Even if it keeps you up all night,
wash down the walls and scrub the floor
of your study before composing a syllable.
Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way.
Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.
The more you clean, the more brilliant
your writing will be, so do not hesitate to take
to the open fields to scour the undersides
of rocks or swab in the dark forest
upper branches, nests full of eggs.
When you fiind your way back home
and stow the sponges and brushes under the sink,
you will behold in the light of dawn
the immaculate altar of your desk,
a clean surface in the middle of a clean world.
From a small vase, sparkling blue, lift
a yellow pencil, the sharpest of the bouquet,
and cover pages with tiny sentences
like long rows of devoted ants
that followed you in from the woods.
“(Capital-W) Work is what we have considered for years: your boss tells you to do something, you do it, and you get paid. By contrast, (little-w) work is motivated by inherent interest and generally unpaid. Think of the difference between an Encyclopedia Britannica editor doing Work, and a Wikipedia editor doing work during spare hours. Big Work drives the economy; little work drives the Internet. Big Work builds skyscrapers; little work generates a half million fanfiction stories about Harry Potter.”
Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.
Alex of ISO50 asked some of today’s most exciting artists and creators what they do when the ideas aren’t flowing. He left the question fairly open ended and asked, What do you do to inspire your creativity when you find yourself in a rut? As expected, he was presented with an array of strategies, ranging from listening to Boards of Canada in a forest alone, to cooking up a storm (recipe provided) and waiting for the mind to clear: Overcoming Creative Block
Last week, I had the pleasure to run into Jay Parkinson who has rightfully gained lots of recognition and respect for his upside-down thinking when it comes to re-inventing the american healthcare system. Jay told me about his latest venture, The Future Well.
Jay Parkinson and Grant Harrison started the The Future Well with the goals of changing the world’s health with elegantly designed, innovative services and products, new ways of connecting and communicating, and their unending mission to help people feel their best. That’s why Jay went to medical school, spent five years in residency, got his master’s in public health, and created a whole new way of visiting your doctor. And that’s why Grant has worked endlessly for the past 20 years to understand consumers and create innovative new products and services that made their lives better. They are optimistic about the future…very.
Delivered in Beta, a wonderful documentary about Open Design & Innovation.
How are social media changing design? What is the value of a prototype? How are work and play merging? Where is design headed in the 21st century? “Delivered in Beta” begins a conversation on these topics and invites your participation (twitter hashtag #od10beta). This video was created during the Open Design Workshop at the Betahaus
as part of Social Media Week Berlin 2010. Produced by KS12.
A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make you know yourself knowing it and the comma, well at the most a comma is a poor period that it lets you stop and take a breath but if you want to take a breath you ought to know yourself that you want to take a breath.
Start with the doorknob. Once you become a doorknob expert, you can move on to becoming a room expert, a door expert, a window expert. Make connections, and you can become an expert on how public spaces can foster community interaction, or how city design can alleviate congestion.
Here’s an interesting article by Robin Sloan on “Stock and Flow“:
There are two kinds of quantities in the world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank, or trees in the for est. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour, or three-thousand tooth picks a day. Easy. Too easy.
But I actually think stock and flow is the master metaphor for media today. Here’s what I mean:
Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.
Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you pro duce that’s as interest ing in two months (or two years?) as it is today. It’s what peo ple discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, build ing fans over time.
Lost Generation is a palindrome video that reads the same backwards as forward, but has a totally different meaning. The video was submitted in a contest by a 20-year old. The contest was titled “u @ 50″ by AARP. This video won second place. When they showed it, everyone in the room was awe-struck and broke into spontaneous applause.
GOOD asked some of the world’s most prominent futurists to explain why slowness might be as important to the future as speed: Hurry Up and Wait by Julian Bleecker
The Zen principles of Aesthetics are derived from the Buddhism beliefs of Anicca or Impermanence where “everything, without exception, is constantly in flux, even planets, stars and gods”. (Wikipedia)
THE PRINCIPLES:
FUKINSEI (imbalanced)
Asymmetry, odd numbers, irregularity, unevenness, imbalance is used as a denial of perfection as perfection and symmetry does not occur in nature.
KANSO (simple)
Elimination of ornate and things of simplicity by nature expresses their truthfulness. Neat, frank and uncomplicated.
KOKOU (austere)
Basic, weathered bare essentials that are aged and unsensuous. Evokes sternness, forbiddance, maturity and weight.
SHIZEN (natural)
Raw, natural and unforced creativity without pretence. True naturalness is to negate the naive and accidental.
YUGEN (subtle profound)
Suggest and not reveal layers of meaning hidden within. Invisible to the casual eye and avoiding the obvious.
