity into awareness in the time window where it's up for action but not yet committed to (such as browsing the fridge, headed toward checkout at the supermarket)
3. Distract the user from the avoided behavior (stress, fear, and physical noise are reliable but expensive; music and beauty work as long as there is social order; fascinating puzzles or information work with fewer people but are far cheaper to implement at scale).

This also relates to the work of Humberto Maturana on the evolution of communication at the cellular level.

evolution of hyperlinks

browsing through wikipedia, I wondered who adds all those links down towards the bottom of the page... they're generally pretty thorough, perhaps too much so as they often lead me down an hour's worth of tangential-path exploration during my research. But they're not as interesting or inspiring as Amazon's recommendation engine. Why not have dynamically defined links, based on the frequency with which a user, organization, or other entity uses two pages (and possibly make a hierarchical (info architecture)structure for the wiki based on the groups thereof, calculated through something resembling the matrix clustering method?)?
Disregarding for now the admirable complexity and sophistication of Amazon's suggestion engine(s), this idea essentially suggests making the recommendation method of finding info and experiences mundane, and then merging it with the existing model of 'menus'.

Before 1920, the success of Newton's and Einsteins theories, and of science and math in general, were so great that everyone conflated them with reality itself. In my reading on the philosophy of science and mathematics, I've seen that the basic trend for the last 60 years (actually sparked by Kurt Godel in 1931, but nobody believed/understood the implications until later) has been to understand the limitations of mathematics and logic. Basically: physical phenomena are a smallish part of what is important for humans.

Today, at the tail end of the public's awakening to this fact, there is a huge need for something new. What we need is not just an explanation of how science/math/econ is limited (this is done well by Morris Kline in 'Mathematics: the end of certainty', Nicholas Tassim Taleb, everyone who writes about chaos, and others), but about how they fit - alongside art, exploration, and intuition - into the actual and supremely effective social, biological, and cognitive processes that science can't/won't/hasn't developed a place for.

(this could also be connected to the burgeoning debate about the inadequacies of the academic system)

architecture

"Frank Duffy's layering of buildings into Site-Structure-Skin-Services-Space-plan-and-Stuff"


"What are we to make of all this apparent fraudulence? As a boat lover I remember when fiberglass boats first came along in the 1950s, and everyone said they would never work, never sell, never last. Wrong on every count. Fiberglass boats are lighter and stronger than wood, more intricately shaped, and they endure negligent owners, which wood cannot, because they are immune to teredo worms, dry rot, and baking sun. Fiberglass never leaks; wood always does, top and bottom. And yet a magazine called Woodenboat, founded in 1969, became one of the all-time publishing successes through worshipping the virtues of wood in boats. Those virtues consist entirely of the aesthetics of tradition and the discipline of managing a short-lived material. I have owned and sold an excellent plastic boat and owned and kept a troublesome wooden boat. Why? The Wood feels better, and I can fiddle with it. But if I really had to sail somewhere, I'd get fiberglass or steel."


from Stewart Brand in his 1994 'How Buildings Learn'

The Third Culture and The Edge

"The strength of the third culture is precisely that it can tolerate disagreements about which ideas are to be taken seriously. "

http://www.edge.org/about_edge.html

synonyms by culture

Surely there is a crowdsourced thesaurus and dictionary (thought it's reprehensible that the major ones - dictionary.reference.com - don't allow it) - and I'll assume that somebody can apply the best practices in filtering/judging entries. But we need a way to divide/distinguish and then visualize/represent the changes in our language over time and by geographic boundaries. Even more: by culture, profession, or interest type.

For instance: reframe, innovation, design
mean vastly different things (which is at least kinda addressed in good dictionaries), and these distinctions aren't addressed at all in thesaurusi.

self-direction

Moving quickly towards the top of the to-do list (from somewhere around #1000 when I first thought of it months ago): apply an insight matrix to my own interests, knowledge, and experiences.

This is in pursuit of narrowing down my focus from everything to a couple key points - in the process I'd probably stumble across a bonus new/different formulation of what design is about or where it's headed.

software observations

Why don't restaurant point of sale devices support dividing bills for large parties? for that matter, why not get them to use a handheld device to allow the server to do it at the table?

Then, I found myself pressing ctrl+g to search for a highlighted term in google - this is a great feature that I was pleased to stumble on in firefox (right click a highlighted word) - though it's still missing 'define'. What would it take to have the program recognize that I use that command frequently and guess that it's what I wanted to effect?

project management

Among my favorite topics is the abstraction called 'meta', or 'recursion', and sometimes characterized by 'levels of abstraction'. I am sometimes suspicious that most people aren't aware of it, or at least don't care about it. That's probably because most of the time I think individuals or groups are addressing it specifically and primarily, leading me to throw out something that has the same relationship to another part of the discussion - and usually to get a response which is either a very short meditation on the Koan I've offered or an awkward silence.

