Bobulate

The Two Things game

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 07:02:00 -0500

Economist Glen Whitman on The Two Things:

A few years ago, I was chatting with a stranger in a bar. When I told him I was an economist, he said, “Ah. So… what are the Two Things about economics?”

“Huh?” I cleverly replied.

“You know, the Two Things. For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay, here are the Two Things about economics. One: Incentives matter. Two: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

Since, Glen has been playing this each time he meets someone from a different profession, which is how he gathered The Two Things about the Two Things:

1. People love to play the Two Things game, but they rarely agree about what the Two Things are.
2. That goes double for anyone who works with computers.

Head over to see his collection of The Two Things from binary systems to piloting an airplane, or a talk that wraps up with them. As for me: 1) intrigued, 2) curious if it could be edited down to only one thing.

On the patience of looking

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:38:00 -0500

On the patience of looking :

On this snowless winter in New York, I ran across an etymology of “no two snowflakes are alike.” It comes from a 1925 report that predicts, “Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated.” The author — Wilson Bentley:

In 1885, at the age of 20, Wilson Alwyn Bentley, a farmer who would live all his life in the small town of Jericho in Vermont, gave the world its first ever photograph of a snowflake. Throughout the following winters, until his death in 1931, Bentley would go on to capture over 5000 snowflakes, or more correctly, snow crystals, on film. Despite the fact that he rarely left Jericho, thousands of Americans knew him as The Snowflake Man or simply Snowflake Bentley.

Dubbed “America’s First Cloud Physicist,” Bentley’s obituary (note that he contracted pneumonia after walking home six miles through a slushy snowstorm) read:

Longfellow said that genius is infinite painstaking. John Ruskin declared that genius is only a superior power of seeing. Wilson Bentley was a living example of this type of genius. He saw something in the snowflakes which other men failed to see, not because they could not see, but because they had not the patience and the understanding to look.

Seems to me there is no greater goal and no greater compliment: Bentley not only devised a new way to see (transforming early physics of clouds and pioneering an understanding of snowflakes), but demomstrated the patience needed to fiercely look.

[Image: [Bentley] experimented for years with ways to view individual snowflakes in order to study their crystalline structure. He eventually attached a camera to his microscope, and in 1885 he successfully photographed the flakes. This photomicrograph and more than five thousand others supported the belief that no two snowflakes are alike …]

Daylit astronomy

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:43:26 -0500

Daylit astronomy:

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.

See also:
So irregular is their movement that when physicists came up with Chaos Theory in the 1970s, some had been inspired by gazing up at the clouds.

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]

Right noise

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:09:00 -0500

Right noise:

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?

Happinomics

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 23:16:00 -0500

Happinomics:

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

See also:
A recent study showed that very few experiences affect us for more than three months.

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?

Every life thing

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 21:00:00 -0500

Every life thing:

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.

"Remember that there are only three kinds of things anyone need ever do. (1) Things we ought to do..."

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 22:26:44 -0500

“Remember that there are only three kinds of things anyone need ever do. (1) Things we ought to do (2) Things we’ve got to do (3) Things we like doing. I say this because some people seem to spend so much of their time doing things for none of the three reasons, things like reading books they don’t like because other people read them. Things you ought to do are things like doing one’s school work or being nice to people. Things one has to do are things like dressing and undressing, or household shopping. Things one likes doing — but of course I don’t know what you like. Perhaps you’ll write and tell me one day.”

- C. S. Lewis, in a letter to Sarah, his godchild, on 3 April 1949 via Stan Carey

A system of irreconcilable regularities

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 07:30:06 -0500

A system of irreconcilable regularities:

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.

"The question of repetition is very important. It is important because there is no such thing as..."

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 14:40:51 -0500

“The question of repetition is very important. It is important because there is no such thing as repetition. There is always a slight variation. Somebody comes in and you tell the story over again. Every time you tell the story it is told slightly differently.”

- Gertrude Stein cf. the science of linguistics cf. “A failure is a project that doesn’t work, an initiative that teaches you something at the same time the outcome doesn’t move you directly closer to your goal. A mistake is either a failure repeated, doing something for the second time when you should have known better, or a misguided attempt (because of carelessness, selfishness or hubris) that hindsight reminds you is worth avoiding. We need a lot more failures, I think.” —Seth Godin

Where the borders are

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 08:00:00 -0500

Where the borders are:

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.

Sudden rejuvenation

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:59:00 -0500

Sudden rejuvenation:

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.

Love not help

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 09:35:16 -0500

Love not help:

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?