DATSUZOKU (unworldly)
Transcendence of conventional and traditional. Free from the bondage of laws and restrictions. True creativity.
SEIJAKU (calm)
Silence and tranquility, blissful solitude. Absence of disturbance and noise from one’s mind, body and surroundings.
Therein lies the best career advice I could possibly dispense: just DO things. Chase after the things that interest you and make you happy. Stop acting like you have a set path, because you don’t. No one does. You shouldn’t be trying to check off the boxes of life; they aren’t real and they were created by other people, not you. There is no explicit path I’m following, and I’m not walking in anyone else’s footsteps. I’m making it up as I go.
frog Senior Interaction Designer Kevin Hutchinson confesses that our social power is evolving due to our presence on online social networks because we are able to find, reach, and communicate with people at a greater speed. But with this new amplified social connectivity comes a new set of expectations for increased engagement. Social networking etiquette is still evolving and it can be difficult to decipher what is appropriate in this hyper-social online space.
Hutchinson believes that, we as social creatures, should take some cues from other forms of communication. You wouldn’t text, call, or knock on someone’s door several times a day to tell them how much you enjoyed what they were reading, doing, or saying, so why comment or “like”, everything they post on their Facebook wall. Right? How does one create social boundaries on their networks and how do we not take it so, er, personally when someone does not befriend us?
Almost every novel I read makes me want to write, just as most cookbooks make me want to cook and many photography books inspire me to take photos. I have yet to come across any inspiring books on web design, though, and I suspect it’s because web designers don’t do as much pure design as the title implies. In other words, perhaps web design has failed to become an artistic medium and simply lacks the material to make an inspiring book.
So I wonder if web designers could become better designers if they emulated the Architect’s system of getting an engineer’s opinion only after his or her imagination has been inked on paper. That is, perhaps we should free ourselves from writing html and css as a profession. Such a strategy might have a better chance at reproducing the radical genius of Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry, if only because web designers could stop handicapping themselves with their fascination with code and the limitations code implies.
Simplicity, many people think,
is an end in itself
But they’re getting it backwards
Simplicity is the path, the means
It’s not a far off destination,
somewhere in the future
It’s right here, right now
It’s taking things one at a time
It’s asking simple questions
It’s taking simple actions
It’s doing it slowly
It’s considering and being conscious,
with everything
When you find yourself becoming overwhelmed
on the path to simplicity
Taking a complicated, frenzied path
to get there
Stop, consider, and choose
the simpler path
And take it slowly
And easily
And lovely
“There are different species of laziness: Eastern and Western. The Eastern style is like the one practised in India. It consists of hanging out all day in the sun, doing nothing, avoiding any kind of work or useful activity, drinking cups of tea, listening to Hindi film music blaring on the radio, and gossiping with friends. Western laziness is quite different. It consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so there is no time at all to confront the real issues. This form of laziness lies in our failure to choose worthwhile applications for our energy.”
Tim Brown says the design profession is preoccupied with creating nifty, fashionable objects — even as pressing questions like clean water access show it has a bigger role to play. He calls for a shift to local, collaborative, participatory “design thinking.”
In It’s Nice That’s first weekly discussion they have invited their digital partner With Associates, to comment on commenting. Online comment has become a medium in its own right, but when the general consensus is that most comments suck, why do we continue to add the functionality to websites?
Osaka’s robot-run parking lots mixed with the Minneapolis lakefront; a musician’s fantasy metropolis. Article by David Byrne: A Talking Head Dreams of a Perfect City
“A city can’t be too small. Size guarantees anonymity—if you make an embarrassing mistake in a large city, and it’s not on the cover of the Post, you can probably try again. The generous attitude towards failure that big cities afford is invaluable—it’s how things get created. In a small town everyone knows about your failures, so you are more careful about what you might attempt. Every time I visit San Francisco I ask out loud “Why don’t I live here? Why do I choose to live in a place that is harder, tougher and, well, not as beautiful?” The locals often reply, “You don’t want to live here. It looks like a city, but it’s really a small village. Everyone knows what you’re doing” Oh, OK. If you say so. It’s still beautiful.”
In an era of mobile devices, instant connectivity, and automated mailing lists and notifications, it is all too easy for people to contact us. As a consequence, we live our lives just trying to keep our heads above water. Our ability to prioritize and control our focus is crippled by an unyielding flow of incoming communication: email, texts, tweets, facebook messages, phone calls, and so on (and on).
Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don’t: Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think.
Swissmiss is a design blog and studio run by Tina Roth Eisenberg, a 'swiss designer gone NYC'. Contact me if you have a design project, a link suggestion or just want to say hello.