To be a little more specific: if a is meta to b, then b is a part of a ('part' could also be 'contained by', 'defined by', 'child', 'branch', 'aspect', 'dimension'). This is immensely confusing because there is no standard about whether or not this relationship is communicative - that is, whether you can switch a and b and still use the word 'meta'.

Demonstration: What is the relationship between A)'Strategy' and B)'Tactics'?
1. A is higher-level than B.
2. A is lower-level than B.
3. A is an overarching concept encompassing B and other concepts.
4. A is an underlying concept at the root of B and other concepts.

After much study, I believe that the relationship it is communicative (non-directional), but that nobody recognizes this. Thanks to Lakoff for helping me to see: this is because our representations of the relationship all rely on spatial metaphors (which is inherently directional for humans, unless you're an astronaut).

Examples: Christopher Alexander's model of abstraction in the design process shows direct learning of how to build a house - i.e. by watching someone and helping them - closer to the top of the printed page than mediated house design - i.e. architectural plans - which is higher again than reflective design - i.e. critiquing a plan as a drawing, as a physical and visible object.
The Christian model of 'infinity', 'eternity', and 'truth' as being way up in the sky, beyond the clouds.
When someone is talking about principles, attributes, or concepts which are unfamiliar or foreign - and thus not linked to anything tangible in the listener's experience - (i.e. 'innovation', 'collaboration', 'utopia', or 'e to the pi i plus one equals zero'), one might say the speaker 'has his head in the clouds'.
When someone speaks of familiar principles that the listener has, time and again, heard associated with particular events and environments (for my father - and thus for me - theses are values like 'a good, hard day's work', 'the value of a dollar', 'quality', and 'power'), the speaker is described as 'having his/her feet on the ground,' and their pronouncements are 'fundamental truths'.

This exploration of metaphors and language lends itself to a thousand tantalizing tangents, but I'm most interested in how the principles, groups, and relationships that are so important to one person are routinely presented and represented ass-backwards to another person. And I don't mean just that they're talking about different levels - one about a strategy and the other about a tactic - but that one person is imagining to move in the direction of bigger, longer-term, more all-encompassing strategies, and the other person is imagining to move in the direction of more concrete, immediate, actionable specifics - and they both describe the next phase of planning as 'strategy'.

With a clearer understanding of the commutability of 'meta', we can work out a standard which will help rectify this.

There were other examples of this phenomenon from class today, but I have to get ready for class tomorrow!

decoupling intuitive relations from complex calculations in mathematics education

Got my hair cut by a european lady with an advanced degree in mathematics this morning, and we managed to find a lot to agree about but it seems I need to work on this idea about a new conception of what math is and how to teach it. On the one hand, as she pointed out, you can't enjoy the power and fluency of a skill unless you practice it, repeating over and over, training yourself and ingraining it where you no longer struggle with the basic parts. On the other hand, there are lots of ways to use logic inside a structured rubric which don't involve numbers, such as the design methods I'm learning about at ID.
Between those two extremes of mathy versus non-mathy logical tools, there are many useful frameworks that are already part of the standard conception of mathematics, yet which don't require full fluency with numeric calculations to understand. As evidence I submit the popularizations of quantum and theoretical physics by many practicing physicists like Stephen Hawking, Murray Gell-Man and Michio Kaku, as well as accessible (if heavy) explanations of underlying/overarching themes in other mathematics-heavy disciplines like Hofstaedter's 'Godel, Escher, Bach' in computer science and 'The World is Flat' in economics.
Yet to my knowledge, no one has popularized any pieces of advanced mathematics so. Doing so could facilitate the reader's ability to see the world in such a way that quadratic equations and derivatives are relevant. I'm currently reading 'fooled by randomness' by Nicolas Tassim Taleb, which comes fairly close to doing this by relating a lot of powerful vignettes where reality fails to conform to some of the basic tenets of statistics and economics. I think he doesn't achieve what I'm describing only because the book is focused so heavily on the financial industry that the broader application is only vaguely suggested. It's also not a great introduction to the principles involved because it is essentially demonstrating Godel's assertion (perhaps when I finish reading I will be able to say whether it's a derivative or variation thereof?), which is all about what you can't do with mathematics. Perhaps there's a way to turn Godel's theorem inside out so that it's about what you *can* do with mathematics?

Here are the parts of mathematics that seem to me to have relevance outside of numbers-intensive disciplines:
- set theory, which is about groups and their relationships (especially container/contained and identity/collection). Has applications in systems theory, could be exemplified through stories about societies and looking at emergence.
- Boolean and Bayesian logic, which are about alternatives, decision making, or branching structures. Could be exemplified through stories about management, flow of goods, and control structures (which is another way to say flow of information?).

wiki visual

Apeksha and I were talking the other day about user interface, and (thoroughly indirectly) came up with the idea that a google search should include - in part at least - a visual breakdown of the general areas that are associated with the term you're searching, so that you can know at once how to get a decent overview of the topic.

