Bobulate, for Intentional Organization

I have been inseparable from The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds after receiving it as a gift a few days ago. In it, I’ve just learned of “cloud streets:”

Low clouds can line up parallel to the wind to form Cumulus radiatus. Also known as ‘cloud streets’, they’re the Roman roads of the cloud road.

Emergent sky roads or our perception of such couldn’t help but remind me of another example of constellation thinking. These water droplet streets are our stories about structure such that we can make sense of their presence. Most clouds fall into 10 main types, although we typically know the Cumulus, not only because it’s one of the Low Clouds. It, together with the other nine types and varieties, comprises our daylit astronomy. To cloudgazing.

[NASA, Earth Observatory, January 24, 2011]

White noise is common. In fact, we seek it out, purchase it, manufacture it. But:

What surprises, and engages, in Phil Julian‘s “Recent Errors” is when, at around two minutes in, the track suddenly shifts states. It goes from grey drone to scintillate whine in a split second. And that subsequent section itself has reveals transformations as it progresses, dipping down in volume, sending out thin contrasting lines of sound (MP3). These aren’t the last shifts in the piece, by any means. It continues on to include industrial churn and 8bit cicada chirping, among other phases.

How much attention do we pay to white noise? If citizens are indeed being asked to begin to design urban noise — or at least take part in it — we should be paying more attention. To the presences and the absences. What is the ideal white noise state?

Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, answers how it’s possible to measure something as subjective as happiness:

Measuring subjective experiences is a lot easier than you think. It’s what your eye doctor does when she fits you for glasses. She puts a lens in front of your eye and asks you to report your experience, and then she puts another lens up, and then another. She uses your reports as data, submits the data to scientific analysis, and designs a lens that will give you perfect vision — all on the basis of your reports of your subjective experience. People’s real-time reports are very good approximations of their experiences, and they make it possible for us to see the world through their eyes. People may not be able to tell us how happy they were yesterday or how happy they will be tomorrow, but they can tell us how they’re feeling at the moment we ask them. “How are you?” may be the world’s most frequently asked question, and nobody’s stumped by it.

If designing products/services based on subjective experiences is what we do, who else can we learn from? Optometrists are a start. Who else allows us to see the world through his or her eyes?

(Source: youmightfindyourself)

Reminded of Shel Silverstein and his absurdity and disobedience toward childhood:

I think he wanted to give kids a sense of life as a fairy tale, but a dark one. He didn’t want to whitewash things. Or leave kids unprepared to deal with trouble.

That’s his nephew, Mitch Myers, one of the managers of his collection. He and a team are preparing for the release of a new Silverstein book, Every Thing On It, and have been tasked with archiving his “collection:”

One of the things you learn is that “polymath” doesn’t even begin to describe Silverstein. His creativity extended in so many directions that his archivists must be versed not just in turn-of-the-century world children’s literature, but Waylon Jennings’s deep cuts; not just in reel-to-reel tape preservation, but how to keep an old restaurant napkin scribbled with lyrics from falling apart. And you also learn that Silverstein seemed to have a terrific time drawing, rhyming, and singing his way through life.

Where the Sidewalk Ends — if there were books I lived by growing up — was a textbook. Permission for messiness, for non-easy stories, for seeing. I read its poems and drawings such that the pages were dirty and flimsy from study. I feared it, starting with the precarious cover, as much as I adored it. Life could be a fairy tale, a neatly bounded poem — but irreverent. And that was totally okay.

German pre-Romantic philosopher, Johann Georg Hamman, held that music was given to man to make it possible to measure time:

We do not measure time regularly, like clocks do, but with many differing rates of speed. In the complexity of today’s experience, it often seems as if simultaneous events were unfolding with different measures. These different measures coexist and often blend but are not always rationalized in experience under one central system. We might call this a system of irreconcilable regularities.

Sort of like the strange but extremely valuable science of how pedestrians behave. Differing rates of speed, moving together in the main — or not — toward the same purpose, differently, together together, or together alone. A system of irreconcilable regularities and irreconcilably regular.

I contributed part of the Icograda Design Education Manifesto 2011 update. I explore the dissolving/ed borders between consumer and producer, collaboration as primary form of interaction in design, and “beautiful seams” as a response.

The updated Icograda Design Education Manifesto and supporting essays — including this one — is available for download. To obtain a printed copy of the book for a nominal fee, please contact the Icograda Secretariat.

The comfortably crisp borders between creator and consumer have dissolved. As a result of technological, social and cultural advancements in product design, the borders that once separated producer and consumer are no longer recognisable, permanent or possible.

Relying on these traditional boundaries can be a disadvantage for contemporary designers. We carry our social networks in our pockets. We crowd-source our private financial decisions with strangers online. We read a single book across devices on a number of screens. It is critical, then, that designers do not see borders, but design beautiful seams.