The visual truth of Barbie

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 05:09:05 -0500

The visual truth of Barbie:

A group of Swedish neuroscientists determined that the perception of your whole body is affected by the size of your body image. How? By “tricking” people into being Barbie:

A research group at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden has managed to make people feel as though they actually inhabited bodies of vastly different size — either that of dolls or of giants. The researchers showed that this fundamentally changed the way people perceived the physical world. Those in smaller bodies felt as though they were in a world populated by giant hands and pencils the size of trees, while those in giant bodies felt the same objects to be tiny, toy-sized versions of the real thing.

And, similar to the left-leaners:

This research also adds to a growing body of literature that demonstrates that the world we perceive is not an identical copy of the physical world. Hills appear steeper when we are wearing heavy backpacks, objects appear closer when we desire them, and, as shown here, the world appears larger when we are in a smaller body. Although the world does not actually physically change in these ways, our mind seems to be constructed in such a way that allows a surprising degree of flexibility in perceiving the physical nature of the world.

On this, David Byrne makes a segue from Barbie to politics to economics:

We instinctively want to believe that a merit-based world exists — that with some hard work, focus, time, effort and perseverance, you too will be rewarded with the body you see on the billboard. The same also applies to our notions of economic well-being. As a result, you have Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich (among many others) implying that poor people are poor simply because they aren’t trying hard enough.

From the neuroscience of Barbie to the neuroscience of vowels, the more that is revealed on perception, the less it appears is visible. What next?

Right as rain

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:18:31 -0500

Right as rain:

Research suggests that leaning to the left encourages people to underestimate things from the height of buildings to Michael Jackson tracks (in cultures that count from left to right):

To find out whether body positions influence value estimation, Anita Eerland and her colleagues at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands asked 33 people to guess the numerical answer to questions while stood on a Wii-console balance board. A third of the questions were asked while the volunteers were perfectly upright. The rest of the questions were asked when — unbeknownst to the volunteers — the board was altered so that it would give a “perfectly balanced” readout only if volunteers tilted slightly to either the left or right.

If it’s true that the left is underestimated and north is farther, curious what this suggests for a delight for and propensity toward the lower-right quadrant.

Small pieces, joined

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:53:00 -0500

Small pieces, joined:

Stripping out the Gospel miracles and inconsistencies to demonstrate parts he found interesting, Thomas Jefferson created a book representing his own views:

Making good on a promise to a friend to summarize his views on Christianity, Thomas Jefferson set to work with scissors, snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Then, relying on a cut-and-paste technique, he reassembled the excerpts into what he believed was a more coherent narrative and pasted them onto blank paper — alongside translations in French, Greek and Latin.

Of the practice, he says:

See also:
Tree of Codes, Jonathan Safran Foer

“I have performed the operation for my own use,” he continued, “by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter, which is evidently his and which is as easily distinguished as diamonds in a dunghill.”

Renamed by Jefferson “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazereth,” the book was just called the “Jefferson Bible” by friends. From the cut-and-paste physicality to the reframing that revealed in public a new coherence of thought, looks like rather physical and more early evidence of the practice of remixing.

[Image source: TYWKIWDBI. Cut-and-paste progress.]

[Image source: TYWKIWDBI. Reassembled version.]

Lessons according to salt

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 22:40:00 -0500

In the kitchen where I grew up in a non-popular town in Pennsylvania — the kitchen where my parents still live and cook and all important Danzico Family Conversations take place — there is a saltbox. It hangs just to the right of the stove, a handmade walnut wooden box, made for my grandmother by my grandfather, who himself was a furniture designer.

The saltbox itself as an object is unremarkable. Alone, it communicates nothing. Says nothing about its role. Its intention. Its history as a gift born out of a romance between my maternal grandparents. Says nothing of its possibilities.

But add people, and it becomes a central iterative device. The license to change, to iterate, to test, to add, to make, to make over, to create (clearly, with food). It gives license and latitude to stray from what has been written (recipes) for those too shy to do. Therefore, it gives strength. It gives iterative powers to those not comfortable with version control. With its subtlety comes comfort in change.

One might say the saltbox, and access to it, is magic.

Iterative powers

For our family, particularly for kids too young to cook, the saltbox was a way to participate in iteration, a way to work together. “Add some salt, would you?” my mother would gesture casually to the pot, as if this weren’t the greatest power one could issue a seven-year-old girl. I now had a hand in influencing The Adult Table.

They, whoever they are, say you can think back to what you were doing and thinking when you were seven years old, and this often is foreshadowing for what you’ll be doing and thinking later in life.

At seven, I was pondering the importance of how the presence of this everyday object — and what’s more, my access to it — could bear influence over a family dinner. It was access to designing an experience.

