Bobulate

Entrepreneur designers in final form

It’s spring. And in schools across neighborhoods everywhere, students are wrapping up projects. This semester @svaixd, Gary Chou and Christina Cacioppo are teaching first-year students Entrepreneurial Design (they’ve even made the syllabus open to all). The final class project: students must raise $1,000.

Projects have taken different forms:

• Projects that introduce a new service, like Coastermatic, a service that allows Instagram users to print their photos on to stone coasters, its corresponding video series, and business lessons (Tash Wong, Tom Harman).
• Projects instigated by something moving, like this Kickstarter project “A Very Graphic Poster.” (Barbara deWilde)
• Projects that teach a lesson, like this Skillshare class “Learning HTML through the lens of Typography” and its corresponding lessons learned. (Tony Chu)
• Projects generated from personal stories, like this Kickstarter project The Cheese Map. (Guri Venstad)

Those are just a sample of the many projects. Follow them all on the Entrepreneur Designers blog as they launch and reach their goal. Best of luck to all!

The age of noise

Marc Weidenbaum on forms of noise:

I am very much the sort of person who is aggravated by sounds as seemingly tiny as the hard drive chatter on the Tivo in my living room, and by the throb of one particular fluorescent bulb that’s recessed into cabinets in my kitchen. When I bought my first iPod, I was stunned by how “loud” the hard drive was when I first turned it on (I was also a little unnerved by the device’s physical vibrations). When I switched from a desktop to a laptop years ago, my primary motivation was the relative quiet of the laptop’s internal fan. When I moved from one part of my neighborhood to another a year and a half ago, the noise level of the street was a deciding factor. (I liked one other house, until I noticed that a neighboring yard had a large cement structure that turned out to be a giant fish tank — just the thought of the sort of constant sound inherent in maintaining such a system nixed that option immediately.) I am very much the sort of person who has been kept awake all night thanks to a radio on a neighboring construction site that wasn’t fully turned off. But in the end, I simply don’t think of noise and silence as polar opposites, perhaps because I’ve read too much Cage and believe silence is an illusion.

Marc is reacting to George Prochnik’s book, In Pursuit of Silence, and its corresponding blog, which pursues silence across categories (or as he notes in an earlier post it might be less about pursuing silence than about escaping noise). Today, as New York City took to the streets, clustering around Apple stores, organizing itself in squares on blankets in parks, others in lines at churches for palms and around tables for family dinners, the city was not quiet but overlapping with sounds — birds upon hot dogs upon taxis upon church bells upon dog barks. But the pockets where people clustered were quiet, a form of noise.

On the Salvador Dali of magic

Career advice from one half of magician duo, Penn & Teller:

Have heroes outside of magic. Mine are Hitchcock, Poe, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Bach. You’re welcome to borrow them, but you must learn to love them yourself for your own reasons. Then they’ll push you in the right direction…

Love something besides magic, in the arts. Get inspired by a particular poet, film-maker, sculptor, composer. You will never be the first Brian Allen Brushwood of magic if you want to be Penn & Teller. But if you want to be, say, the Salvador Dali of magic, we’ll THERE’S an opening.

Mine are Robert Adler, Robert Moses, Silverstein, Gertrude Stein, Glenn Gould, Jane Jacobs, Cage, Moog, Feynman. See good in everything and in everyone. But love only a few fiercely and determinately. Make them heroes. Find patterns among them. Stage hypothetical conversations, debates, between them. Have inspiration outside what you do. The way you do anything is the way you do everything. And if you want to be pushed, have heroes in anything, everywhere.

Happiness is not a destination

Tony Chu, MFA candidate, turns around a Quora answer for first-time entrepreneurs that answers “what part of the process are people often completely blind to?”

An idea is not a design,
but it is an invitation to a journey.

A design is not a prototype,
but it is a plan for moving forward.

A prototype is not a program,
but it is a test for your assumptions.

A program is not a product,
but it is a milestone towards progress.

A product is not a business,
but it is the first fruit of an idea.

A business is not profits,
but it is a team behind your back.

Profits is not an exit,
but it is validation of your work.

And an exit is not happiness,
but happiness is not a destination.

Happiness is a journey.

Thanks to Tony for a reminder that what is can be turned around.

Risk as feelings thesis

Stanford economist George Loewenstein on how the brain makes decisions and something called the Risk as Feelings thesis:

He argued we overreact emotionally to new risks (which are often low-probability events), and underreact to those risks that are familiar (although these events are more likely to occur). So, as Loewenstein explains, “this is why people seemed to initially overreact to the risk of terrorism in the years immediately following 9/11 [and the Bali bombings], but tend to underreact to the much more familiar and more likely risks of talking on the mobile phone while driving, and wearing seatbelts”.

