It’s been a while since I’ve posted. There are a lot of “postings in waiting” and I’ve got a short stack of Fave Ideas of the Week to catch up on.
It’s busy. I’ll be back soon. Thanks for being patient.
In the meantime, this is really funny.
We’re social and tribal, we humans. And making assessments, judgments and forming opinions is part of the supple cloth that we weave in our relationships, in how we perceive things, and our perspectives on the world.
So, how do you figure out if you wanna hang with someone? If you want to do business with a company? How do you assess what they stand for, what they are aiming for, what lens they view the world through?
In talking with Rachel, this 2×2 emerged…
Companies are somewhere on this grid. Your friends are somewhere on this grid. Steve Jobs is somewhere on this grid.
And you’re somewhere on this grid. Where are you?
When Nathan Moody did his brown bag for us, he mentioned delivering a magpie piece…the shineyshiney stuff that catches the eye. I’m a total crow/magpie/squirrel…something shiney generally rules my life. So go ahead. Find the shiney.
I changed the words a bit, but the idea that you need to feed all three parts of your being was intriguing. Do your projects feed your head and your heart? How much does money matter in getting you to do your best work? What kind of work gets you out of bed in the morning? Chances are, it’s work that feeds all three.
When Ryan said…”it wasn’t innovative…but it was innervative” It got me thinking…first of all, I didn’t really know what innervative meant, but I thought it had something to do with reaching out, stretching across, activating…like nerves. But it was an interesting idea, a great contender for the favorite of the week.
When I went to look it up, I found 2 words, “enervate” and “innervate” and the I didn’t know which one Ryan meant.
Innervate :
1. to communicate nervous energy to; stimulate through nerves.
2. to furnish with nerves; grow nerves into.
Totally different meanings.
I went with enervate (gut feeling, but sadly not what Ryan meant) because I think that’s how businesses that can’t innovate think: if you can’t out-think the competition, then focus on squashing it into the ground by any means necessary. That’s a sad thing. But interesting to explore in a sketch. That’s where the anvil comes in…
Here’s the re-do of the week with what Ryan really meant, just to balance things out.
Peter blogged about his empathy quotient, and a bunch of us joined in the test. I ranked low, which didn’t really surprise me. I was a 36 out of 80. Apparently I don’t care about people around me. Which is funny, because I think I do.
Then I took the Systemizing test and realized what all those brain parts that aren’t being empathetic are spending their time doing…they are looking at the world and being curious about how it works. My score on this was 73. The authors of the test had this to say about the score:
“51 - 80 is very high (three times as many people with Asperger Syndrome score in this range, compared to typical men, and almost no women score in this range)”
Great. So I’m an asperger guy trapped in a woman’s body. Thanks, test.
My move killed my blog. So many transitions, so little focus. But now, after the inspiring and insightful experience at UX Week 2007, I’m juiced back up and ready to talk.
Last night I attended a workshop for the City of Emeryville, and we did a participatory design activity. It was interesting to see the different mindsets that come with living in different parts of a town, for different durations of time.
It also brought home how key it is to design an activity that is clear, simple to understand and yet delivers rich interactions and lots of ideas. More on that later.
I was at a meeting a week ago, and the hostess offered me the carafe of coffee to take home. How could I pass that up? Only when I got into the car with all my stuff did I realize that I had no way to keep it upright.
Enter the handy life-saving seatbelt. Worked like a charm.