The problem with this shares a common root with the problem of natural language processing and with artificial intelligence (at least on cursory examination), which basically means that to implement it we have to have humans construct the list of categories by hand for every search. Thankfully this has already been done to a large extent by wikipedia!

Not two hours later, I read in Fast Company that some people have already been working on visualizing wikipedia... but after a quick google search it looks like they're all concerned with visualizing the whole thing. Here's a collection that is (again after cursory search - let me know if you find different) representative:
http://www.scimaps.org/maps/wikipedia/

Understanding the structure of human knowledge in general is great, and some of these people have made it visually compelling too, but it looks like nobody has put this idea into a particular context, so here's a quick sketch of the idea:




So while I was making that sketc, I was thinking, 'surely this quick sketch wouldn't blow their minds over at google - there has to be somebody there who's thought of this and prototyped it a little more thoroughly than me...' And yep, sure enough they have. Go to 'show options' on the results page, and then click 'wonder wheel' towards the bottom of the list, and you'll see something like this:




It looks to be basically what we were thinking of, requires a little more research to determine if basing it on wikipedia would be more useful, robust, etc.

the new planning

I came to ID thinking that Design and Planning still operated like in the 50s, setting out a five year plan or a grand vision of a shiny future. I'm finding that there's a different kind of big-picture, a model of the world that doesn't break down due to new information but adapts to it, that doesn't rely on a rigid, linear set of goals but rather sets out a bundle of densely interconnected questions to be explored, and that accelerates its progress as more people with more different viewpoints want to join the party. I'm hoping to find a career creating tools to help others understand and use these principles.

hans reiser

This guy hans reiser, apparently some kind of hard-core coder, has an interesting observation on information theory: if you add to the length of time it takes to access a piece of info, you divide the number of people who will ever access it.

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/03/06/18/1516239/Hans-Reiser-Speaks-Freely-About-Free-Software-Development

experience economy

The basic idea of the experience economy was in my head soon after I got to ID, but I am only now reading it firsthand. The 1998 HBR article seems to be an excellent blueprint for creating a design consultancy - I would be very interested to know if any consultancies explicitly used this method, or if Pine and Gilmore had done work with any of those consultancies.
In particular, it seems that the consultancies are elevating research (possibly education - maybe this is the generalization we're building now at ID) from a service to an experience. I like to oversimplify such things in the form of an earnest, text-heavy, 50-s style advertisement:

"Does your company lack knowledge in a particular field, or are you having trouble with a particular process? Call us - not only will we enable you to build what you want to build, but we'll make you rock stars in the process and give you the opportunity to tell all your buddies at the golf course that you are working with some of the world's most talented people.

Compare this to the alternatives of the painful learn-it-yourself approach, or the humbling experience of asking for help, or the (acutally I'm not sure what it's like) experience of getting BCG to drop by, and it's clear they've found a great opportunity space. Next experience to offer:

"So your company/city/ruling party has collapsed. It's no time to venally try to hang on to power - come to the Transformation Institute and relax in the sun while taking in the latest ideas from others in your situation while we all work together to plot the next venture/revolution."

Action vs Reflection

I'm so glad for the intellectual revolutions of the 60s and 70s. The earlier generation dealt with tearing the structure down the ground and then rejecting what remained of it inside themselves.
It is clear that they were generally right - but it's equally clear that they had to fail. Just because we recognize that there is something fundamentally wrong with the situation - whether it's our society our ourselves - there is no option of giving it all up.
Even with all of the mind-freeing and radical experimentation of the past few decades, we still see that our government enacts horrors while most of our social institutions are (at best) distracted. We have all heard the call to stand up for the environment, for the disenfranchised, for the children. Yet still, Al Gore gave up the presidency.
Yes, we are disillusioned - try as we might to hold onto the dreams of utopia in our literary havens, we can't devote ourselves to the vision of a future that our parents fought for. They rioted, they dissented, they rebelled - yet still, all over our great country (and increasingly all over the world) life is defined by material possessions and experiences consist mostly of interacting with faceless retail corporations.
But just as much as we have lost the illusion of a peaceful, natural, synergetic future Small World After All, we have gained the perspective that comes at the dusk of the golden age of a civilization.
We have seen so many of those hippies settle down and get real jobs and raise kids in the very social, political, and economic structure whose validity they once questioned, encouraging them to excel in the only dimension which seems to be available. (to climb the only ladder which we have?)
We've seen the corporations that poison our environemnt with products and pollute our culture with ads begin to embrace their own evolution and breed with the counterculture.
We've seen the greatest of oppressors provide unity and growth in local communities while nonprofits and academia are revealed to be strong supporters and excellent progenitors of the existing power structure.
Yet we don't lose hope - because we know that these are us. They are made by, for, and of us, even if we don't like what htey are doing.
Detaching ourselves from our history - and by implication, from our present - would be equivalent to raising ourselves up by our own bootstraps. They discovered that cutting out the greed, the exclusionism, and the small-mindedness that characterize too much of human affiars, we would have to give up the stability, the satisfaction of achievement, and the love that make it worthwhile to struggle and suffer.
Yet it is, in fact, a physical reality (if only at a quantum level, for massless particles) that energy expended in a new direction can experience a feedback loop and gather strength and momentum from its reflection in its own medium.

