The morning commute is seldom a pleasant experience (nor is driving in Taiwan) but when it rains it becomes hopeless as everyone crams on the highways at once.
Yearly Archives: 2008
Characteristics of tangible interfaces
Two proposals seem most promising for an understanding of the characteristics of tangible interfaces. Both are relevant. Ullmer and Ishii stress seamless integration of representation and control.
There are 4 characteristics concerning representation and control:
- Physical representations are computationally coupled to underlying digital information.
- Physical representations embody mechanisms for interactive control.
- Physical representations are perceptually coupled to actively mediated digital representations. (visual augmentation via projection, sound…)
- Physical state of tangibles embodies key aspects of the digital state of a system. (TUIs are persistent: turn off the electrical power and there is still something meaningfull there what can be interpreted)
And:
- Tangible interfaces rely on a balance between physical and digital representations.
- Digital representations are needed to mediate dynamic information.
- The elements of TUIs are spatially re-configurable (in contrast to tangible digital appliances) (Ishii, H., and Ullmer, B, 1997).
Whereas Ullmer’s characterisation focuses on issues of representation and its computational coupling, Brauer’s perspective is one of human-computer interaction, comparing GUI interaction with graspable interfaces. Brauer defines as special qualities of graspable interfaces the following two key characteristics:
- a) Physical spatiality describes the co-presence of user, objects and other users in one interaction space. This space is a hybrid. Physical objects have a double affiliation to real/physical and virtual/digital space, but must still obey laws of the physical world. Real and virtual parts are each enhanced by the other. Because of co-presence of users and objects, interaction takes place IN the user interface. Therefore input and output space coincide. The user experiences a bodily shared space, his/her body is in the same space as the interaction objects. Following [17, 22, 35, 41] physical spatiality, by preserving physical laws and sharing of space, results in well-understood visibility of objects and of gestures. Strictly speaking this characteristic is a prerequisite for the next characteristic.
- b) Haptic directness denotes direct manipulation where the physical, graspable objects themselves are the interface. The user has direct contact with the interface elements and has an embodied experience of manipulation, using his/her hands and body movements. Interaction is unmediated and intuitive, leading to ‘direct engagement’. Because hands interact directly with interface elements, two-handed or parallel interaction is possible. Unmediated, direct manipulation results in isomorphic and structure-preserving operations.
A motivation for the Tangible Media Group is that our ancestors developed in the past a range of specialized physical arifacts with different functionality, for instance to measure the passage of time, to predict the movement of planets or to compute. By grasping and manipulating these instruments, they developed rich languages to interact with real physical objects.
Newly arrived and quite ignorant of the languages of the Levant, Marco Polo could express himself only by drawing objects from his baggage-drums, salt fish, necklaces of wart hogs’ teeth-and pointing to them with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder or of horror, imitating the bay of a jackal, the hoot of the owl… Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
But many of these artifacts disappeared and were replaced by the most common of devices: the Personal Computer. In consequence, human computer Interaction is currently limited to the use of a screen (desk-mounted, head-mounted, hand-held, etc.), a mouse and a keyboard. The Tangible Media Group wants to reject this traditional way of HCI and wants to use real physical objects for representation and control of digital information instead.
Most research on tangible interfaces has been focused on implementation. This concentrates on defining concepts, building category systems (B. Ullmer and H. Ishii, 2000), evaluating usability (M. Fjeld,et al, 1999) or potential interaction metaphors. The focus is on single user interaction, with questions of cooperative use largely left out of consideration. As requirements for cooperative use are not identical with usability requirements for single user settings a deeper understanding seems essential in order to deliberately design for cooperative use.
I did some elementary investigation into cooperative use as part of the tangible work I was doing about 3 years ago.
Ishii, H., and Ullmer, B. “Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits, and Atoms”, Proc. of CHI’97, pp. 234-241, ACM 1997.
Emerging Frameworks for Tangible User Interfaces Brygg Ullmer and Hiroshi Ishii.
Hsinchu HSR station and bling
I arrived by car at the Hsinchu HSR station yesterday to two full parking lots. I thought at first that somehow the concept of driving to a station at least 20 minutes from anywhere in Hsinchu had at last caught on. After parking on the street two blocks away, I discovered that someone had the brilliant idea of sectioning off a 1/3 of the available parking spaces to store construction materials for a building going up next door. I guess the open fields adjacent to the project weren’t suitable.