And:

But when thinking about difficult, exciting, interesting activities, such as investing in a new business, or perhaps buying a $10 million lottery ticket, the brain areas associated with emotion — such as the midbrain dopamine system — become more active.

Images, colours, music, even social discussion means that the midbrain emotional area becomes dominant, and the rational part of the brain finds it hard to resist the temptation. The emotional centres of the brain simply tell the rational part to shape up or ship out.

And then a funny thing happens:

The rational part of the brain agrees, and starts to look for evidence that supports the emotional brain — it becomes an ally in the search for reasons why the emotional choice is a good one.

The value of optimism.

For spontaneity’s space

Jonah Lehrer on the value of hurling people together told through a story of MIT’s Building 20 [referred to by MIT people as “the magic incubator”]:

The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right — enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways — the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions add up. In fact, they may even be the most essential part of the creative process. Although such conversations will occasionally be unpleasant — not everyone is always in the mood for small talk or criticism — that doesn’t mean that they can be avoided. The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together. It is the human friction that makes the sparks.

Southwest at Carnegie Mellon, you can tour around the still-new Mack Scogin-designed computer science buildings. Surely, you’ll find heaps of zinc and glass, pathways haphazard and intentional. For me, one thing has stayed with me: the offices have unexpectedly large doors. It turns out that when the architects were interviewing future users, they found that meetings often took place from the office doorways. Drivebys. Unplanned conversations. So how could the environment encourage them? Apparently, something as simple as making space for spontaneity.

The discipline of making

The difference between making and meeting:

If you’re rushing to make a train, you have to be there before the last moment. Five seconds too late is too late. The cost of error is absolute.

If you’re hurrying to meet a train, though, there’s a soft deadline. Five seconds is no big deal. Thirty seconds might be annoying, particularly for someone returning from a long journey. And five minutes is really rude.

Too often, we treat our obligations as meet, not make. We impose a sliding scale, a soft penalty, and we not only show up just a bit late, we show up a bit behind on quality or preparation.

Making is a discipline. Meeting opens the door for excuses.

Not to mention some free advice: show up early. But, never run.

The genesis of browser names

Martin Beeby on the origin of popular browser names. On my browser of choice:

While there was a codename vote early in Chrome’s development, none were finally chosen (I’d love to know what they were). Instead, it’s said by Glen Murphy that they chose Chrome because one of the design leads liked fast cars. They then ended up sticking with the codename for the final project launch because 1. they’d grown used to it, 2. they associated it with speed and, 3. because it minimised the amount of browser UI (sometimes called chrome).

And a mystery, as described by Scott Gilbertson over at Webmonkey:

[N]o one seems to know the exact origins of “Safari”, though the Beach Boys’ album seems like a reasonable guess — surfing the web, Surfin’ Safari … get it? The WebKit blog is named Surfin’ Safari, which might lend some credence to that story, but the name also nicely ties in with the notion of exploring the wild and connotes some of the same images as “explorer” and “navigator”.

No word, so to speak, on lesser-known browsers such as Konqueror, which begs the question: how does a name affect later adoption and use?

Linguistic relativity

How language affects economic behavior has been hotly discussed of late, primarily due to an unpublished paper from Yale economist Keith Chen on the same:

Chen […] thinks that if your language has clear grammatical future tense marking […], then you and your fellow native speakers have a dramatically increased likelihood of exhibiting high rates of obesity, smoking, drinking, debt, and poor pension provision. And conversely, if your language uses present-tense forms to express future time reference […], you and your fellow speakers are strikingly more likely to have good financial planning for retirement and sensible health habits. It is as if grammatical marking of the difference between the present and the future insulates you from seeing that the two are coterminous so you should plan ahead. Using present-tense forms for future time reference, on the other hand, encourages you to see that the future is just more of the present, and thus encourages you to put money in a 401(k).

A potentially exciting correlation. (As designers, I believe we seek these correlations and assumptions often.) But is it? Geoff Pullum respectfully reviews Chen’s work and pointedly points out what concerns him. His greatest concern:

None of these briefly summarized worries about Chen’s work, however, disturb me as much as the appalling journalistic misrepresentations that David Berreby offers us. His title is: “Obese? Smoker? No Retirement Savings? Perhaps It’s Because of the Language You Speak.”

A lesson for any designer who synthesizes user research to inform design.