craigslist design

From wired.com, an analysis of craigslist and how and why it's one of the biggest communities on the internet despite the fact that it doesn't put any effort at all towards design, marketing, presentation, etc.

""

The truth is that a lot of people complain about craigslist. Buckmaster is correct that few of them complain about the design. They complain about spam, they complain about fraud, they complain about the posting rules, they complain about the search, they complain about uploading images. They complain about every way a classified transaction can go wrong. They seldom complain about amazing new features they imagine they might possibly want to use, because they are too busy complaining about the simple features they depend on that don't work as well as they'd like.

""

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_craigslist?currentPage=3

philosophy and details

It looks like I've decided to focus on interaction design (or, perhaps it would be better to call it at this point software design, perhaps even programming, until I get familiar enough with the medium to really produce something new and/or compelling).
I've had trouble the past few years committing to anything particular as a career goal or path, because performing any particular task seemed to limit my focus, learning, and abilities to simply that activity. I think ID has shown me how to work on the tiniest details with utter abandon until they are of the highest quality possible, the highest quality produced in the world. But the professors here didn't do it by showing me how to polish and polish until something shines (though there is some of that, thanks Larry) - they showed me how to do it by linking the niggling, insignificant, myriad details with the big, fuzzy, philosophical-worldview-level, which is the only part I find compelling.
My next task is to become more adept at creating a smooth gradation in my storytelling between the details and the framework. For now, I only have time to jump straight into the lowest level.


Bug List

Print Settings
When you press the 'print' button icon, that skips the options dialogue boxes, in Word or InDesign, do you know which settings are being used? Is it printing with the formatting that you used for the full-color, tabloid sized poster you printed yesterday, or did you print a simple text document since then? Will you get four copies, or just pages 4 and 6? I've learned to check the dialog box every time I print anything - why doesn't the button give some indication of the active print settings it will enact? Even better, these applications should allow me to create several different print settings and turn them into buttons on the menu for quick access.

space ghetto matrix

carefully craft insights, then put them next to random photos from the internet and try to deduce the relationship, leading to deep, unexpected insights about the topic at hand. Meets JG's criterion of mysticism.

planning is dead

Long-term planning, in its traditional sense, is dead. The ability to specifically predict the tone, tenor, overall shape, and other details of a corporation, society, family, or any other complex organization more than a few years in the future is just as much a dream as Laplace's idea that we could mechanically extrapolate what will be happening in the world, given enough information about its current state. But there are other sorts of long-term planning.

Agent-based modeling assumes that the simple rules which govern interactions between individuals can produce evolving (even revolutionary sometimes) systems, but are relatively stable themselves. By creating modular systems, which give workers pre-made pieces that are rigidly constrained but allow freedom of what to build with those pieces, we can effectively design systems in a few dimensions but must leave them open in the broader shape and telos.

But maybe other abstract characteristics, such as values, morals, and beliefs in a society or strategic plan in a company, can be looked at in terms of the effect they really do have (because obviously they don't - in fact - cause their respective organizations to comply with their edicts). There is likely some systematic effect of these kinds of ideas on the outcomes of human organizations. We could call it a phemonenological view of teleology.

As our politicians, CEOs, and futurists begin to realize that we can't predict or shape the future at the macro scale, we will be forced to focus on getting things better at the micro-scale. Focusing on the details, as designers would say, will become the prerogative of society in general.

science of quality

Christopher Bartneck claims that design is the science of quality. I was meditating on that and thought that maybe quality is all the stuff that other sciences can't qualify. any better thoughts?

invasive species

Henry King (of Doblin) makes a widely-recognized observation that the recession will lead to innovation. He takes it one small step farther: as the economy picks up again, we'll see emerging new business models and unexpected fast-growing players in many stagnant industries.
These are currently tiny and invisible firms, and as the economy picks up steam they'll take off and grow much faster than their peers. It seems we without jobs right now are extremely well-placed to take advantage of this by looking for such innovation and placing ourselves within these types of companies.

decision science

It's not that I'm anti-social, but I don't participate in the green movement, nor in the race to save all who are suffering in Africa and elsewhere, nor usually even to keep my family and friends updated and in-the-loop about me and my life. I haven't made a conscious decision to behave in these ways, and I haven't made a conscious decision not to.