I missed my train but luckily still managed to arrive in Taipei for a meeting with a minute to spare. Once you get to the station and get on the train it’s the most convenient way to arrive in the city.
Post meeting I had a spare hour and decided to roam around the streets of Shi Da. We lived on the lower depths of Tungan St. for our first year in Taiwan and like a million other people had many of our first food experiences in the Shi Da market. Since I hadn’t had lunch I was anxious to try something from one of the restaurants I used to frequent. Unfortunately mid-afternoon isn’t the best time of day to go shopping for food so I decided to try the old foreigner haunt Grandma Nitti’s. I’m happy to report that the place is still a dump and the food still somewhat a health hazard. I guess when I arrived ten years ago it seemed quaint – we didn’t have a real kitchen and wanted to eat the familiar but it now seems like a waste. I ordered a burger and it arrived rare and squirted blood all over my pants. They did have a beautiful overweight dog laying around which I guess makes it feel more bohemian. He seemed interested in my raw hamburger but I didn’t want him to get sick too.
Though it came too late, I did get a nice twitter message from Steve Leggat with advice: ‘ … good pizza and pasta over the road at Peacock though. Or KGB across from Wellcome. Mo!Relax cafe is good too, but smoky’. I might try those next time.
After lunch I made a hasty exit to the bathroom to wash the evidence of my carnivorous ways. My server breathed a sigh of relief when I met her on the stairs – she thought I left with out paying. I smiled and paid my bill.
Next stop ATM machine and the MRT which I think doesn’t have enough strategically placed route maps. Those of us who don’t ride the system everyday need a little reassurance that we are lining up for the right train. They line-up to get train tickets on the HSR was long and hot. I stared in disbelief at the two ladies wearing far too much cheap bling discussing on their mobile with someone who seemed to be standing off in the distance somewhere just how many tickets they need and for what time. This decision seemed to be of the utmost importance and very difficult as after 30 minutes of multiple calls and running back and forth they were still standing there.
Design is like jazz
Design is often like playing jazz. Lay down a structuring rhythm, find a snappy theme, and then improvise. Keith Dytham architecture
[Bits] 15 Interface design resources
10 Futuristic User Interfaces
Good user interfaces are crucial for good user experience. It doesn’t matter how good a technology is — if we, designers, don’t manage to make user interface as intuitive and attractive as possible, the technology will hardly reach a breakthrough. To gain the interest in a new product or technology, users need to understand its advantages or find themselves impressed or involved.
10 Best Application UIs of 2008
Many winners employ dashboards to give users a single overview of complex information and use lightboxes to ensure that users notice dialogs. Also, the Office 2007 ribbon showed surprisingly strong early adoption.
History’s 5 Best Interface Designs
Modern interface designers hate you. With few exceptions, the modern gadget is as impossible to navigate as were the seas before the sextant and the marine chronometer. The reason? The internal functions bear no relationship to anything we might encounter in the real world, so arbitrary abstractions are needed to bridge the gap between microchip and brain. Add to this the fact that the UI is often an afterthought in most devices and you end up with something like the RAZR, hated far and wide for its labyrinthine control layout.
An introduction to using patterns in web design
The biggest challenge for web designers is the unthinkably huge number of possible ways to solve any given problem. We usually don’t think of this because we have our habits and traditions to fall back on, but there are literally billions of possible pixel combinations for each page we make. There is a better way to manage this vast complexity than by making big decisions up front and hoping for the best. To make better sites–sites that are functional, beautiful, and “usable”–we have to break our design problems up into small independent chunks based on the real issues within our requirements. Christopher Alexander, who came up with this stuff, calls these chunks patterns.
IA Summit: Design patterns in the real world
“James Reffell and Micah Alpern presented eBay’s evolving body of solutions to Design Patterns in the Real World at IA Summit 2006. As their business and design teams grew exponentially over the past few years, eBay began to have problems maintaining design consistency within their products. Once the number of designers at eBay grew past “a number that could effectively coordinate amongst themselves” the complexity of the eBay platform and the rate at which products needed to be delivered contributed to lots of unintentionally inconsistent design work. People were reinventing the wheel and lots of information was being lost. To address these issues, eBay’s design team tried several approaches.”
