Tackling Procrastination

Two videos, one a Masters and another a senior project, came by me recently that both tackle the sensitive and ever present topic of procrastination. When you have something you really need to do, but you can't motivate yourself, or figure out how to do it. Both have some delightful animation. I think we'll all recognize a little of ourselves in both of these videos.

The first is a 2007 animation by Johnny Kelly at the Royal College of Art. I've embedded the youtube version below but you can check out the website of Mickey and Johnny to see other cool stuff he's done.



This second (much shorter) is a recent animation by Bang-yao Liu at the Savannah College of Art and Design, not exactly on procrastination, but deadlines (not too far off). Ah, Post-Its. What would the world be without them.



(It struck me by the coincidence that perhaps Masters and senior projects are the only time where you have enough time on your hands and are faced with procrastination so strongly that you can actually make a film on procrastination.)

Coroflot's 8th Annual Design Salary Survey Results

Although based on, at times, spotty data, it's definitely enlightening to check out Coroflot's Survey of Design Salaries. Especially nice is their design salary calculator (or corculator) that enables you to put in your field and see what others are getting - even ballpark figures help either reassure you or give you something to strive (or bargain) towards.

They also post a few simple graphs about the overall data from which I drew, at a short glance, a couple of things.

• Increasing experience steadily increases your salary - which is nice to know, though I couldn't tell if it becomes diminishing returns or increasing at the top-end
• A Masters degree will serve you as well as a PhD in most fields (which makes sense and something I can attest to - not that you get a PhD studying design to be able to do it a whole better)
• Design management's the place to be if you're into the $

Try it out.

10 (more) skills for designers

Another post from Fast Company - this time from Dell's Ken Musgrave on the additional skills that designers need beyond the design basics. I pretty much agree with his selection, though I can also see that if you honed each of these 10 you could just as well be a politician or a celebrity as a designer. Put together they'd be a pretty good description of Barack Obama. Of course, I'd rather be a designer in any case. Here they are:

1. Passionate Curiosity
2. Imagination
3. Objectivity & Self-Awareness
4. Crisp Communication
5. Effective Storytelling
6. Flawless Execution
7. Business Acumen
8. Global Awareness
9. Context
10. Talent

10 Things to Demand from Design Thinkers

I wanted to link to a post on Fast Company by Mark Dziersk on Design Thinking. Mark sees Design Thinking as playing a significant role in the way we will, and need to do our work. He also sees Design Thinking as something that is not exclusively the realm of designers, but is regularly picked up by people from many disciplines (politics and business are two notable examples).

He lays out 10 things to demand from design thinkers, which I see perhaps more as 10 important things to remember about design thinking. Some are more transparent than others, so for details check out Mark's original post. I modified some of the titles to make them make more sense to me. Here goes:

1. Brand equity starts with the consumer*
   
2. Designers are the storytellers
3. Desing Thinking starts with empathy and perception*
   
4. Good design is good business
5. Design thinking starts at the very beginning
6. Designers need to manage cross-functional teams*
   
7. Keep design assassins in the crosshairs*
   
8. Be strategic and think big picture*
   
9. Aim for biggest bang for your buck*
   
10. Good enough is no longer good enough*
    

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*Original titles:

1. Get clarity about equity

3. The ergonomics of understanding

6. Designers need to be orchestra conductors

7. or don't let the bozos grind you down (Guy Kawasaki's advice)

8. Use your head before your hands

9. Be a good shepherd

10. Obsessive compulsives welcome here

Roomba Revealed

Came across this fantastic shot at signaltheorist.com of the path Roomba takes around a room. Although it's hard to see any method to the movement when you watch one for a bit (as, yes, I did), it's clear that he does a good job of covering the space (he has little brushes that sweep up along the edges). I particularly like the graceful spiral on the left.