You might say that it's my culture to do them, but my culture is so diffuse and heterogeneous that it would be silly to characterize it this - or any other - way. You might say I'm just lazy, but if that's true then at least 99% of humans are lazy, and again that seems a silly way to characterize things.

Instead, I'm going to propose that, even though I roughly understand the negative consequences of using styrofoam, not volunteering for an unpaid internship in India, and not calling my mother, I do them because they benefit me as a person. Although I am dedicated to the greater good in some ways, it's not in my actions.

There are a myriad reasons for this, including personal inertia, my own fear and uncertainty, and my sense of achievement from all the other activities which I personally value more than environmentalism and other trendy worldviews. There's a growing field of study designed to deal with these issues - decision science. I don't know much about it and don't have time to learn right now - back to homework!

droughts and margins

Droughts kill societies. Along with using up resources, the straight out vagaries of nature are not amenable to our long-term goals. It's not always our own human nature that drives the death of society - although in this light these difficulties also drive our evolution.

This is important for designers because we must realize that it's important to design for the extreme users, like the cliff-dwellers of New Mexico around 1400, who are running low on water, crops, and tress, whose neighbors are coming around to kill them and steal their supplies, and who have no hope that the drought will ever end.

What kind of products and systems could help in this situation? The long now foundation begins to offer an answer, but it's even more helpful to think about extreme sustainability. What can we reuse? What can we make to last a few years longer? What can we refill or repair instead of throwing it away?

While I hope we'll be able to continue along our current trajectory and build a space elevator in the coming decades, we'll be better and safer to focus on raising the floor of the conditions that society reverts to in times of war, plague, and drought, when our complicated systems break down. There is a need to keep working on the most basic mechanisms to make them more robust and more broadly applicable. Even if we can make writing, growing wheat, or storing water 1/100th of 1% more efficient, we can transform the world.

awareness

I think the zeitgiest of the past couple decades has been about the horror and difficulties of self-awareness, how when you realize you're doing something or participating in something, it's over. But there are certain things where you can be aware and still do it, and perhaps even a state of mind that lets you be aware without destroying what you're aware of.

attention economy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy

A highly relevant and timely idea, the attention economy is coming to be but not in the way expressed in this article at least. It lists some of Ronald Coase's ideas about how to implement attention transactions, but doesn't notice that tools like digg and delicious are already accomplishing it.

economics

There are two basic principles on which economics is based, and they are both false.

1. People act in their own best self-interest.
In fact, that doesn't always happen - it's demonstrable that people don't do this. They have social, personal, emotional reasons to behave otherwise, not even considering that "best self-interest" is impossible to define in terms that individuals experience.

2. All other things being equal, two products with different value will sell for different prices.
In fact, all other things are never equal. We live in a very complex world.

Once we accept these basic limitations of economics, we can use it to understand many things about the world. But pretending like it IS reality (instead of an imperfect model of reality), is like going into McDonald's with several business partners you're trying to impress, intending to sit down to a delicious steak dinner on white tablecloths with a vintage wine, topped off with a world-class bananas foster and a nightcap of port.

archives

Are there any types of information which are not currently being collected and recorded?

Or is the question more about how to make information - which has already been abstracted out of reality - more accessible?

too big to fail

The big book I've just started, Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings, points out that errors and failures are a key part of our learning process. If we were to accomplish the "goal" of many theories and methods of stopping errors and failures, we would stop learning.
The assumption that the risk management techniques and other fancy features of the economy would stabilize it and moderate the business cycle was unrealistic. An assumption that any human-created system can operate without failure misunderstands the nature of human-created systems.
In fact, because we expect them to evolve, human systems must fail every so often.

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13315818&source=hptextfeature

It's very interesting to think about the process of commercializing scientific research. I wonder how formalized the process is at MIT and other large research universities - maybe there's the potential for a research project there.

open source bank

the title on an article from wired.com today gave me the impression that someone was going to create a p2p bank - a financial trading/loan mechanism hosted and owned by thousands of loosely affiliated individuals, with no central control or ownership. Turns out that's not what the article was actually about, but wouldn't that be an awesome invention?

subintelligitur

I've been subscribing to Anu Garg's word of the day for a couple of years now, mostly for the quotes at the bottom of the email. But sometimes a new word jumps out at me, and its etymology suggests to me patterns in the evolution of our culture.

today's word of the day: subintelligitur. Meaning: something that is not made explicit, but is nonetheless understood.

The quote used to illustrate:
"We pray to God as a Person, as a larger self; but there must always be a subintelligitur that He is not a Person. Our forms of worship, public and private, imply some interference with the course of nature."
Benjamin Jowett; Life & Letters; 1886.