Salt lessons

Today, I still think of salt as enormously instructive. Think about the classic white shaker on every restaurant table. Most of the time we look right past it or ignore the invisible flavor in the small packets stacked next to the pepper. But stop for a moment, and consider salt’s history and presence — how far it traveled, what form it originally started in, how many people were involved just to get it to your table. It gets more interesting. Salt has inspired wars, funded the Great Wall of China, it’s been considered divine, it’s the name of cities, it has been used as currency. Today, it has over 14,000 uses and is considered a luxury in some parts of the world, while Americans just consume about a teaspoon and a half a day.

So what follows are, ostensibly, lessons of a career according to salt:

1. Overlookedness.

You see, something so mundane as salt could easily be overlooked. But in fact if you look closely, stop long enough, you realize salt has magical properties — not just in its remarkable history, but in its propensity to give comfort in change, to create versioning, to allow for work, to give strength, to create experiences, to transform.

And the truth is, I almost overlooked my career. Three years ago, I co-founded and began chairing a graduate program in interaction design. I am a Design Educator. But I never planned it this way. In fact, I overlooked this possibility entirely. Yet in irony, for 15 years, I have been an educator, but until I founded a program, I overlooked education as a path. I saw the teaching I was doing as so much a part of me, so everyday, that I failed to recognize its magical properties: to create a place for iteration, to create experiences, to create the capability to transform.

2. Invisibility.

Salting is great because when it’s done right, it’s not really noticeable. Think of salt in cookies. Cookies are only odd when they don’t have enough salt or have way too much. We only notice the deficit or the excess, because when it’s just right, it disappears. It literally dissolves. Maybe that’s how change should work.

What separates a leader from a manager is the quality of an editor. The role of a good editor is not to be seen, in fact, but to make an author’s words come forward. A good editor dissolves into the background. It’s not unlike typography. Focus too much on the type, and you’ve lost the story. Whether as editor, director, or head of department, my role is not to be seen, but to create a space to make the stories of those I work with come forward.

3. Sidekickedness.

On its own, salt is intolerable. And so might be change. They’re both meant to be sidekicks that enable and transform, but sidekicks only. “Change is the spice of life,” not the meal itself.

For me, education was a sidekick. It didn’t just show up in 2009 when I founded the program. But it was at that time, I realized I had been an educator sidekick for 15 years. My first job out of undergrad was a teacher. I left full-time teaching to go to graduate school, where I taught on the side. I moved to New York to be an information designer, and began teaching on the side. Education has always been the sidekick.

4. The loop.

See also:
Salt: A World History

Saltboxes allow for iteration in small steps. The feedback loop then is super tight, and that’s why one can trust a seven-year-old to contribute without ruining dinner. It’s straightforward, no instructions needed, but powerful because one can taste the effects of their contribution. Small effort, low risk, big reward.

While I was doing education on the side, I iterated through some UX roles. I started out with information design, moved to information architecture, management, product management, directing teams, working in house, for non profits. Each move felt like a small, super-tight feedback loop where I was rounding out an iteration of something I’d previously done.

5. More salt.

What that simple box taught us growing up was that there would always be guidelines. So do what feels right. What tastes right. At the current time. In the current conditions. For the current audience. Add more salt.

If I could give one piece of advice, it would be to find a saltbox. It may be in your attic, your storage space, your parents’ house, the place so familiar you haven’t looked or haven’t looked closely. What’s been there all along? What was there when you were seven, and what’s in it for you today? What just feels right? Because in that is the drive to do something you care just enough about to make change.

And when you find that, don’t let go.

This post taken in part from a talk given for Women in Design. Thanks to them for an invitation to write and to Frank for contributing words, and for being such a close editor.

Intuition, printed

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 21:26:00 -0500

Intuition, printed :

It was hard for me to approach even a little old lady. There’s a barrier between people riding the subway — eyes are averted, a wall is set up. To break through this painful tension I had to act quickly, on impulse, for if I hesitated, my subject might get off at the next station and be lost forever. I dealt with this in several ways. Often I would just approach the person: “Excuse me. I’m doing a book on the subway and would like to take a photograph of you. I’ll send you a print.”

If they hesitated, I would pull out my portfolio and show them my subway work; if they said no, it was no forever. Sometimes, I’d take the picture, then apologize, explaining that the mood was so stunning I couldn’t break it, and hoped they didn’t mind. There were times I would take the picture without saying anything at all. But even with this last approach, my flash made my presence known. When it went off, everyone in the car knew that an event was taking place—the spotlight was on someone.

I’ve been thinking a lot about intuition. Its value, its place in everyday life when it shows up. Because it does show up; we just rarely choose to look at it. To use it, that’s another thing entirely — it seems that takes practice. This here, an excerpt from the introduction to Bruce Davidson’s 1986 book of photographs Subway (just reprinted), is just about a perfect description of intuition on paper.

“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.”

