Category: Essays

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Car-Race Meat Spiral Chief Restaurant Snail Button

No, it’s not some new awesome, all-purpose web widget. That was the subject line of an email I just received. The next one read “Butterfly Drink Book Army Data Base Aeroplane Space Shuttle,” and “Worm Data Base Rainbow Jet fighter Compass Pocket Telescope” was after that. They were spam of course, and, as much as it still frustrates me that there’s an entire industry dedicated to intruding my inbox (and phone line, and hard drive), I’m trying to see the positive.

Mind Performance HacksThe subject lines above are perfect fodder for Mind Hack #19 [Seed Your Mental Random-Number Generator] from O’Reilly’s Mind Performance Hacks (edited by Ron Hale-Evans). I mean, you can make that stuff up, but randomness is easier if it just arrives via email.

Another one I use a lot is Hack #27 [Play Mind Music]. Though I still often play Hip-hop when I work, I’ve been listening to more and more instrumental music. Here’s a sample of my recent playlist of “mind music”:

  • Explosions in the Sky All of a Sudden I miss Everyone, The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place, Friday Night Lights OST
  • Cliff Martinez Solaris OST, Wicker Park OST
  • Pelican City of Echoes, The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw
  • Red Sparowes At the Soundless Dawn, Every Red Heart Shines Toward the Red Sun
  • Main Hz, Motion Pool
  • Mogwai Zidane OST, Mr. Beast, Happy Music for Happy People
  • Peter Gabriel Long Walk Home (Rabbit-Proof Fence OST), Passion (The Last Temptation of Christ OST), Birdy OST
  • Brian Eno Eno Box I: Instrumentals, Music for Airports, Apollo, Discreet Music, etc.

(Brian Eno might be the best creative catalyst available, what with his cannon of ambient music and his co-creating the Oblique Strategies [Hack #23]). Mind Performance Hacks has nearly a hundred tricks and exercises to rattle your brain out of its usual patterns.

A Whole New MindI also just read The 4-Hour Workweek (Crown) by Tim Ferriss and am in the middle of Daniel Pink‘s A Whole New Mind(Riverhead), both of which have exercises that will make you think differently. The former has more for achieving personal goals, delegating responsibility, and getting free of your work, while the latter has more regarding cognitive and creative concerns. Pink contends that the next revolution will come not from left-brained engineers and accountants but from right-brained creative types like designers, teachers, and storytellers (good news for artists that want to be formerly known as “starving” — thank you, Govone), and his book is rife with exercises for your right hemisphere.

Anyway, I’m now thankful for weird subject lines in spam messages. Anything that makes me think about things in a different way is welcome.

What tricks do you have for tackling problems creatively?

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Reconnect the Dots: Toward a Decentralized Social Network

About a year ago, I had a discussion with my friend Ryan Lane about a “Trillian for social networks.” Having no idea how such a thing would work (and realizing that I probably wasn’t the only one thinking about it), I was trying bouncing aspects of it around with someone who might have an idea how it would work. Skip ahead to last summer, my friend Justin Kistner and I had a similar conversation. Well, in the meantime, Justin has gone several more steps toward making this a reality. Continue reading “Reconnect the Dots: Toward a Decentralized Social Network”

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Avoiding Affordances: Unusability Engineering

With all of the semi-recent focus on usability, I’ve noticed a growing countermovement that doesn’t get near as much attention: unusability. I’m talking here about deliberately designing something so that it’s not usable, not the much-maligned negligence of design that renders things unusable.

“Bum-proof” benchFor example, there are several bus bench designs that allow sitting while waiting for the arrival of mass transit, yet prevent the bench from being used as a bed. Most of these designs involve armrests or ridges in the seat to prevent one from lying prone across the bench, but my favorite is the backless, round-top bench: The seat is shaped like half of a cylinder and allows one to sit (albeit not a luxuriously comfortable place to park yourself). Without your feet on the ground though, you’re not likely to stay on top. Therefore, there’s no napping on this bench. In one of his books on L.A. (City of Quartz, Vintage, 1990), Mike Davis calls them “bum-proof benches.”

The manipulation of the perceived affordances of objects and surfaces is another great example. Donald Norman discusses a few of these in his book Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles (Addison-Wesley, 1992). Chairs and tables offer surfaces that are affordances for the support of weight. That is, a table affords support. If you have a glass counter on which you don’t want anything placed, it should be slanted. If it’s flat, it gives the perception of affording weight placed on top (and often ends up cracked).