This reminds me of my many (mostly imagined) arguments with religious types about how god should not be anthropomorphised this way. And this reminds me of the dozens of other philosophical conversations railing against the representation of some cultural norm or value as a simple, well-contained entity (because they are in fact ambiguous, abstract, and evolving).

The reason for these conversations, and many others like them, is essentially to bring out into the open the underlying assumptions and understandings of our society, culture, and race. It is to make explicit those subintelligitur supports for our culture which buoy it up over the chaos of the animal world. It is to cut the earth and stone away from another, deeper level of the girders of social agreements that guide our collective behaviors.

Once we free the structure of our society from the darkness of the unconscious, it is no longer held static by our genetic predispositions which evolve at a glacial pace. Once we can see and analyze the assumptions and preconceptions which define our culture, we can begin to fix them where they are broken or where technology has shifted our needs away from our evolved social tools. Or we can take the pieces and build something altogether new.

David Foster Wallace as visionary

Reading in the New Yorker about David Foster Wallace today was kind of surreal. The story reminds me of myself on many levels, but I was surprised to feel that I would have had a lot more empathy with him a year or two ago. I was also chasing my impossible dreams of capturing or expressing something I knew and felt: the epiphany of infinity that swallowed me while I was contemplating the nature of abstraction in that cold, lonely cabin in the Arkansas foothills. I formulated it on paper once or twice, but I've never really shown it to anyone except Dad. I accept that nobody will understand or care until I can find a use for it.

None the less, the discussion of boredom - emptiness - that he was trying to capture resonates deeply. The few clips from his writing struck a chord inside me and reminded me of the joy of capturing little insights and feelings through words. But I think there is something in the story even deeper about the drive to envision something and then transform it into a representation in reality. Much like the design process, the author goes through a learning process where he writes, reflects on that, and lets the limitations of what is possible reflect onto the envisioned goal.

The stronger the will of the writer or the designer, the more he or she will stick to that original vision regardless that what is created is but a shallow shade of the abstraction. And doubtless DFW was a strong one, but perhaps he could not live with the inherent limitations of reality; perhaps he could not accept that some visions cannot be fully captured, represented, and communicated.

I am a weaker sort of creator - I will throw myself into a vision for a little while, but after that first pass is done I realize that I'm burning myself up to go back to it, to try it again. Once I've got it to a first level of approximation, I move on to the next project and the next vision. Grad school has taught me to hold on a little longer, to let my goal evolve and change in response to what I can create, and to then try again to bring the goal into being.

But looking at the design process through this lens, another of ID's great focuses comes into focus: the commonly-held original vision. When a group of four or five designers collectively hammer out an instantiation of an idea, none of them can hold back, none of them can say of the entire project "this isn't what I wanted" unless he's going to give up on the group. The project inexorably moves forward, with each team member merely adding to an existing object, none fully responsible for the original idea, and none able to fully negate the value within.

presenting

I've been unsure the last couple of days about my end-of-quarter presentations. I don't have that sharp, clear feeling that we have achieved the level of simplicity and deep insight that I normally associate with success. Yet it seems that my professors and colleagues are satisfied - even impressed - with the quality of my teams' work.
Several understandings of this situation present themselves:
1. There's an opportunity area for adding what I see as a missing level of insight and depth on top of the workaday strengths of ID methods or, more generally, on top of simply copying what others are doing in any given field.
2. I am having a fair degree of success actually achieving that, and should be careful to gently push myself to greater facility and clarity over the coming decades, rather than becoming angry and disillusioned that my dreams are not realized now.
3. They are just being nice, and if I don't gear up and really focus soon I'll end up at the bottom of my class.
4. There are other measures of success that everyone else is aiming for - I should seek out and better understand these other value systems in order to better communicate.

In general, I have a lot of extra energy with which to push myself which is not finding its way into my schoolwork. The deeper question is: to what extent can I meet my professional goals while still taking time to pursue art, philosophy, and girls?

ephemeralization

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13208736

Pianos are being replaced by digital replicas. The lead of this story, though, is that Yamaha has gone to great lengths to get the player's experience to mimic that of playing an analog grand piano, as well as the concertgoer's.
The first implication from this goes along with the digitization of car steering, chemistry labs, cameras, warehouses, and dozens of other information capture and transformation processes. I'm certain there are a few processes which will always continue in the old, direct, mechanical way, but it's increasingly clear that it's not easy to tell which side of the line any given object will fall on.
The deeper implication is that a professionally trained piano player doesn't feel right without the characteristic motion of the keys and the hammers, and they are even sensitive to the vibrations strings cause in the piano body. Now that the sound coming out of the piano has been decoupled from the mechanisms which produce those experiences, there is a new degree of freedom in producing a musical instrument. What kind of music would a concert pianist produce if the vibrations in a piano's body were the inverse of the notes played? What if the keys had two click-points, could be pulled upwards as well for a different effect, or had a variable resistance setting? What if notes played on one instrument could be mapped onto and come out of another instrument, or if another surface entirely - like a door or a table - could become an instrument, or if another device like a coffee machine or a printer could be fitted with such experiential, force-feedback controls?

