Intelleto

There’s something interesting about disconnecting natural and intuitive. They really aren’t the same thing, yet I have often assumed they are. If you look up intuitive, you’ll find synonyms: natural, innate. And if you look up natural, you’ll find synonyms of spontaneous, unaffected, genuine, unmannered. So far so good.

But if you delve a little deeper and explore “intuition” it gets murkier.

Intuition is:

1. direct perception of truth, fact, etc., independent of any reasoning process; immediate apprehension. 
2. a fact, truth, etc., perceived in this way. 
3. a keen and quick insight. 
4. the quality or ability of having such direct perception or quick insight.

Natural is a whole bunch of things, including (selections of definitions not in order):

1. Existing in or formed by nature
2. Growing spontaneously
3. free from affectation or constraint
4. arising easily or spontaneously
5. based on what is learned from nature rather than on revelation
6. any person or thing that is or is likely or certain to be very suitable to and successful in an endeavor without much training or difficulty.
7. and (my favorite…) In craps, a winning combination of seven or eleven made on the first cast.

Nathan Moody of Stimulant was speaking to a bunch of us at Adaptive Path, and he was clear in his thinking: “Natural does not equal intuitive.” He was talking about large-scale interactive displays, and how the physical movements of gesture and body motion were natural…yet when faced with a taller-than-God interactive display, people had no clue how to interact with it.

Good to remember.

Working in a user experience company, I use a bunch of words to describe user-centered design: user experience, user engagement, interaction design, experience design, there’s a lot of words out there that triangulate the ideas around experience strategy and design, and they almost always are about the Web.

That’s why it was wonderful to hear Jesse advocate for designing for human engagement. Funny how a slightly different words can open up a world of possiblities. Thinking about the best experiences I’ve had…with a product, a place, a site, an activity…I can’t think of one that wasn’t smack dab in the center of human engagement.

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.

She’s Geeky, Future of Technology, part iii

I’m hanging with the girl geeks at the She’s Geeky un-conference on Monday and Tuesday of this week. So far it’s been an interesting time.

Registration was smooth. The nametagclouds were a nice touch. Chiara Fox and Indi Young from the Adaptive Path crew were also there. We staked out a birds-of-a-feather lunch table for User Experience, and I had a good chat with Googler Kathy Baxter.

After lunch was the first session. I attended the Future of Technology, which was 3 talks in 1:

• Melanie Swan, MS Futures Group, provided a whirlwind tour of the edges of technology discovery
• Christine Peterson, Foresight Nanotech Institute, talking about Open Source Security
• Liana Holmberg and Tess Chu, Linden Lab talking about Second Life

You can check out the visual notes that I took on Flickr.

What’s really wonderful is talking to all the smart gals attending. I had a great chat with Sally about innovation (I insisted it was a buzzword; she had some solid counterpoints, and we ended up pretty much agreeing); Dinner with Melanie Swan was awesome…we covered affinity investing for financial markets, virtual worlds and user experience methods. Heather Gold finished up the evening with some ad hoc comedy.

Looking forward to tomorrow. Up bright and early to leave at 6:15pm, pick up Chiara and be in Mt. View by 8am! Woo Hoo!

   

the EARP model

A few years ago in a moment of desperation, I came up with the EARP model. It’s weathered well, so I’m sharing it here. EARP = E-Embrace; A-Accept; R-Reject; P-Postpone. You gotta be careful with the last one, because it just shoots stuff back into the top funnel.

Other than that, it’s a great model for figuring out what you’re going to do with all the stuff that comes into your life.

Mapping Cloud Atlas

Some books just have a visual structure to the flow. When I read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, the interwindings of the plotlines and the step-structure of the story arc were compelling. Compelling enough to claw at my brain until I could see it visually.

Hence the map.

[warning: larger image may contain spoilers]

November 2006

I cut out interesting patterns to use in other creative works. Also, snippets from magazines that have relevance to what I’m thinking about…or what I want to think about. The visuals on this page became watercolored gift bags that I used to wrap my holiday gifts. (Helped with the watercolor skills, yea!) The article on the left is a slime mold sighting from Smithsonian. And the small green-striped card was the enclosure card for my 10 free little Moo cards.

December, 2006

Sometimes pages look fun. I’m partial to sticking things in the book and integrating them into the page. Maps and diagrams are the most common things that result. This is a page from craft night last year. Looking at it puts me back there among the smart, sassy women creating frightening cookies and writing holiday cards.

August 2005

Sometimes pages just suck. But who cares? It’s all about putting things down. This one’s a reminder to work on my watercolor skills, heh.

I’ve been concerned about a blog taking over the space and work that for years has gone into my sketchbook. But the more I think about it, the more convinced that they are deeply complimentary, not competitive. Sure, they both take time, but each has it’s unique place.

What got me excited was looking at how they can activate each other…sitting in a park or drawing from life in the great world outside the machine is a very different thing from blogging at my computer. They are just very different tools.

So what I’ve decided to do is snapshot some pages, and then put them here. And for blog-first ideas that I want to extend out of the machine, I’ll print and stick. I think that the blog and the sketchbook will be great friends.