How to improve learning

Had a few minutes over to finish my short presentation on education reform, I hope you like it. Feel free to ask about anything you feel I’m neglecting to mention, should extrapolate on or if you think I’m just plain wrong.

Business Card Design – minimalist color fetish

Another business card design, this one with a slightly less hidden fetish for the mint/new spring green that I really like. For some reason this color represents the color of sunshine and happiness for me. Has something to do with new leaves on birch trees in spring but that’s as far back as I care to identify the emotional response.

 

Minimalist color bombardment

 

 

The card had, besides the clear fetish for green, a slogan about design that I regularly use as a mantra and a short pitch about why I can help improve your product. Not the most convincing one I’ve written but still alright. The typography of the pitch is a bit dodgy as the wording wouldn’t let me balance the characters by reshaping the sentences. Might return to this one.

Business Card Design – minimalist typography

I realized last weekend that I’m missing a proper business card. Time to design one.

And since I’m at home, sick but not dying, I took the time to do a couple of sketches.

 

Minimalist Typographic Business Card

 

 

This card is based on the very popular typographic design posters you’ll find floating around the web. Complete with a more minimalist front with the logo from my current WP theme design (not launched, still sketching and tweaking)

Creating a minimalist WP theme

These are just sketches for my WP theme. Just getting ideas out to test them visually. Experimenting with design is really an awesome process and I wish we had the tools to do the same with interaction without involving a group of developers and spending a lot of money.

Portfolio showcase design

 

Experimented a lot with gradients and feedback as if the objects had a real world existence.

Worked pretty well but not at all to the degree I was looking for. Getting users to experience fake tactile experience through Gestalt Closure is really hard without sound.

 

 

Blog with portfolio images

 

Here I tried relying more on the grid to make the site look structured and clean. But I bailed out in the last minute and added a few details outside the grid that didn’t work at all.

 

 

 

lifestream design

 

Here I was just trying to present a lifestream that could work as a living resume of my entire life. Before long I realized that what I really was designing was an XML feed. Not at all what I had set out to do.

 

 

 

Interactive businesscard

 

Testing out the idea of a virtual business card. But it started feeling cheap really early. The point of a business card is to be able to hand it around. A website doesn’t have the same appeal for the function. If I wanted you to find out exactly who I am I’d probably hand you my resume, not my site.

 

 

Lifestream with a presentation of me

 

This was one of the most interesting models I tried. Another fake spatial space website but with equal amounts of information about me and information that I wanted visitors to see. Worked pretty well but ended up a bit cramped. Not far from my current direction though.

The sickness of actually liking your job

My friend called me a few minutes ago.

Friend: Hi J, what are you up to?

Me: I’m working.

Friend: I thought you were sick?

Me: I am.

Friend: So why are you at work?

Me: I’m at home, got a fever and feel terrible.

Friend: …and you’re still working?

Me: Yeah.

Friend: What the hell is wrong with you?!

Me: …I honestly don’t know.

Real time search – the problem

Both Google and Microsoft’s new search service Bing has partnered with Twitter to provide real-time search results for queries. This is great news for finding valuable information but it also creates new problems to overcome; filtering out the irrelevant data.

Search today is based on relevance through counting the number of links to and from a site. This relevance also weights the linked sites. This is the basic idea behind Google’s PageRank system. But its fundamentally flawed, namely the older the site the more information and weight it can get. Google has of course tried to minimize this affect but it’s still visible when searching for certain topics.  Google “next apple event” for an example. The search result is completely useless.

Twitter however has the opposite problem. Without a system like PageRank to value the posts a lot of relevance comes from time. The latest posts are the most relevant. But this also means that topics that aren’t current might not yield any relevant information available. So the time problem is reversed from Google’s PageRank time problem.

So how will we solve this? Well, I don’t have a definitive answer of course. But I’ve more and more come to believe in crowd sourcing as a means to get accurate data. Perhaps relevance can be calculated not from the content itself but from how we interact with it. If users can be filtered out from bots (usage patterns for bots are really hard to mask over time since the cloud could potentially remember ever mouse move they make) relevance could be weighted from number of users who actually read or view the content.

No doubt Google has teams working on this. And no doubt they will eventually buy some small startup doing it a lot smarter than they are. It’s an interesting problem nevertheless.

Tools are not your trade

We all showcase skills we have by listing the tools we’re proficient using. Usually on our CV or talking with friends and business contacts we say things like “I use X to do Y” or similar. I just realized that this is somewhat strange, for any task a tool might be more or less important. In some extreme cases the tool is the task and knowing how to use it is essential for the job.

But for knowledge workers, when is Photoshop really a critical skill? Graphic design is the real skill, with the addition of experience using software designed specifically for the task. Would a switch to painter really make all that skill obsolete?

This is most striking for programmers. If you know how to code a web app using an object based language, which language tends to be irrelevant. Sure, knowing the language a company uses beforehand is an advantage. But certainly not crucial, anyone new to a workplace has to learn the specifics of that job anyway.

Strange news about Happiness

What is happiness to you? To me I’ve always defined it as reaching my goals, whatever they may be.

Turns out I’m wrong. Dead wrong apparently.  As Dan Gilbert explains in the video below happiness is comprised of a lot of synthetic happiness. And as Luis C.K. displays in the next video our many many choices leave us stranded in a place of chasing happiness that is really all around us. What we need to do is really enforce more restrictions on our own lives.

For games and products, this translates into restricting what they can do. Think about how strange that is, restricting what players / users can do will actually make the product more fun and usable. Not because it is, but because the choices will make that happiness more available.

The Prestige Problem

Prestige is usually a problem in organizations and development alike. People with too much prestige become complacent some of the time and obstacles for the organization, most often this happens not on purpose but because of the real prestige the individual has earned over years of work.

Because of this problem many companies and developers strive for prestigeless workspaces. They ask for prestigeless applicants and so forth. But this attitude lacks a basic understanding of prestige.

Prestige is a cultural gauge which we use to measure ourselves with. If you as an individual do good things and make good things happen you usually acquire prestige from your surrounding social circle (whether privately or professionally). But if you perform poorly or bring about negative effects you usually lose prestige.

While this system is far from perfect (a single mistake might wipe you out) and for form fair (seeming to deliver gives as much prestige as actually delivering, presuming you can keep the facade up) it is still a social system all organizations should be aware of. No one can be completely free from prestige. And they should not either.

Prestige is usually the most direct form of reward individuals can see as a result of their work.

But we also need to be really wary of prestige, it can lead to horrible evils in any organization. Perhaps it might help if we start thinking about prestige as something less durable. What do you think?

Agile development another new oldie

It struck me about a week ago. Agile project development, which is a somewhat new fad in software development, is not really that new.

Now most of you are probably shaking your heads thinking Of course it isn’t, we’ve been using it for ten or more years. That might be true but I’m talking seriously old here.

Compare agile development, where features are implemented in short both to enable developers to work instead of plan and at the same time not commit the entire project down one road if something changes during development. With Kaizen, where each working (or even living) person takes time to be just one step better, just one step more efficient, each day.

Now I know, the parallel is a bit stretched, But it’s not really that far fetched is it? We’re all simply trying to improve our projects just one step (feature?) at a time.Perhaps we can learn even more from Kaizen and shorten our sprints even further.