Too many options - who has a way to narrow them down into a world that makes sense?

consumerism

Watched "The Reader" yesterday and realized that our irresponsible consumerism is enabled/created by the same sort of dysfunctional social system that allowed the Nazis and the SS to kill millions of innocent people.

compression

Reading too many books and magazine articles, I keep coming across more that I should read. The tenth or twentieth time I'm recommended to read something I'll go to the library and pick it up, but this is dangerous because passing by the "New Arrivals" section I'll inevitably see two or three titles that are not just interesting but germane and specific to the research I'm turning in in a few weeks.
I take a break from all this by getting back to my fundamental research on abstraction, communication, and the theory of knowledge that I won't be turning in for at least a decade. I want to sum up this article or that one so I can come back to it later (when I have more time) and fit it into a larger structure, and it occurs to me that - perhaps - this is one primary goal of literary criticism and analysis: to condense the long-winded explorations of the ancients and the greats into a sufficiently compact format that our peers and colleagues will have time and energy to digest them.
At any rate, now that I see it as even on the same level as the other goals of analysis and critique, I'm letting it serve as a motivator for me. Even though my work may be infinite, at least I can make it easier for others to access the information I have at hand.

postmodern fairytales

Sunday:

I remember it bothered my family when I started to say things like, "god - that stupid bastard - I doubt he'd understand what we wanted if he was sober and awake enough pay attention."

I have a dream where god is sitting in a beautiful, old building in this giant, ornate chair, strapped down and gagged, trying to motion to the children not to believe the lies of the people who put him in this gilded cage called a church.
but the children just laugh and poke him like a stuffed animal.


I once dreamed god was a pinata full of lies

assertionism

When trying to lead, the most effective statements are assertions. Laying out a form or structure gives people something to see and feel - even if they don't like it, they can hardly ignore it, and since most people don't have the time, energy, or foresight to replace it with something of their own choosing they will usually end up accepting it and using it.
Even if the assumed followers are actively opposed to you or your assertion, unless they're fast and smart enough to build an opposing assertion the best they can do is try to tear yours down.
Compare this to a popular format in the humanities - critique. Taking time and thought to show where or how another author/artists' work is deficient can - at best - say that it's imperfect. It can never say that it's entirely unvaluable, because just taking the time to critique shows that it has some inherent value you're trying to strengthen and bring out.

network anxiety

A couple of days ago two satellites collided, creating an unknown amount of debris in orbit. There's some small chance that one of these pieces will collide with another satellite, creating lots more debris and setting of a chain reaction which will destroy many more satellites.

Telling a friend about this yesterday, she commented that it would be great to have a little less communication in this world - a few fewer emails, maybe a smaller dose of news, not as many friend requests on facebook... After learning about the value and methods of networking while I was in Washington, I have seldom given voice to my own desires to be more cut off, more disconnected, more careless about the thousands of people I've met and learned the names of and don't really care about anymore. But this describes it almost perfectly: we're aiming to become too connected - maybe there's an optimal amount of friends and acquaintances, and maybe it's finite.

Steven Levy wrote about a similar feeling yesterday in Wired. While lots of people would probably disagree - those with 800 facebook friends, rolodexes with the business card of everyone they've shaken hands with, or who make those few thousand dollars worth of conference worth every cent - maybe there is a place in our society for those of us who don't want to be networked. Personally, there's a 90% chance I'll find joy and fulfillment sitting at home, alone, reading philosophy, while there's closer to 10% chance I'll have fun going out and meeting new people. Perhaps this extroversion even evolves during one's life?

If you agree, don't leave a comment, don't friend me on facebook, just be content that we're all together in our fear of falling satellites.

Ambiguity or opacity?

The mechanisms of society and culture are a great mystery to most people. My time in college - especially in Washington - helped reveal to me how and why things work, and my time here in Chicago is opening up another world of doors to power, influence, and ideas. But still much remains closed, invisible or uninterpretable, reminding me of one of the great maxims of ID: "Accept the Ambiguity".
But perhaps it's not just ambiguity - perhaps there are parts which are deliberately made opaque. There exists the possibility that fearful or power-hungry individuals hide knowledge, processes, and above-mentioned doors in order to create scarcity. If this is truly the case - which surely it is in some places, as described in the book Secrets by Daniel Ellsberg - our society is currently undergoing profound transformations brought about by the cult of transparency.
In many circles, notably Academia and NGOs, the free flow of information sparked by the printing press and reaching its apogee in the internet is humanity's most fundamental source of value. This worldview implies that more open access to information creates a more efficient and effective use of that information, enriching everyone.
If there is anyone not committed to this idea of sharing access and knowledge, they may remain powerful and rich, but they will drown in the rising tide of converging societies that is coming to define our era.