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 19:37:00 -0500

“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.”:

Rorsketch is a project where visual artist and interaction designer Catherine Young draws her interpretations of ordinary objects. This weekend, Catherine reached 100 objects, specifically, clouds:

The first part of the name comes from the Rorshach test, a psychological test in which people’s perceptions of inkblots are recorded and subsequently analyzed. While the Rorschach is used to examine a subject’s personality characteristics and emotional functioning, I intended for Rorsketch as a way for us to be mindful of the other things ― the potential ― that we can see in ordinary objects.

This is a project of imagination, but also of perception:

Seeing is different from interpreting. It is always worthwhile to take a second look. Consider that culture, upbringing, profession, and other factors affect human perception. The same cloud can mean different things to different people.

From Paul Valéry, “To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.” It’s a goal.

An eightfold path of Sylvianess

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 12:21:00 -0500

With the unexpected news of Sylvia Harris’ passing this summer, David Gibson and Emily Cohen coordinated a memorial service last evening for the many who loved her.

With respect (and without blasphemy to the Buddhists), Chelsea Mauldin presented her “eightfold path of Sylvianess,” what lessons one incomparable woman taught another:

1. Wear bright clothing when you speak to groups.
[She gestured at the red shirt she currently wore, which corresponded to the one Sylvia wore in the image projected on the screen.] As Sylvia would say, “Give the people something to look at!”

2. Always be working.
Just because you have a crazy job, or small kids, or some other big problems, you don’t get to slow down or stop moving forward – all you can do is rearrange. Sylvia was fine with sequencing – as long as you always kept working. Maybe if I were lazy or had a little slack period, she would say, “Why don’t you write a book? I’m thinking about writing a book. Why don’t you write a book?” Unbelievable.

3. Hire a housekeeper.
“Please stop cleaning your kitchen,” she would say. “You do not have time to do that.” This goes with “always be working.”

4. Talk to everybody. All the time. About everything.
In the last three years, I have 1,200 emails from Sylvia. And half of those emails are her telling me about some other conversation she’s having – something fascinating she learned, someone she went to lunch with, someone I should look up. She was at the center of this constant circle of communication. And that was not only a very canny business strategy, but it was also a source of personal power: The power to transform people’s lives, and transform not just the lives of people she knew, but the lives of people who experienced the world she made.

I’m really trying hard to figure out: how do you be like Sylvia in that way, really embrace all the people around you?

5. Have lovely food.
Have lovely food any time you can have lovely food. Have lovely food at meetings, at breakfast. Have hard-boiled eggs. Have scones. Have homemade fruitbread. Have whole milk and skim milk. In the conference room. Have M&Ms on the train down to Baltimore. Have M&Ms coming back. She embraced pleasure.

6. Build an idea, and then move into it.
I got an email from Sylvia almost exactly three years ago, on November 16, 2008, and the title of that email was “Citizen Designers!” She didn’t know then that she was going to rename her firm Citizen Research & Design. But she was constructing this idea of what she wanted to be and how she wanted to live. Then she was going to figure out how she was going to go do it. That’s incredibly powerful. Because how can you live the life you want to live, and create the change you want to create, unless you can name it and picture it first? Then you can go have it.

7. Give projects the right amount of effort.
Now, that was a highly subjective measurement. Sometimes that meant I was supposed to stop freaking out, let something go, and move on, because we had to be finished. And sometimes that meant we had to have the 17th conversation about something we’d already decided long ago, but not to her satisfaction.

But the heart of this idea was balance: thinking consciously about effort versus reward. What are you putting in and what are you getting back? What do you want to get back and what do you willing to put in?

Finally, the eighth thing she always told me was:

8. Call a car.
She based this on what she called the “Gary Singer Rule” [Sylvia’s husband]. Apparently having done some pretty intense mathematical calculations, Gary had proven that it was cheaper to call a car whenever you wanted to take you wherever you wanted to go rather than own a private vehicle in New York City. And therefore, one should just call a car.

But I thought this also spoke to something we discovered when we had done the taxi project: that cars for hire were — for New Yorkers, time and space starved as we are — a rare form of freedom. They make us feel free.

And Sylvia was for free.

Chelsea ended by noting all the ways, big and small, Sylvia changed her life, and that she does indeed have Arecibo, now, on her phone’s speed dial.

Thank you, to you both.

How to be a person/novelist

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 22:33:00 -0500

How to be a person/novelist:

Murakami on how being obsessed with music helped him be a novelist (emphasis mine):

Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz.

Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more.

Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words.

Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow.

Finally comes what may be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a work.

These are just as important a set of guidelines for music and writing as they are for how to be a person.

Have predictability or rhythm
Find a melody or a narrative
Create harmony to support the narrative
Improvise
Make it public/ship it

[via rgreco]