Navigating Roomba round a room never seemed like such a difficult problem to me until I spoke with a friend of mine about a year ago. He recently completed his PhD at Berkeley studying the problem of unmanned planes navigating the shortest distance between an arbitrary set of points (kind of like the travelling salesman). While the planes are at least able to use GPS for an absolute position from time to time, he explained to me how difficult it is to actually accurately know where a robot like a Roomba is at any one time. Essentially, the sensor errors for how far he's been and where he's turned build up very quickly to be almost unusable. To avoid the noisy sensors you really have to develop an algorithm that's somewhat position agnostic - it'll get Roomba around the room no matter where he starts (or if, being mean, you were to move him mid-stride). Somewhat more challenging, but signaltheorist's photo at least gives me some hope that Roomba's engineers have done a good job.

Seeing Roomba in action reminded me of Paul Saffo's prediction at the Long Now that "the next big thing is robots." Essentially, pick a technology that's been largely failing for the last 20 years and it's probably about the right maturity level to take off. Maybe this is a good time to invest...

Deep Agriculture: Michael Pollan in defense of food

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Michael Pollan, once again hosted by The Long Now, on Deep Agriculture.

I enjoyed myself taking notes on his talk and I think they speak more clearly (and more interestingly) than any summary I could post here. Below I've included a large scan of my notes from the talk (which I asked Michael to sign!). I even bought his latest book, In Defense of Food, after the talk which I've finished already - Michael Pollan is a compelling writer.

To try and sum it up, missing half of his great stuff, in my own words:

Everything is connected - we can't separate our own health from the health of what we eat and the soil it grows in. We need to transform farming from big industry and make farming cool again. We need to design better incentive systems for farming. By paying attention to what we eat and where it comes from, our health, and the health of the planet, will improve.

I hope you enjoy the notes. Read them big.

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I first read Michael Pollan in his New York Times Magazine article Unhappy Meals. His manifesto for eaters of 'Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.' counts as some of the stickiest imperatives for action that I've come across. Great journalists have a way of cutting to the chase. Michael Pollan teaches journalism at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism.

You can also read Kevin Kelly (the founder of Wired magazine's) summary of the talk on the Long Now blog entry for Michael Pollan "Deep Agriculture"

You could also do worse than spending 6 minutes watching Grocery Store Wars for a similar message.

Photosynths: Remarkable, fun and practical

Nearly two years ago I remember marveling at a neat technology demonstrated by Blaise Aguera y Arcas at the TED conference. It was called Photosynth, and if you haven't enjoyed Blaise's Photosynth TED talk yet, it's definitely 8 minutes well spent*. With a camera, no particular photographic talent and plenty of photographs, Photosynth creates a navigable pseudo 3D experience of exploring an environment. You can explore from different angles and even zoom in and out. It's remarkable stuff.

Sometime after Blaise introduced the world to Photosynth, Microsoft made the service available for free at Photosynth.net. Just recently I tried my own hand at creating a Photosynth with the view from our San Francisco balcony: San Francisco Ferry building balcony view photosynth. I also embedded a smaller version below. It's fun to click around. I tried to include a few close-up details you can find with a little searching. The interface reminds me a little of an old computer adventure game; if you find the right way through the maze you may stumble upon something hidden away.

As I mentioned above, the neat thing here is that you don't need any special skills to create a photosynth; just a little thought and a snap-happy trigger finger.

Hopefully, by now I've convinced you of the remarkable and fun part of Photosynths. I recently learned about a more practical use of them too: NASA released a photosynth collection of the International Space Station. With the NASA photosynths (and a fast connection speed) you can really get a feel for the Space Station from all vantage points checking out the big picture and details. I loved looking around the inside of the Destiny US Laboratory. I also enjoyed the photosynth of the Mars Rover.

Photosynths bring a little control to the viewer of an object rather than ceding all editorial control to the photographer - you can explore at your own will and pace. They also turn the viewing of a photograph into a qualitatively different experience - while it's not like being there it's a whole different feel for the environment and context of a site or object. If you make one, let me know. Have fun.