User Interface Design Patterns
It has long been common practice to use recurring solutions to solve common problems. Such solutions are also called design patterns. Collections of software design patterns are standard reference points for the experienced user interface designer. This website seeks to better the situation for the UI designer, who struggles with the same problems as many other UI designers have struggled with before him.
Pattern Tap is here to satisfy and encourage the inspiration needs of my interface design peers and peeps. We aspire to be the one stop pattern shop for your next inspiration need.
Factory Joe’s Design Patterns. This collection captures findings of consistent, unique or interesting interfaces and design flows from across the web.
AJAX & Interface Design
In order to communicate content updates to users, many AJAX applications have adopted attention-getting techniques to highlight interface changes. Color change and animation are two of the most common approaches.
And The Yahoo Design Pattern Library, Webpatterns.org, Guspim’s Design Solutions Collection, Ten Usability Heuristics, First Principles of Interaction Design, Introduction to Apple Human Interface Guidelines.
Graspable User Interfaces
George Fitzmaurice on Graspable User Interfaces in his thesis of the same name:
“A Graspable UI design provides users concurrent access to multiple, specialized input devices which can serve as dedicated physical interface widgets, affording physical manipulation and spatial arrangements. Hence input control can be “space-multiplexed.”
That is, different devices can be attached to different functions, each independently (but possibly simultaneously) accessible. This, then affords the capability to take advantage of the shape, size and position of the physical controller to increase functionality and decrease complexity. It also means that the potential persistence of attachment of a device to a function can be increased. By using physical objects, we not only allow users to employ a larger expressive range of gestures and grasping behaviors but also to leverage off of a user’s innate spatial reasoning skills and everyday knowledge of object manipulations. These physical artifacts are essentially “graspable functions” — input devices which can be tightly coupled or “attached” to virtual objects for manipulation, or for expressing actions. These artifacts need to have spatially-aware computational devices.”
This logo’s a turkey
Recent series of logo’s produced in jest which didn’t fly. I think I was secretly hoping the concept if not the (sloppy) execution would be accepted.
An old definition of Information Design
Information design is concerned with transforming data into information, making the complex easier to understand and to use. It is a rapidly growing discipline that draws on typography, graphic design, applied linguistics, applied psychology, applied ergonomics, computing, and other fields. It emerged as a response to people’s need to understand and use such things as forms, legal documents, computer interfaces and technical information.
Information designers consider the selection, structuring and presentation of the information provider’s message in relation to the purposes, skills, experience, preferences and circumstances of the intended users. To do this they need specialist knowledge and skills in graphic communication and typography, the psychology of reading and learning, human-computer interaction, usability research and clear writing, plus an understanding of the potential and limitations of different media.
A definition from seemingly one of my most popular articles.
Years ago, I used to eat and breathe information architecture but alas it’s hard to live in theory forever. This kind of design practice had been and still is a hard sell in Taiwan. The evidence of which can be found in just about any government website or intranet.
Singapore MOE vs. Taiwan MOE
One can only be amazed (or perhaps disgusted) at the differences between Taiwan’s Ministry of Education (MOE) website and Singapore’s.
While I could nitpick, Singapore’s MOE site gave me the information I needed quickly and clearly. It looks like it was built with a goal of actually helping people find the information they need.
Taiwan’s MOE is a confusing mess of political and organizational data of interest to only those who wrote it. Their English site is useful to no one. It’s the type of masturbatory exercise so prevalent in many government information dissemination efforts here.
If you believe that what and how an entity communicates is an indication of the organization itself, by using their websites which organization do you think has their shit together? Which do you trust?
The signal to noise ratio is so out of whack, it’s no wonder people try to circumvent the system. One could spend their whole life trying to find accurate data (or do as we do pick up the phone and ask directly).
These problems have little to do with the lack of knowledge or practice in usability, design, or simple customer advocacy. There is talent here. It’s politics, poor organizational management, and lack of vision that creates these black holes.
