Bobulate

The smallest talk

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:08:22 -0400

Exchanging small talk with people we’ve just met may be an unfortunate necessity, but with people we already know, it seems to suggest that they’re people to whom we have nothing to say. And yet if small talk is just talk that’s idle, insignificant and without stated purpose, then surely a substantial portion of the chatter that goes on between couples, friends and (or especially) families must count as small.

That’s Dora Zhang in a recent piece for The Point, digging deep on small talk, a social necessity, if not a linguistic oddity, in everyday social encounters.

But as our talk — from small to significant — moves substantially online when we can’t be co-present, small talk appears in digital expressions as well. Take email. There is:

The non-purposeful opening

I hope you’re well.
I hope this note finds you well.
Hoping you had a great weekend.
Hope you had a good trip.

The openings, so full of hope, that we layer into our email are a kind of linguistic greasing the wheel. While it’s meaningful for people to state social intention, to do some social grooming, these openings may be presumptuous. After all, this past weekend, the goldfish may have died, the car broke down, the game may have been rained out. When opening with small talk, consider how your subtle well wishes may be received. Then there is:

The aspirational closing

Hope you get some rest.
Hope the weather lets up.
Hope to see you soon.
Hoping you have a great weekend.

These aspirational closings help keep our conversations going; they’re necessary social cues that indicate we’re departing from the conversation and bid the person well. When they’re genuine and followed up on next exchange, even better.

“The opposite of small talk isn’t big talk, but no talk.” And while we are undergoing an age of big talk, big topics, big data, more, I, for one, am all for more meaning — talk or no talk. Hope you are too.

Byrne on bypassing waffling

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 11:18:29 -0400

Byrne on bypassing waffling:

David Byrne on his remote collaborations with Brian Eno:

The unwritten game rules in these remote collaborations seem to be to leave the other person’s stuff alone as much as you can. Work with what you’re given; don’t try to imagine it as something other than what it is. … The fact that half the musical decision-making has already been done bypasses a lot of waffling and worrying. I didn’t have to think about what to do and what direction to take musically — the train had already left the station and my job was to see where it wanted to go.

He goes on to ask:

Is writing ever NOT collaboration? Doesn’t one collaborate with oneself, in a sense? Don’t we access different aspects of ourselves, different characters and attitudes and then, when they’ve had their say, switch hats and take a more distanced and critical view — editing and structuring our other half’s outpourings? Isn’t the end product sort of the result of two sides collaborating?

I like this. Collaboration as the caretaking and guidance of two parts of a moving train.

Inexactitude

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 06:02:00 -0400

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait. —Gilbert Keith Chesterton

They were right. As they’d predicted two decades ago in 2013, half of humanity now lives in cities with nearly 60 percent of our world’s population as urban dwellers. Cities have not only grown in size and population, their very interface has changed.

Back then, citizens were enthusiastic about the layered effect of our data so we could search, sort, friend, follow, retrieve, and archive it in the interest of exactitude. Google, Twitter, Foursquare were changing technology — which is to say, culture. These, and more, increased the opportunity for specificity as they decreased the chance for serendipity.

But humans grew uncomfortable. Things got smarter. Time sped up and time compressed as people became more informed, more efficient, more connected, faster. While the rise of the slow (at first, slow food, then slow web, slow cities) began as rhetoric, it took as a movement.

With more inhabitants than ever before, cities had become not a place for human interaction, but for precise location and retrieval. Entering addresses and finding exact points on the map (with recommended walk/drive/transit directions!) left little up to chance. As humans found more, they had less. Media inventors of any notoriety launched apps and services that provided shortcuts: shortcuts to getting lost, shorthand for privacy, short forms of disconnecting.

Meantime, undigital became luxury. Spas, once islands of tranquility and beauty, became islands of undigital luxury goods. Free “off the grid service” services sold out. This pastoral new concord has had an effect. Humans choose longer lines, the slow lane, practice inexact query formation. Because without the slow, the good was not recognizable.

The divide between the connected and unconnected continues to demonstrate an economic discord: those living comfortably are also living un-connectedly. Unubiquitious computing demands have inspired developers to rush to build unconnected communities. The new connected is to be disconnected. Deadspots are the new hotspots.

Moving toward is moving away, and hence, the notion of density and progress has changed. It’s our job to pause, coordinate, and design opportunities for chance.