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*In fact, almost all of the TED talks are time well spent. We got into the fun habit of watching one TED talk a week over dinner. It's amazing what you can learn.

The road to quality is paved with our failures (lots of them)

At Jump we recently passed around an entry from Ben Casnocha's blog about the idea generation process at The Onion. While the original reason for passing it on was visual recording, the statistic of note is that the team at The Onion generates ~600 title ideas to arrive at the 18 titles that eventually make it into each issue. That is, remarkably, exactly 3% of the ideas.

Bob Sutton commented on this same fact bolstering an argument for quantity with statistics from IDEO's toy group (now part of IDEO). The numbers go like this:

In 1998, at IDEO's toy group Skyline:
10 employees, generated
~4000 toy ideas.
230 progressed to a nice drawing or prototype.
12 were sold and
fewer of these probably made any money...

It's a tough life being an idea.

At a recent Concepting project here at Jump it's a similar story as the 700 concept ideas generated by the team and clients get distilled down to the few that will make it.

In any case, the reason for posting this is from Jesse Farmer's generous comment on Ben's post sharing with us the following anecdote about quality and quantity. It's from David Bayles and Ted Orland's book, Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Art Making. While (I found) it's been shared in many other places on the web, it's so sticky I thought it worth sharing again. Enjoy:

'The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.'

As John Maxwell writes in Attitude 101: Fail early, fail often, fail forward.

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Just to be clear I take no credit for what's above. Thanks, Ben, Bob, Jesse, David and Ted, John, The Onion and all their sources.

More inspiration from moreinspiration.com

While we're not all in need of more inspiration, there are certainly times when a little inspiration goes a long way. For a regular dose of inspiration, and some browsing of some really cool bleeding edge technologies you could do worse than check out More Inspiration

One of the free services provided by CREAX - Creativity for Innovation - in Belgium (where I worked back in '03), it neatly ties in over 2500 eye-catching innovations, short descriptions, an email newsletter should you wish, and a technology analysis of each using their own methodology. It's hard to receive the newsletter and not want to take a look at at least one of the new submissions.

It's unashamedly technology inspired innovation. Yet the engineer in me continues to get excited and inspired by the possibility of what these applications of new technologies promise. I'm still yet to see a firm that specializes in offering the ultimate marriage of technology and people-centered design, though I'm looking forward to seeing the day. In the meantime, this is a great place to land.

Trails of the departed: Dealing with death online

If you've spent any time online it's hard to escape the fact that we all leave trails everywhere. Posts in forums, accounts on sites we no longer use, mentions in blogs, perhaps a website we no longer keep up to date all point to a trail of where we've been. This is all very well while we're still here. But not long ago, I listened to a column by Jeremy Wagstaff on the BBC about the online trails we leave behind when we die.

We spend our time gradually collecting logins, passwords and email accounts that we share only with the makers of the different systems. Should the unthinkable happen noone has access to those login details but you. Jeremy shared the tale of a fellow tech columnist who died and still appeared as a smiling friend on his facebook page. And, for that matter, it would be some shock to see a status update as 'deceased'. They continue to appear on your networks on twitter, dopplr, or linkedin, and Outlook continues to recommend them when autofilling email addresses. Another friend told me of how, with the passing of a friend, their facebook wall evolved into a shared memorial for friends and family to share tributes.

Given that the Internet tools and sites we now know and love have generally only been around 10 or so years, this is clearly going to become a larger and larger issue. When somebody dies no one is able to easily go in and remove their online presence. In my case, no-one person knows all the sites I've signed up to, nor do people really have the incentive to go in and remove me from them.

I think, this becomes an issue both for the makers of sites, and for the users themselves. As a user, is it my responsibility, as it would be in a regular will, to ensure that my online presence is carefully cleaned up online, just as my physical assets, property and bank accounts would be passed on to next of kin to keep or dispose of? As a website maker, how do I tastefully and appropriately deal with the inevitable deaths of site users?