Rock Island Blues Band
Found these photos on Facebook of a band I played in during/before college. Facebook always makes me feel old.
In these photos: Joey Kitson (vocals), Ron LeBlanc (drums), Barry Sorenson (tenor), Julian Spears (guitar), Colin Standfield (alto), Tom Easley (bass), and Clark MacLeod (trumpet). More info on Joey Kitson’s site.
Elementary school morass
There is an increasing sense of panic in our household this week as we come to terms with elementary school enrollment rules in Hsinchu.
Until earlier this week, we thought we had our daughter’s education under control. She’s had a good nanny who has helped make her completely fluent in Mandarin, we chose a small kindergarden in a great location with an emphasis on the kind of learning we value at her age, she goes to dance twice a week, and we plan on sending her to a math class on Saturdays. We want her to go to a local school and we had a few picked, both public and private, but what we completely glossed over was the age requirements for entering grade 1.
Our daughter, Catriona, was born on Sept. 25th but the rules state that a child must be six before Sept. 1st in order to gain admission. In order to attend ‘early’ a child must take an exam, an exam that reportedly only 10% pass. Of course the date to apply to take the exam has passed as well. One gets the impression that you start planning your child’s entrance to elementary school before they leave the womb.
Of course this is pretty critical. I cannot accept having her wait another year to attend elementary school and be the oldest child in the class.
So now we have to start getting favours from our network here, writing letters, and making phone calls in the hope that she can be allowed to write an exam. An exam that she will have prepare for daily. That’s allot of pressure for all involved and it seems insane to have to study for an exam at age 5. But that’s the system here.
Photo is from March 2007 of Catriona checking out Ming Fu elementary – one of our choices.
Update: We were told by the one private school in Hsinchu City that Catriona could attend ‘early’ without exam but not if she was going to stay for the full 6 years of elementary school. Also, she wouldn’t be able to transfer out of the private school to another local school. So they are able to bend the rules but if we plan on sending Catriona to elementary school in Taiwan longer than 3 years we are sol.
Ambient wants to make the world calmer
With Ambient the physical environment becomes an interface to digital information rendered as subtle changes in form, movement, sound, color or light.
Current information interfaces are either interruptive or too detailed. For the first time in history, ubiquitous wireless networks can affordably deliver digital information anytime, anywhere. The result for most of us is cacophony. Ambient wants to make the world calmer. Ambient Devices.
From an old ambient interface project of mine called unoriginally, Girls Ambient Room.
A bell is a bodhisattva
During retreats Thay (Thich Nhat Hanh) encouraged participants to give calm, bright-eyed attention to each daily activity, whether eating a meal, drawing a Buddha, or just walking quietly, aware of the contact between our foot and the earth which supports it. In order to encourage this kind of mindfulness, a ‘bell master’ sounded a large bell regularly, and everyone stopped their activity, breathed three times, and recited silently, ‘Listen, listen, this wonderful sound brings me back to my true self.’ ‘A bell is a bodhisattva,’ Thay said, ‘It helps us to wake up.’ Peter Levitt, 1988
Sounds of Taiwan
This morning I registered the domain soundsoftaiwan.org. The .com, which for some reason I like more, is in use by Ring of Fire Music, a company commited ‘to searching out and bringing the best and most authentic traditional and modern musical currents of Taiwan to the world’. I like their catalogue.
Let us cross a great modern capital with our ears more alert than our eyes, and we will get enjoyment from distinguishing the eddying of water, air and gas in metal pipes, the grumbling of noises that breathe and pulse with indisputable animality, the palpitation of valves, the coming and going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jolting of a tram on its rails, the cracking of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags. We enjoy creating mental orchestrations of the crashing down of metal shop blinds, slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffling of crowds, the variety of din, from stations, railways, iron foundries, spinning wheels, printing works, electric power stations and underground railways. Luigi Russolo
Five years ago or more I started to pay more attention to the sounds around me as I went about my daily routine and when I was on my frequent explorations around Hsinchu for 35togo. As odd as it may seem I started to enjoy the noise of my neighborhood and thought of all the mechanical sounds as music of sorts. ‘Too make a long story short’, this interest lead to a number of sound art installations, one of which featured hundreds of sound samples (or field recordings to use the proper parlance), but though wanting to continue the work I have as yet not had the ‘itch’ to do so.