This thought was first published by The Pastry Box Project

Big

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 07:54:00 -0500

In the future, you have access to all your data. Memory, or the lack thereof, is no longer discussed. It is only assumed, a feature of modern life, since you can now relive all your past data as experiences. But because of “technical constraints,” all of your experiences are taxonomized and merged for ease of efficiency/retrieval. To access your past, then, is to relive each experience — in real time, all at once.

You begin:

You spend seven weeks holding your iPhone to your ear on hold.
You pull to refresh for seven months, click to refresh for nine.
You miss 30 Thanksgiving dinners restarting your laptop.
12 Valentine’s Days restarting your iPhone.
You swipe past iPad ads for 48 hours before ever seeing content.

You deliberate for two hours clicking the back button.
You waste four hours feeling guilty about not accepting invitations.
You go nine whole months accepting LinkedIn recommendations.
Six months seeing who’s followed you on Twitter.
One hour clicking away from ads you clicked accidentally.
For two months you stare at your browser default page.
You power through eight years of anxiety trying to unfriend people on Facebook.
You hunch over your desk for seven months downloading unregistered software.
Three straight weeks stealing someone else’s WiFi.

You tell friends you’re “off the grid” for 48 hours.
You scroll through Twitter for one year without clicking a single link.
There are 16 days you missed the point when your calls are dropped through AT&T.
And 14 hours of confusion as you try to work Skype video.
Three years of watching YouTube videos.
Sixty-five minutes liking.
Forty hours tapping.
Ninety-seven whole days right clicking.

You spend fourteen whole days without contact as you stare at the fail whale.
Three days confused as you update your WordPress install.
Two years behind updating your iPhone apps.
Seventeen months with strained eyes while you debug code.
Two years cursing Adobe Creative Suite.
You spend six months with slumped shoulders as you click “forgot password?”.

You reflect on older times. Passwords were forgotten once, and forgotten again — the next day, the next week, the next month. The thought seems idyllic. A life where small errors are experienced in lovely, small scales — one at a time.

This thought was first published by The Pastry Box Project, and its form taken from and inspired by the first chapter of David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

On the origin of manners

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 08:12:01 -0500

On the origin of manners:

Simon Heffer reviews, or rather is offended by, a new book on the origin of manners:

As I wandered through this increasingly unfathomable book — if it has a thesis, I for one missed it — two elements of the bleeding obvious appeared to be missing. The first was the idea that most manners have evolved because most of us, whichever class we spring from, behave towards others as we would like them to behave towards us: so, unless downright barbaric, we do not defecate in front of other people, or vomit over them, or spit at them, or tell them their wives are ugly or stupid.

The second is that the most recent chapter in the evolution of manners is through what the right calls political correctness. The terms used half a century ago to describe ethnic minorities, or disabled people, or people of minority sexual orientations are not acceptable in most polite society today. Manners are made by fashion and by peer pressure.

“If it is not rude to say so,” he finishes, “[the book] should have been better edited and about half as long.” It may be, but perhaps well deserved.

The grand time hack

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 09:46:00 -0500

The grand time hack:

The times displayed on Grand Central’s departure boards are wrong — by a full minute:

This is permanent. It is also purposeful. The idea is that passengers rushing to catch trains they’re about to miss can actually be dangerous — to themselves, and to each other. So conductors will pull out of the station exactly one minute after their trains’ posted departure times. You might call this time-hacking; you might call it behavioral engineering; you might call it comical. Regardless, it seems to be working. Grand Central boasts the fewest slips, trips, and falls of any station in the country.

Once heard Carnegie Hall starts their performances eight minutes early [or late] for a similar reason. Curious what other time hacks exist to accommodate New Yorkers.

[thx, John]

Urban unattentional

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 09:30:00 -0500

Urban unattentional :

British psychologists report that those who live in cities have a certain diminished power of attention compared with those who don’t:

[T]he brains of people in remote places seem ready to focus on the task at hand, while the brains of their urban counterparts seem prepared to explore the ever-changing conditions of city life. Certainly explains why some country folk find the city overwhelming, and some city folk find the country a little dull. Nothing personal — strictly neural.

And:

[C]ity dwellers have developed a form of attention that puts priority on “the search for potential dangers or new opportunities.”

Or perhaps city dwellers are simply trying to be comfortable.

[Image source: “Oliver Twist,” “The Catcher in...

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 10:56:00 -0500

[Image source: “Oliver Twist,” “The Catcher in the Rye” from the Fictitious Dishes series, Dinah Fried. “The photographs in this series, Fictitious Dishes, enter the lives of five fictional characters and depict meals from the novels The Catcher in the Rye, Oliver Twist, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Moby Dick.” Be sure not to miss Dinah’s collaboration on Tiny Little Words and certainly don’t miss What Book Should I Read.]