Alexis vs Klinker

A fascinating article contrasting the ID "sellout" viewpoint of design with the Cranbook "artsy-fartsy" viewpoint: http://www.cranbrookdesign.com/index.php/topics/more/design_versus_innovation_the_cranbrook_iit_debate/

I'm pleased and surprised how little Apple came up in this discussion, but I find it amusing that Jobs and Ivy have purposefully kept their methods and viewpoint about design hidden (of course, other than that it's important - which we can all agree on). I can't imagine Apple doesn't do extensive user research, but they obviously cultivate a certain flair or spirit. This opacity is probably just another strategic move to keep us all buying their products.
While Alexis, Owen, and our other professors are successfully infusing method, clarity, and rigor into our thinking here at ID, they also - subtly and implicitly - call upon us to follow our intuition and let a strong viewpoint show itself in our work.
As a student of the humanities, I like to think that not only does a designer need both the spirit and the method, but that we won't be human at all if we give up either the form or the function of our work.

Official google.org Blog: How to assess entrepreneurial potential? A new tool for SME lenders

Official google.org Blog: How to assess entrepreneurial potential? A new tool for SME lenders

Bottom, Middle, Top of the pyramid

A project I worked on last semester parallels work that is being done at google.org - my project for Larry Keeley's class (dqe1.com/files/juncture-proposal.pdf) focused on creating an 'opportunity engine' that connects various NGOs like Kiva, Grammeen Bank, and Heifer Intl. to let them share data and get better coverage of their customers. The Google project (http://blog.google.org/2008/09/how-to-assess-entrepreneurial-potential.html) is more than a proposal - they of course have funding. They are aiming for a much higher spot on the small-business ladder, funding in the half-million dollar and up range. But the perspective and the goals are closely aligned: scaling down our immediate ambitions to reach out to a larger number of potential customers.

This is also the case in a new class I'm very excited about with Patrick Whitney this semester. We're examining why CK Prahalad's "Bottom of the Pyramid' theory isn't working out. He proposed in his 2006 book that large multinationals should consider serving people who make less than a few dollars a day - there are so many of them that even if we sell them a product for $.01 every day, we can make a killing over the course of a year with 4 billion customers. While this has worked out in a few isolated cases (Hindustan Lever, Mo Ibrahim's cell phone networks), in general it's taking longer than expected and companies are having a rough time with it. So my classmates and I are going to contact some of the leaders of organizations which have attempted and failed to try to develop a framework to help make this effort more reliably successful.

At this point in the process, we're still looking for organizations with experience reaching out to the BOP market and leaders to contact who might give us some perspective on the problem at hand.

Official google.org Blog: How to assess entrepreneurial potential? A new tool for SME lenders

vonnegut's lobotomy

In Galopogos, Vonnegut suggests that in a million years humans will have evolved much smaller brains (and turned into dolphin-like creatures), laughing and crying about the ridiculous machinations and complexities of our current society. Indeed, it's doubtless that much of what our culture produces is tangent - if not downright opposed - to our long-term survival (not useless, however, as nobody can really say right now which part is wheat and which is chaff).
It occurred to me last night - at a particularly lucid point in the last few weeks' dream of simple being unencumbered by the worry and existential pain that usually haunts me - that maybe giving up some of this ambition, responsibility, and sense of loss in the shadow of my imagined genius is evolutionarily beneficial. Of course I've realized before (thanks to help from Lao Tzu and sakyamuni) that it could be helpful for me, but I was still chased by spectres of Marx who wanted me to suffer an hour so my children would live in a paradise for ten.

constitutional celebration

Time for a constitutional amendment party!!!
Maybe it's just that I've had my first cup of coffee from a clover machine, but I'm swayed and convinced by this article that it's time and ready for change:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200901/founders-mistake/3

superficiality

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. -Martin Luther King, Jr., civil-rights leader (1929-1968)

Some day i'll write a computer program to come up with new analogies and it will tell me, "I have a dream that my four offspring will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the material of their bodies but by the content of their character."

I'm just saying - they're not really conscious if they've just copied it off this blog...

acting

maybe actors are born by never learning, intuitively, to act. These simplest of people always show what they are feeling with direct, un-second-guessed earnestness. When somebody puts them into a situation, they baldly display their reaction to it. When a director says, "now you're in love," they know what that feels like and don't worry too much about the meta-level motivations, ironies, hidden information, etc, which people (me, at at least) take into account to help their position in social situations.

Of course, then there's the other way, where actors have an intuitive grasp of how to manipulate people by showing them certain feelings and information as opposed to others, and then they hone that skill through practice. This kind of actor would probably be more flexible, though it would take them many more years before they were ready to give a really convincing presentation.