If I can afford the some digital recording gear, I hope to create a library of sounds of Taiwan. It will be interesting to se where it leads.
Approaches to the design of sounds
In his thesis ‘Auditory Information Design‘, Barrass (1998) describes 7 types of approaches to the design of sounds that in particular support information processing activities – syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, perceptual, task-oriented, connotative, and device-oriented.
The syntactic approach focuses on the organization of auditory elements into more complex messages. The semantic approach focuses on the metaphorical meaning of the sound. The pragmatic method focuses on the psychoacoustic discrimination of the sounds. The perceptual method focuses on the significance of the relations between the sounds. The task-oriented method designs the sounds for a particular purpose. The connotative method is concerned with the cultural and aesthetic implications of the sound. The device-oriented method focuses on the transportability of the sounds between different devices, and the optimization of the sounds for a specific device”. (Barrass 1998).
It’s great reading if you are interested in Audio Interfaces.
Catriona and Hsinchu Bikini Girls
On early Saturday morning LuLu and I were out for an extended walk along Da Hu rd. and across the train tracks. It’s a nice walk but one I try to avoid as people, including tricks laden with flammable liquids, treat it as their own private race track.
LuLu and I came across a celebration of some sort (my 20 character vocabulary didn’t cover the titles on the sign) in a stage area just off Chung Hwa Rd. Seeing as there was to be dancing and an abundance of balloons I called Sheryl and she brought the kids. The mayor was there, who we seem to meet often, but I left before Catriona started asking for candy or gifts from him.
The only way I get to meet girls in bikini’s is via Catriona and she unabashedly agreed to have her picture taken with these two groups of ladies.
[Bits] On work, work, and working
Startup, Inc – What You Need To Know Before Starting A Company
Often people start a company without any clear idea of what a company is. Entrepreneurs closet themselves in the garage and start writing code. While the modern tech world could not exist without obsession, artistic inspiration and crazy engineers, there’s more to a startup than passion. Alex explores the basics behind corporate entities, stock, financing, and the key non-technical infrastructure every company should have.[via Swissmiss]
Walking the Line When You Work from Home
Working from home as a freelance contractor or remote employee can be a great thing, particularly if you live alone. But what if you have a spouse and/or children at home with you while you work? Every work environment offers distractions, but those who work from home with their families face a unique set of issues—and need equally unique ways of dealing with them.
Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Managing Multiple Jobs At Once
Some of us take on second jobs to make ends meet. Some do it for a chance to do the work they actually enjoy. And some of us create our own second jobs to build a business or create our own projects. No matter what the reason, though, juggling more than one job is guaranteed to be a crash course in time management. If you’re not careful, the word ‘crash’ could become more than figurative
Tim Ferriss interview
Whether you are a musician, entrepreneur, employee, or all three, everyone has too much stuff you have to do, and not enough time for the stuff you want to do.
If you have something that you would like to make and you just don’t know how to test it, make sure you’re scratching your own itch. Like Twitter: Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey created it in two weeks as a way to scratch their own itch. He said, “At least that way you know that one person is interested in having it.” It’s amazing how many otherwise smart, well-funded companies will use awful statistically-invalid focus groups, then say, “Well, no one in this room likes the idea, but our focus groups tell us that we should make it,” so of course the product comes out and it fails.
Political blogs vs. Obamedia
I just spent a couple hours procrastinating by reading a number of American political blogs with leanings toward the Republican political spectrum. I won’t say conservative because though many label themselves conservative, the values and opinions they express are anything but.
With the exception of Drudge (which I think is funny like the Onion) and the Huffington Post (which i guess is ‘liberal’ and funny like the Onion) I never read sites such as these.
It’s their community’s which are especially illuminating. So here off the top of my head a short list of memorabilia:
- Russia wants Obama to win the election so they can run all over him
- Obama is a pussy. Anyone not tough enough or who doesn’t advocate war is a pussy
- If off-shore drilling will save me 2 cents a tank where is the downside? (unless you live on the coast of course)
- Hummer’s seem to be a necessary accessory
- Liberals all want to spit on the constitution
- Lots and lots of tough aggressive talk – like I remember conversations in high school or while drunk
- Lots of black and white thinking. Us and them. Liberal or Conservative. Against us or with us.