Life, underlined

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 12:46:00 -0500

Life, underlined:

In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment. For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time.

That’s Jhumpa Lahiri, with a first piece in the New York Times’ Draft, a series about the art and craft of writing.

See also:
Anne Galloway makes stuff with words.

Constructing a sentence is the equivalent of taking a Polaroid snapshot: pressing the button, and watching something emerge. To write one is to document and to develop at the same time. Not all sentences end up in novels or stories. But novels and stories consist of nothing but. Sentences are the bricks as well as the mortar, the motor as well as the fuel. They are the cells, the individual stitches. Their nature is at once solitary and social. Sentences establish tone, and set the pace. One in front of the other marks the way.

I have to photograph it. It is my impulse. But rather than capture by underline, my reflexes have changed. Today, falling in love with a sentence, my instinct is not to use markup (analog or digital), but the quick snap-and-post with a device had became the embodiment of affection for me. Sentences do indeed remain unsettled organisms: alive, uncapturable, magic. Many years, many formats, and many sentences later, the sentence remains.

Sight unsealed

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 20:53:00 -0500

Sight unsealed:

Howard Blackson on the unsealing of America:

For many, perhaps the majority, of us, our suburban lives were spent sealed in air-conditioning, interspersed with moments of purported discomfort as we transitioned between the homes, cars, McMansions, big boxes, gyms, schools, Olive Gardens, and Arby’s drive-thrus that characterized our daily lives.

But then:

The wish for sustainability and energy efficiency has permeated our society and building profession. This has led us to the rediscovery of windows that can be opened and closed, a step towards unsealing our lives. Today’s less expensive mix of low-to-mid-rise buildings does not create the wind tunnel effect more expensive full-block towers create for pedestrians and inhabitants wanting to open windows. …. Being a pedestrian, or one of our ever increasing army of bicyclists, is a proven step towards unsealing ourselves from an air-conditioned lifestyle.

As we continue toward unsealing ourselves from suburban environments, perhaps we’ll see even more of the “outdoors” “indoors.”

"The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it..."

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 13:20:04 -0500

“The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.”

- Gilbert Keith Chesterton by way of Farnam Street. He continues, “Everywhere in things there is this element of the quiet and incalculable. It escapes the rationalists, but it never escapes till the last moment.”

Big wheels turning

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 08:23:01 -0500

Big wheels turning:

Why are these “observation wheels” reaching landmark status in some places when other, more vernacular gestures might better fit the context of a place?

That’s Chuck Wolfe with a fair question as he catalogs five principles for people and place in preparation for a forthcoming book. I’ve puzzled, too, about the observation wheel plans here in NYC.

Yet he defends them gracefully:

My answer is not to cynically decry these wheels, but to consider them as the same exciting, moving observation points first explained by seventeenth century observers. Understanding their ongoing success — premised on fun and excitement — is consistent with my opening call for more studied reflection about relationships of people and the communities around them.

Fair enough. In Bloomberg I trust.

Consider the shortcut

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 10:48:00 -0500

Consider the shortcut:

Wayne Curtis on the lost art of the long walk:

[W]hen we move by foot today … it always seem to involve brief, intense tromps motivated by a single purpose. We walk to the garage to get to the car. We walk from the mall parking lot to Best Buy. We walk from Gate 4 to Gate 22 in Terminal B.

Also:

We also seem to be losing our capacity for in-depth walking. Walking is now short-term scanning. Thoreau liked to spend four hours every day rambling, free of tasks and immediate goals. He lamented that his fellow townsmen would recall pleasant walks they’d taken a decade ago, but had “confined themselves to the highway ever since.” “The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of his friend. “If shut up in the house, he did not write at all.”

With respect to long walks, let’s consider the value of the short-term. The shortcut.

Shortcuts are sort of secrets for locals. A shortcut out loud might sound something like, “Oh, to get to the freeway, actually take a right instead of a left. It will be 10 minute shorter.” But a shortcut is never done. Once you’re let in on the shortcut, you want more. You can always save more time. You can always imagine a shorter way. And there probably is.

All secrets are not shortcuts, but all shortcuts are secrets. Perhaps then shortcuts are secret handshakes. Perhaps they’re secret handshakes for a public. A private public.