The handrails around hotel balconies are typically rounded or beveled in such a way as to prevent the setting down of a beverage. This is to keep one from setting a beer bottle on the rail then drunkenly or excitedly knocking it off onto passers-by, cars, or just the ground below. This is not a design flaw. It is an engineered unusability.

Skate-blocked ledgeIn the past ten years or so architects and urban landscapers have made or retrofitted handrails and ledges to make them unusable for skateboarding. Large knobs welded onto metal handrails or blocks bolted to ledges keep skateboarders from using these surfaces as props or obstacles for their maneuvers. Again, these are not mistakes, but designed — if even often clumsily or not exactly aesthetically — for preventing a certain use.

There are many other examples, but it just struck me that the flipside of usability (in its deliberate form) doesn’t get much attention. Be on the lookout for things designed to prevent their use.

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An Inconvenient Youth

It seems that youth is no longer wasted on the young. In recent years, many social scientists (as well as Jay-Z) have claimed that thirty is the new twenty. Whereas one at twenty used to be considered an adult, now one at twenty is relatively still a child. So, what makes an adult these days? Are there any rites of passage in Western culture in the twenty-first century?

You can make your very own poisonous, despicable man.
Begin by keeping him a boy for as long as you can,
And when the voice in his head says that everything’s wrong,
Let him think we’d be convinced but only with the right song.
— Cex, “The Wayback Machine”

I first heard it expressed that forty was the new thirty a few years ago just after two of my colleagues had broken the forty-mark. The further encroachment of youth on adulthood (or vice versa, depending on which way you want to view it) is seemingly evident everywhere. From movies, to videogames, to music, we are not aging — culturally — the way our parents have. “Adults” in their thirties unashamedly play and discuss videogames, obsessively. The theme itself is apparent in pop culture (See recent cinematic hits like The Forty-Year-Old Virgin or The Last Kiss, for examples). As the main character in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club so directly put it, “I’m a thirty-year-old boy.”

I am often asked if I am comfortable with my age, and I must say that I am more comfortable at thirty-six than I was at twenty-six, but if thirty is the new twenty, then Jay-Z and I are both twenty-six. He claimed last album to have graduated from throwback jerseys to button-ups (because he was “thirty-plus”), but I don’t even own a pair of dress shoes, much less a suit. We might not know what makes the man, but it sure ain’t the clothes.

Sure, all of my friends (most of whom, it must be noted, are younger than I am) are getting married, buying houses, having kids (or at least talking about it), etc., but the old rites of passage (e.g., marriage, childbirth, etc.) do not adults make. Perhaps they never did, but the illusion was strong, and now there seems to be no one consciously interested in maintaining that illusion. We need new rules or no rules. Right now there’s a rupture in our cultural development that begins in the late-teens and continues often into the early forties.

Sometimes I feel like adult. Sometimes I don’t.

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Recurring Themes, Part Three: The Paradox of Exposure

I read somewhere a long time ago that most people die within a couple of miles of their homes.

A few months ago, I helped a friend do some work on his new house. We were painting, and hanging gutters, so we were up on ladders for much of the day. Now, my friend does this kind of work for a living, so he’s on a ladder quite often. I can’t remember the last time I was on a ladder. That day, I was probably more likely to fall and injure myself since I was the least experienced on a ladder, but on any other day, he’s more likely to fall from a ladder and get hurt (because I’m less likely to be on a ladder at all). Continue reading “Recurring Themes, Part Three: The Paradox of Exposure”

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Not Bad Meaning Bad, but Bad Meaning Good

While I don’t agree with everything in Steven Johnson’s semi-recent book, Everything Bad is Good for You, it does present an interesting lens through which to reexamine pop culture. In a theory he calls “The Sleeper Curve,” Johnson states that pop culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less, as is conventionally assumed. Johnson bolsters his theory with examples from video games, television, and film. Though he doesn’t mention it, where hip-hop is concerned, I couldn’t agree with him more. Continue reading “Not Bad Meaning Bad, but Bad Meaning Good”

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Understanding Mediation

Printing PressThough Gutenberg’s printing press represents what Marshall McLuhan referred to as the first assembly line — one of repeatable, linear text — and is what made large-volume printed information a personal, portable phenomenon, the advent of the telegraph brought forth the initial singularity in the evolution of information technology. The telegraph enabled the bifurcation of communication and transportation, and information became a commodity. As Neil Postman put it, “…telegraphy created the idea of context-free information — that is, the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.” Continue reading “Understanding Mediation”