- The media is run by liberals who are against ‘us’
- Though proven ineffective torture is ok and desirable
- The Republican leadership can do no wrong
- It’s not the administrations fault ‘things’ (always see this word and never clear points) have gone the way they have
- Obamedia
- Liberalism is a mental disorder
- There is a fight to take America back … from Americans (wtf?)
- It seems anyone with an education is branded dumb and elitist. Especially if they went to an ivy league university
My uncle back home, who is one of my favourite people in the world, had similar thinking. He never voted on the issues or the person on the ballot but has fallowed the Liberal party religiously for as long as I can remember. But he was neither aggressive, nor violent, and was generally very kind to people regardless of their political or racial make-up. The kind of thinking I read was so utterly narrow that I can see how fractious debates in the have become.
User illusion
My main complaint (about modern interfaces) is that metaphor is a poor metaphor for what needs to be done. At PARC we coined the phrase ‘user illusion’ to describe what we were about when designing user interfaces. There are clear connotations to the stage, theatrics, and magic, all of which give much stronger hints as to the direction to be followed… should we transfer the paper metaphor so perfectly that the screen is as hard as paper to erase and change, clearly not. – Alan Kay
Certainly I need more data
Dailylit is an interesting service which I am giving a try. It delivers books in installments, via email or RSS. One per day. They have over 950 titles available, of which I am struggling to find something I am interested in reading. Many are free or available on a Pay-Per-Read basis.
Since I unfortunately spend most of my day in front of a screen this might be a good way to read something of value vs. the shit I read on blogs and news sites.
Seven Secrets for Better Brainstorming
- Sharpen the focus
Good brainstormers start with a well-honed statement of the problem. This can be as simple as a question. Edgy is better than fuzzy. The session will get off to a better start-and you can bring people back into the main topic more easily-if you have a well-articulated description of the problem at just the right level of specificity.
We’ve also found that the best topic statements focus outward on a specific customer need or service enhancement rather than focusing inward on some organizational goal. On the other hand, a series of more specific, customer-focused brainstorms on topics like “How can we accelerate the time-to-first-result for customers searching via dial-up modems” could uncover innovations that might ultimately yield the competitive edge you are looking for. - Playful rules
Don’t start to critique or debate ideas. It can sap the energy of the session pretty quickly. You need a way to turn aside critiques without turning off the critiquers completely. At IDEO many of our conference rooms have brainstorming rules stenciled in six-inch-high letters on the walls, for example, “Go for quantity,” “Encourage wild ideas,” or “Be visual.” Not willing to mark up your walls? - Number your ideas
Numbering the ideas that bubble up in a brainstorm helps in two ways. First, it’s a tool to motivate the participants before and during the session (“Let’s try to get a hundred ideas before we leave the room”) or to gauge the fluency of a complete brainstorm. Second, it’s a great way to jump back and forth from idea to idea without lasing track of where you are. - Build and jump
Watch for chances to “build” and “jump.” High-energy brainstormers tend to follow a series of steep “power” curves, in which momentum builds slowly, then intensely, then starts to plateau. The best facilitators can nurture an emerging conversation with a light touch in the first phase and know enough to let ideas flow during the steep part of the ideation curve. It’s when energy fades on a line of discussion that the facilitator really earns his or her keep.
Try building on an idea. Encourage another push or introduce a small variation. Or take a jump, either back to an earlier path you skipped by too quickly or forward to a completely new approach. Whatever you do, try to get into the next power curve and keep the energy up. - The space remembers
Write the flow of ideas down in a medium visible to the whole group. There are many emerging digital technologies for group work, but we have had great success with extremely low-tech tools like Sharpie markers, giant Post-its for the walls, and rolls of old-fashioned butchershop paper on the tables.