Consider that un-long walks are not anti-walking, then, but rather pro-shortcut. Pro-secret. Pro-belonging.

Adapted from #LAD05, a package for Quarterly.

TYWKIWDBI, “Ripples” Evolution is a tricky item to articulate....

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 08:01:30 -0500

TYWKIWDBI, “Ripples”

Evolution is a tricky item to articulate. For me, meandering and rippling best characterize the way I evolve over time as they’re both an intentional and serendipitous process — one activity inspiring and feeding another, yet not one thing being conscious of the other. The “meandering” is the serendipity; the “rippling” is the intention. If one is to grow, whether by meandering, by rippling, or by intending, one must diverge at critical and unexpected places.

Write something else. Get uncomfortable. Try and err. If you ripple a little, you will evolve a little. If you ripple a lot, you could evolve a lot.

On dog hair

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 11:54:00 -0500

There it was — as persistent as it had always been. A stubborn, short, quiet hair on the arm of my jacket this afternoon. My hand went up to brush it away, and then it stopped. Routine interrupted.

There it was. Although several weeks before, my beloved red dog had peacefully passed away. My closest companion of 12 years had once shed — generously and unadulteratedly — across the things of my life. And while she was gone, here: her trademark doghair still stood.

How lucky I had been for the red hair. How lucky I had been for the loyalty two companion animals provide: commingled, intertwined, co-habitated. Shedding upon one another our lives such that when we went back into the world, we had these small red badges of courage.

In our dozen years together, this animal taught me more about being a person than any person I’ve known. Importantly:

Learn at least one impressive trick.
Shake when wet.
Wag.
When off the leash, it is best to run to a loved one.
Accept treats from strangers energetically yet cautiously.
Roll in grass whenever possible.
Wonderful things can sometimes be found in the trash.
Barking is a last resort.
Know when the right time is to let go of what you love.
True life partners do exist.

Lucy passed away November 15, 2012. The loss devastated me so deeply and personally that I couldn’t speak of it at all. Now, I think back on what I have been known to say, “When in doubt, trust the one covered in dog hair.” Trust them, and know they’re carrying badges of much more.

How lucky we are if we have known dog hair.

This thought was first published by The Pastry Box Project, and inspired by Lucy and my infinitely kind brother.

The math of lists

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 10:46:00 -0400

Peer over someone’s shoulder — on subways, at desks, at kitchen tables — and chances are good you’ll quickly find a list maker. Inventories, enumerations, lists are sensemaking for nonsensical things.

Lists guide and advise. Not only do they provide temporal structures for moving through a day space, they demand coherence, story, and priority. “What’s your number one priority on this project?”“What’s your top ten list of apps?” “What are the top x of y,” people ask, the content mattering not at all, in contrast with a hunger for the list itself. We have numbered lists, therefore, we are.

Hence, when recently asked the “five things all designers should know,” I offered a list.

See also:
The art of listmaking

1. Be comfortable with fiction like nonfiction.

Leadership is 50 percent fiction/50 percent nonfiction. That is to say, leadership is the confidence in knowing what you know and what you know you’ll know. It’s the ability to speak confidently, knowledgeably, and easily about the latter that sets some apart. Be comfortable with the fiction.

2. Know presence from present.

It’s a relatively mundane thing, after all. It’s what we do when we show up — we’re present. However, presence is different from present. In both cases, one is there. But presence offers those also there the resonance and memory of something larger than just being there. When you show up to talk about your work, are you present or do you have presence?

3. Make practice spaces.

Design is only as meaningful as the way it is communicated. Think not of design reviews and presentations as the only opportunity to talk about your work. Consider every day an opportunity to talk about the thing you believe in. Look at the exchange with your barista, the dog walker, the phone call with your great aunt, the family dinner table all as opportunity to test out your idea in the wild. Life offers a practice space for an idea. Use it to practice live.

4. Find a yes threshold.

We do a lot of filtering. A lot of filtering out interesting from not interesting, smart choices from the less smart, good email from spam, nourishing from the draining. We have less practice saying yes. Instead of practicing filters, try practicing good ways of saying yes. Accept invitations. Say yes to the offer to have coffee, to write a post, to do a project. Practice saying yes and not only will you expand your networks, but you’ll learn your yes threshold so you can use it wisely.

5. Have a trustable framework.

This morning I had cereal, fruit, and milk. Same as yesterday. And five years yesterday. Truth is, I have the same thing every day. Little routines of sameness create a foundation that’s trustable. Trustable small frameworks make whatever unpredictability that happens throughout the day more doable. Whether its thank you gift, a way you take a photo, a song, frameworks create possibilities for what’s possible.