By not seeing borders, designers expand their possibilities at a time when websites have migrated off desktops onto streets and computing in public is becoming a behavioural norm. With the blurring of borders between disciplines, and across devices, time zones and communication spaces comes a new mode of collaboration. The changes necessitate a new form of collaborative enterprise — not just with team members, but with the target audience.

As we experience this shift, our collaborative activities must evolve in at least five critical ways:

Collaboration is interactive

Traditional frameworks for production are evolving into interactive activities where the consumer participates in creation. While traditionally a passive role, consumers are more frequently introducing their own stories, values and content into the production process. One-to-one works have become many-to-many works, and the do-it-yourself (DIY) culture is giving way to a do-it-with-others (DIWO) movement.

Collaboration is responsive

With the emergence of tools that allow consumers to take part in product creation, consumers have taken on a new role. No longer passive, they have become co-creators - moved from nouns to verbs. Consumers actively create alongside designers, often through improvisation. Improvising - the act of creating in the moment and in response to an environment, results in the invention of new patterns, practices, structures and behaviours.

Collaboration is sensemaking

To create patterns is natural not only as designers, but as humans. We make sense of chaotic environments by giving shapes and concepts meaning and form that we can categorise - poster, website, building, typography, interactive, stone and so on. Creating categories gives our experience boundaries.

Collaboration is continuous

Collaboration is both discipline-respectful and discipline-agnostic. It is a historically rich creative process that has influenced artistic mediums from music to dance to theatre. As a method it is evolving from a bounded behaviour that is a useful tool in specific cases to a life-long process that calls on various disciplines to work spontaneously, harmoniously and holistically.

Collaboration is personal

People should be fiercely passionate about good ideas so that their collaborative efforts are a natural extension of themselves. Confidence can bridge a gap between desire and outcome if our integrity of thought and authenticity of creation remain intact. We have the ability to both do good work and to make it personal. Confidence is good’s natural extension.

Finally, as we consider these shifting borders, we must consider the areas where those border lines meet — the “beautiful seams,” a term coined by Mark Weiser, chief technologist of, at the time, Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre. Weiser intended for users to explore systems and to find moments of beauty within them. If our role as designers is to create platforms and frameworks, we must be conscious of developing recognisable seams for others, so that they can play, discover and configure in those spaces.

As borders continue to shift, designers and users overlap, time zones matter less and boundaries blur, it is at these beautiful seams that designers have the most opportunity to create, to present possibilities, to demonstrate beauty, to teach and to learn.

Apropos of borders, in NYC, I am at 40˚34”N 74˚00’W.

Everyone has it. For some, it’s a place. For others, a religion. Others, a sidewalk cafe. A cocktail. A best friend. A familiar painting. Or, a vice. For some, a dark place. For me, it’s a text. Specifically E.B. White’s Here is New York. You see, whatever it is; whatever happens in the city — small, large, flittering, scented, sterile, crushing, tragic, magic — that thing. E.B. White has somehow made sense of it, there, Here Is New York.

Recently, I moved — all of 2.2 miles. After 11 years in one Brooklyn neighborhood, I moved just over 11,000 feet to the north. For Brooklynites, for all New Yorkers really, who know we live and breathe by the people and services and sights on a single city block, we know that moving this far is just as well moving countries. Changing currencies. Time zones. Allegiances. But without the sympathy of the crowd. Because it is, after all, still New York.

However, as White wrote:

Although New York often imparts a feeling of great forlornness or forsakenness it seldom seems dead or unresourceul; and you always feel that either by shifting your location then blocks or by reducing your fortune by five dollars you can experience rejuvenation. Many people who have no real independence of spirt depend on the city’s tremendous variety and sources of excitement for spiritual sustenance and maintenance of moral. In the country there are a few chances of sudden rejuvenation — a shift in weather, perhaps, or something in the mail. But in New York, the chances are endless.

However I feel about this place: this strange land where the currency is ever so slightly foreign. This Brooklyn territory where sidewalk rules are askew just enough to make me relearn all walking patterns. However I feel, the chances are endless.

A pair of French researchers propose that adding the text “loving” to a collection box almost doubled the amount of money raised:

Some [collection] boxes had this additional text in French just below the money slot: “DONATING=LOVING”; others had the text “DONATING=HELPING”; whilst others had no further text below the slot. …. The text on the donation boxes made a profound difference. On average, almost twice as much money was raised daily in boxes with the “donating=loving” text, as compared with the “donating=helping” boxes and the boxes with no additional text.

Why?

Guéguen and Lamy think that the word “loving” acts as a prime, activating related concepts such as compassion, support and solidarity, and thereby encourages behaviour consistent with those ideas. Such an explanation would fit the wider literature showing how our motivations and attitudes can be influenced by words and objects without us realising it.

If you recall, researchers who analyzed conversations of 154 middle-aged and older married couples about points of disagreement found:

[T]hose who used pronouns such as “we,” “our,” and “us” behaved more positively toward one another and showed less physiological stress. …. Couples who emphasized their “separateness” by using pronouns such as “I,” “me,” and “you” were less satisfied in their marriages.

Pronouns=loving?