I recently learned from Springwise about Legacy Locker, a site that aims to tackle this growing issue.

Legacy Locker is a safe, secure repository for your digital property that lets you grant access to online assets for friends and loved ones in the event of death or disability.

I think they're one of the first in which is clearly going to be a growing segment - just as, though we don't often like to acknowledge them, cemeteries, funeral directors, and morticians play a critical role in keeping the world turning. As our presence is increasingly also online, we also need similar roles for the online world. And, in fact, these already exist. Should you perform a search for online memorials, you'll find that the space is rapidly being catered to. Here, the online world has some advantages over the physical, with online memorials allowing many forms of tribute to loved ones that go beyond a mossy gravestone in a rarely visited cemetery.

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I since found Jeremy's radio broadcast online on the Jakarta Post: The comforting presence of absent friends.

Designing emails for busy people

It's no secret that genuine work these days is done through email. In the sense that "doing email" is a legitimate work task even though email can encompass a vast array of things.

I've been in the position recently where I have had the pleasure, and challenge, of working with senior leaders at a large awesome company who have many other pressing demands on their time besides what I'm asking of them in my email.

This has caused a necessary reflection on designing even regular emails to make it easy for the person on the receiving end. To that end, I tapped my colleague at Jump, Lara Lee, for her experience in writing emails that work. She picked out four principles that have helped her emails see their way through crowded inboxes by making life easy for the recipient.

The real secret is to treat emails more like a user-centered design situation. It's real people on the other end, so use whatever empathy you have for their situation, and some thoughtful designing, to write in a way that resonates with them.

Et voila:

1. Put the subject box to work

The subject box is your main communication to get you out of the inbox. A Professor I know at Stanford tends to do 90% of his communication through the subject line. If you're fighting for attention, make the subject box get the information across you need. So it's...

Less: Mockup thoughts

More: Input needed on mockups by Tuesday

It doesn't have to be an entire sentence, but the more information carrying words you can load upfront the easier it will probably be (a little like this).

2. Consider writing in 2 sections

Consider splitting the email into two main sections: the first with the need to know; the second with the nice to know. The email cuts to the chase fast: what it's about, and what's needed from them (if they didn't already get it from the subject). After the chase, for a reader who finds themselves with more time, there's space to add the detail and extra context that you were tempted to put up front.

Like a lot of our work here at Jump it can help to think of an email having 3 reads:

1st read - the subject line

2nd read - cut to the chase, the need to know at the start of the body

3rd read - the delicious context below for those who want to know more

3. Provide easy visual navigation

Words and paragraphs are great, but we have an extra means to help get our message across: how we lay out the email. Provide easy visual navigation through the email by using the visual structure of the mail to help tell your story. That means things like, breaking several actions into a list. Having a clear intro paragraph, or using emphasis to pull out headers or actions.

Don't bury your message in dense text. Use a layout that makes it evident.

4. Use categories to clarify

It's not appropriate for all emails, but for those in a hurry some simple categories can work wonders for rapid comprehension. If you are organizing something don't shy away from the when, where, who buckets. Add headers of takeaways, conclusions, initial thoughts, or context to more easily describe things. Maybe now, next, later or high, low, medium priorities.

Categories help structure information. Adding them to an email means we've done some structuring so the reader doesn't have to. In the process we make life easier for them, and probably also clear things up in our minds too.

For me, it's somewhat of a frame shift to look at an email as an object to be designed. A tool that can serve a purpose. We don't need to see an email as a next generation letter, or even how we would talk to someone - we have far more flexibility at our fingertips and it can be used in many different ways. Use every tool we have to design an email appropriate for the task and the audience. It's not about being rude or manipulative - it's about thinking about who will read it and making a conscious effort to design your email to make their life easier. And, in the process, you'll also find you're more likely get what you need.