As for making any of these part of a daily routine? Add it to the list.

Cowboys versus farmers

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 11:50:01 -0400

Cowboys versus farmers:

Obama, recently, revealed part of his framework for simplifying his decision making process,” namely: same suit, different day . Brian Eno nicely outlines the same as cowboys versus farmers:

Describing his philosophy of studio work, Mr. Eno tries out another big metaphor: cowboys versus farmers. Most of what happens in a recording studio is repetitive monotony, tilling the same soil over and over to make slight improvements — insufferably boring, in his view. Mr. Eno prefers to see himself as a cowboy — or, even better, a prospector — constantly seeking out new territory, never staying in the same place for long.

“In my normal life I’m a very unadventurous person,” Mr. Eno said. “I take the same walk every day and I eat in the same restaurants, and often eat exactly the same things in the same restaurants. I don’t adventure much except when I’m in the studio, and then I only want to adventure. I cannot bear doing something again, or thinking that I’m doing something again.”

Which are you?

New York truths according to Gopnik

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 21:51:00 -0400

New York truths according to Gopnik:

Adam Gopnik’s truths about New York:

We can’t make any life in New York without composing a private map of it in our minds.
An actual map of New York recalls our inner map of the city.

Simultaneously [New York is] a map to be learned and a place to aspire to.
A city of things and a city of signs, the place I actually am and the place I would like to be even when I am here.

Even when we are established here, New York somehow still seems a place we aspire to.
We go on being inspired even when we’re most exasperated.

If the energy of New York is the energy of aspiration, the spirit of New York is really the spirit of accommodation.
And yet both shape the city’s maps, for what aspirations and accommodations share is the quality of becoming, of not being fixed in place of being in every way unfinished.

In New York, the space between what you want and what you’ve got creates a civic itchiness.
I don’t know a single content New Yorker.

To make a home in New York, we first have to find a place on the map of the city to make it in.
The map alone teaches us lessons about the kind of home you can make.

[Excerpted and abbreviated from Through the Children’s Gate]

Each summer, she visited New York. “What’s your diary like?” preceded overlapping calendars to find where we might place the visit. And each summer, I drew a map for my guest. Shopping places, seeing places, eating places, finding places, sitting places, secret places. The neighborhood diagrams charted my moves through the city — East Village, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens — and were as unknowable as they were temporary. Each summer, places dissipated into places they used to be. Drawn maps, a history of a moment. The ritual of the map became the truth that persisted.

"We experiment; we assume; we fail; we experiment some more. Finally, tentatively, we succeed."

Fri, 04 May 2012 17:44:07 -0400

“We experiment; we assume; we fail; we experiment some more. Finally, tentatively, we succeed.”

- Megan Garber on the City of Tomorrow and the dead dream of the dirigible. She continues, “[They are] a timely reminder not just of the short, happy life of airship hegemony, but also of the crazy contingency of history. …. Like the hot-air balloons that preceded it and the wing-thrusted planes that would render it all but obsolete, the Zeppelin represented a hope for a future that might have been, but, finally, was not — an accident of history whose demise was as inevitable as humans seeking the sky.”

“We are no longer designers or writers or technologists,...

Thu, 03 May 2012 09:42:00 -0400

“We are no longer designers or writers or technologists, we’re creators.”

That’s Barbara deWilde in “Can You Teach Someone to Be an Entrepreneur?”, a response to the class carefully crafted and led @svaixd by Gary Chou and Christina Cacioppo. “Internet School,” or the course, challenged students to use the power of the network to complete assignments, and if tacit responses around the studio were any indication, life lessons.

Barbara confirms:

The lessons from Internet school are life lessons. If I can sum them up I would say they are: 1. The Internet and the emergence of networks have disrupted and will continue to disrupt structures that are hierarchical. 2. Learn technologies and use them to build. We are no longer designers or writers or technologists, we’re creators. 3. Know yourself, have an opinion and share it. You’ll find others like you. Networks aren’t lonely, they’re empowering. 4. There is very little reason to work for others. If you have the skills that make you hirable, you have the skills to create something for yourself, and in turn, for others. 5. Don’t spend all your time refining, get your ideas out there and see if people like them.

The lessons from guests, the lessons from failing in public, and reminders of what learning is for in the first place gave way to a wonderful things. I suspect this is only the beginning.