Cover virtually every wall and flat surface with paper before the session starts. And you may find there’s a certain synergy in physically moving around the room writing down and sketching the ideas. As you rapidly capture the team’s ideas, make a mental note of ones that are worth coming back to during a build or a jump. When you return to the spot on the wall where that idea was captured, spatial memory will help people recapture the mind-set they had when the idea first emerged. - Stretch your mental muscles
People are busy. Time is short. Is it worthwhile to “burn” some time at the beginning of a brainstorm doing some form of group warm-up? Maybe. But that “maybe” rapidly becomes a “yes” in certain circumstances:- When the group has not worked together before
- When most of the group doesn’t brainstorm frequently
- When the group seems distracted by pressing but unrelated issues
One type of warm-up we practice is a fast-paced word game simply to clear the mind (Zen practitioners call it “beginner’s mind”) and to get the team into a more outgoing mode. Another warm-up is to do some content-related homework.
- Get physical
Good brainstormers are extremely visual. They include sketching, mind mapping, diagrams, and stick figures. You don’t have to be an artist to get your point across with a sketch or diagram. Leave your performance anxieties at the door and jump in with whatever visual tools you have available.
But the best brainstormers often get physical. We move beyond two dimensions and push for three. The first way we do this is to bring in everything but the kitchen sink (and we’ve brought the sink, too, when it was relevant). The second way we get physical is to have materials on hand to build crude models of a concept: block, foam core, tubing, duct tape, whatever might be useful. The third physical approach is “bodystorming,” where we act out current behavior/usage patterns and see how they might be altered. We’ve bodystormed on products ranging from vending machines to car seats, where our skits and scenarios pointed to all kinds of opportunities for improvement.
Excerpted from Art of Innovation, Kelly, pg. 56-62.
Time keeps on slipping into the future
Dates seem to be playing a larger role in my life than at any time in the past. The past is something that I spend far too much time thinking about as well. Perhaps this is a symptom of my advancing age or more likely I have allowed myself to settle into the boredom of ordinary life.
Either way the next few months seem to represent a number of milestones:
- this month I have been married for 12 years
- this month marks my 10th year of living in Taiwan (9 of it in Hsinchu)
- next month my daughter turns 5
- the month after that marks 19 years that I have been with my wife (we lived in sin for 7 years)
Writing it down makes it seem less auspicious. I’m not convinced that having spent 10 years on this rock is something to be proud of. It feels like an endurance test more than anything.
The title comes from Steve Miller’s Fly Like an Eagle (songza) which for some reason started playing in my head when I was jotting this down. Perhaps Daniel Levitin’s book has an answer as to why.
An anthropological introduction to YouTube
By Michael Wesch of Kansas State University. Via Robert Paterson.
[Bits] Food and reading
Peak Energy and What That Means For Food
The rising cost of energy could be an opportunity to address big problems- a catalyst for positive change. With that in mind we must frame this not as ‘the end of the world’ but as the beginning of something better.
Food Sovereignty and the Collapse of Nations
Here in the United States about 40% of our population farmed for a living around the turn of the 20th century. By 1950 that number had dropped to 12%. Today fewer than 2% do the work of growing food in America as we too have industrialized and urbanized our population. The other 98% of us work at a job which provides us money that allows us to buy food from a small number of domestic producers and from others who grow it abroad. We have given up our own food sovereignty as a people and instead rely almost entirely on an economic system to provide us with meals.
Louise Fili design
Restaurant identity & food packaging. Beautiful typography.
Online, R U Really Reading?
Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.
What the Internet is doing to our brains
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
A different approach to reading RSS feeds
Instead of treating news like email (as most RSS readers do), Times presents you with headlines and photos from a variety of sources all in one place, letting you more easily discover the news you want to read. Like your own personal newspaper, you can put feeds into separate areas, create pages for different subjects, and more.
Casa de socrates
Hidden away on the campus of Tsing Hua University is Casa de socrates, a café following the bohemian tradition of many of my former Toronto haunts. If it weren’t so removed from the rest of the city (which may be part of it’s charm) it might just become my home away from home.
We had dinner there last Wednesday after going to see the Australian production of Thomas the Train which was being shown on the Tsing Hua campus. The kids seemed to enjoy it. The greatest thrill for me was watching the performers try to lip sync to the Mandarin sound track. Attendance was light at our showing no doubt due to in part the outbreak of enterovirus.
