feel the thoughts
What a person imagines he hears, and what the speaker has really implied, may be poles apart. Try to feel the thoughts behind the confusion of men’s verbiage.
Biophilia
biophilia- the connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life.
A process fed by design thinking will feel chaotic to those experiencing it for the first time. But over the life of a project, it invariably comes to make sense and achieves results that differ markedly from the linear, milestone-based processes that define traditional business practices. In any case, predictability leads to boredom and boredom leads to the loss of talented people.
Tim Brown | Change By Design (via amotion)
Meditation
“If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things—that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It’s a discipline, you have to practice it.”
Steve Jobs (Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson)
Drewbot: On Facebook Timeline: Teaching Data to Speak Humanely
Yesterday, Facebook unveiled their new “Timeline” design. Largely imagined by Sam Lessin and Nicholas Feltron, the design coaxes personal actions recorded by Facebook into a humane, emotional, interface for a given history1. Users can delve into their content not as images, notes, and…
“If you went outside at exactly the same time every day and took a picture that included the Sun, how would the Sun appear to move? With great planning and effort, such a series of images can be taken. The figure-8 path the Sun follows over the course of a year is called an analemma. ”
知人者智，自知者明。勝人者有力，自勝者強。知足者富。強行者有志。不失其所者久。死而不亡者壽
To understand others is to be intelligent,
To understand yourself is to be enlightened.
To conquer others is to be forceful,
To conquer yourself is to be strong.
To know how to have enough is to be rich.
To powerfully enact is to have your will.
To not lose your place is to last long.
To die but not perish is to have longevity.
The amazing bower bird uses art and architecture to attract mates.
SOLICITING CRITICISM by Daniel Burka
During the past year, I’ve figured out a few decent techniques to encourage people to give you a critique. This is something I still struggle with so I’d appreciate your ideas as well. A few things that seem to work for me:
ASK FOR JUST ONE THING
If you ask people to tell you ‘anything’ or ‘everything’ that you could improve upon, they’ll usually stumble about and not give you anything useful. But, ask them for the ‘one thing’ you could improve on and they’ll at least wrack their brain to come up with a single criticism. This is much better than getting nothing.
ASK PEOPLE WHO KNOW YOU WELL
The best post-presentation critiques I’ve received have come from a long-time coworker and my father. People who’ve been on the other end of your own stinging criticisms are much more comfortable throwing some back at you. This is great! My dad’s a really nice guy, but he’s both heard me carp at him more than a few times and he’s a seasoned university lecturer. He was kind but blunt with several pieces of good advice.
ASK DRUNK PEOPLE
Seriously. After a workshop at Future of Web Apps in Miami last year, I asked the attendees to give me some honest feedback and got a tepid response. But… that night, a couple of the guys were pretty drunk and (standing a little too close for comfort and with potent whiskey breath) gave me a healthy dose of totally unvarnished advice. That advice, which was to show more examples and to cover less material but in more depth, was fantastic.
ASK GROUPS OF PEOPLE
This seemed counterintuitive to me. I assumed that if you cornered an individual that you could get good one-on-one advice. But, if you can coax just one person in a small group to give you a single piece of advice, the rest sometimes sense blood in the water and will join in too — yay! Once the ice is broken and people see that you actually didn’t rip the critiquer’s head off, it’s much easier for the other people to add their own comments.
BE PERSISTENT
People are eager to please. Heck, that’s why they’re being too nice to you in the first place. If you seem genuinely disappointed that no one is offering you criticism, people sometimes throw you a bone to please you. Like in the previous point, once you’ve broken the ice…
“The Universe is Speaking to Us Incessantly. And everything that comes to us is part of its message directed to our soul. So we should also therefore express ourselves from the part of us that is universal, essential and inter-connected to all other beings.” - Pi Villaraza
Content shifting
…I am certain people want to shift content from discovery oriented devices (laptop, satellite radio, etc.) to consumption oriented devices (tablet, sonos, etc.), and I am certain that we will see this get easier and easier in the coming years.
—Fred Wilson
Paradise Parking by Photographer Peter Lippmann
via EightHourDay
From the incredibly talented Mike Matas:
In November 2011 my girlfriend and I traveled to Japan, taking the train from Kyoto-Nara-Hakone-then to Tokyo. This film is made up of nearly 4,000 photos taken over one week in Japan.
Design to delight
To really think about design, you need to learn and think about everything other than it. Design is a vessel: the most important part is what it holds. As makers of things, the work gets better from outside influences, and gives us clarity about the purpose of the work: to inform, to persuade, and to delight. We’ll spend some time ruminating on what it means to delight our audiences, think of different ways to do so through mechanisms like storytelling, and realize that the real benefit of making anything is to nourish lives.
You can’t measure design. Why? Design is for people. People are illogical and emotional.
The opposite of a true statement is a false statement. the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth niels bohr
Cynicism isn’t the appropriate answer to profound truths
creative work is about embracing paradox
If you’re doing your job right as a designer, people will make stories about what you make.
Design is about gift-giving.