I love the atmosphere of the café. Used books line the shelves, many in English and French, and jazz plays on the huge audiophile set-up they have at the front of the main room. A large grand piano is there as well and seating is either comfy couches or swirly old chairs. Swirly old chairs are like a ride at the circus for the kids which doesn’t make for a relaxing start to the ‘meal’. Cats roaming the room round out the ambience.
The food is rubbish. Our first and second choices were not available. My wife eventually could order pasta which somehow is always, not so good – not so bad, in almost every restaurant in Taiwan. I was hungry so I ordered ‘peach pork’. The dish was a large plate with 4 slices of dried ham with peach sauce on top. Craptacular and expensive. I didn’t try the coffee but I suspect like the pasta, the coffee would be passable in much the same way as my morning Nescafé.
But I will go back. The staff is young and sickly cute. It seems like an excellent place to have a lazy afternoon of reading, or to spend a morning writing, and it would be a great choice for meetings. It’s nestled in the beautiful Tsing Hua campus and is quiet. If you keep your menu expectations low it’s certainly worth the effort.
Google Map of location.
No cut ‘n’ past in Illustrator
I’ve had this error pop-up regularly for ages when I am using Adobe Illustrator and it drives me mad:
quicktime and a decompressor are needed to view this image
A completely unintelligible error message. What the hell does this mean exactly? I have Quicktime and it’s only a jpg so I have all the necessary resources to allow for what is in every other application on the Mac a basic mode of interaction – cut ‘n’ paste.
So far the only answer I have found is that simply the only way to import a jpg into Illustrator (and InDesign) is to use the ‘Place’ command. That seems unintuitive but if that’s the case than why not say so in the error message!
You can cut ‘n’ paste easily between Adobe applications just not from the Finder into Illustrator and InDesign.
Bad start
I finally got to sleep before midnight but the kids woke me having bad dreams. Later Elsa was whimpering and not settling down to sleep so I took her downstairs to the first floor bathroom in the chance that she was going to be sick. Later I was awake a few other times with more bad dreams from Catriona. Slept in late until 6am when I heard Elsa crying downstairs. She had diarrhea all over the bathroom. Nothing like that smell first thing in the morning. I took her outside for a walk and she relieved herself numerous times on the street prompting a return trip for me with a bucket to clean the mess. I took her to the roof and gave her some water. After the diarehea in the bathroom was cleaned I returned to the roof to give her some medicine when I stepped on a piece of glass which went deep into my bare foot. Hobbled down the stairs spreading blood everywhere. Luckily LuLu, our other dog, is fine.
In theory this morning was going to be the start of a good day. The kids are coming off of a quarantine after both being infected with enterovirus, whatever virus I had seems to have weakened, and Sheryl starts her holidays.
Theories seldom seem to work in practice.
The RT-Mart date
I wouldn’t call trudging through RT-mart an enjoyable shopping experience (RT makes Wallmart seem exotic). We shop there because they have a good selection of fresh foods and the cheapest prices in town. And yet each time I go there, a shopping cart full of vegetables, fruit, and rmb for the dogs I see couples leaving with nothing or on occasion a box of cookies or some other small sundry items. Of all the places to do the ‘shopping date’ so prevalent this strikes me as the oddest place of all. I wonder if this is an indication of what the future holds for these couples relationships. Would shopping together at Jason’s market indicate something more auspicious?
Hsinchu lawn mower
Pictured below is Hsinchu’s answer to both the climate crisis and the rising cost of fuel. Instead of hiring workers to whack the grass into dust with their noisy polluting weed trimmers, they have instead stationed two goats at a local park in what could be the start of a country wide program. As an added bonus I’m sure the grass gets a much needed nutrient boost.
Coincidentally, if the goats continue in their current direction, the park leads them directly to a large meat packing plant.
Unique qualities of sound
Some of the ways that sound is unique are as follows:
- Sound can provide information about the interior of an object. Our ears perceive patterns of moving air from vibrating objects and sound can carry information about the consistency and hollowness of objects.
- Sound also communicates information very quickly (Brewster 1998)
- “Sound exists in time and over space, vision exists in space and over time” (Gaver 1989)
- Sound is not bound to a specific location
A draw back is that one cannot turn away from sounds nor can one turn off our ears to unpleasant sounds.