designswarm thoughts

In the little insular community that is the building I work in, you acquire habits. Surrounded by talented peers, constantly admiring others and wanting to do work that is as good, as challenging, as great, your expectations of others start to change. I’ve found myself asking “so what do you do” instead of “how do you do” much more often and becoming more and more critical of my time and how I spend it, both as a manager and as a designer.

It’s easier to just spend your days consuming: email, other people’s music, other people’s links, thoughts, etc without ever creating yourself. The head space necessary to create, to design, to act in the world is, if you let it, much smaller than it was before. Made me nervous all of a sudden. An informational backlash if you will.

You are defined by what you make, and you define yourself by the act of making. Lack of definition is just a by-product of not spending enough time contributing to those infamous 10K hours. So here’s to more making.

Wrote this as an exercise for JC back in Ivrea. Re-read it today and didn’t dissagree with it as much as I thought I would. Strange how we set a path for ourselves and naturally try to follow it. I was young enough I suppose to be able to see beyond myself. In the day to day these days, it’s hard to take that step back.

“A person who creates ideas worthy of note is a person who has learned much from others.”-Konosuke Matsushita

With this statement in a way I seal my faith and set a path. Choose among my many interests and direct my attention. It’s a very hard exercise and I get the feeling I might be inclined to rewrite this every couple of years but I feel I musn’t.

I should have the strength to make this decision. To put forth all my thoughts on myself, my work, my professions, my faith and write it out loud. I still fear as I digest this task, that I do not know, nor do I possess the tools to make such a bold move, but looking back, I’ve been braver. This statement should reflect what I feel of the former suit I wore that is that of industrial designer as well as the new one that doesn’t quite fit right now of interaction designer.

I should be able to tell you of my hope of a society where the industrial designer no longer has the right to produce unconsciously anything that is asked of him. Where responsible design is compulsory and services guide manufacturing and not the other way around.

I should be able to tell you of my fears that this will not happen in my lifetime, that people and societies are stupid, greedy and forgetful, that what has been, will be again and that I feel small in front of that fact but my heart tells me I must be part of the solution and not the problem.

I should be able to recall all the times I was inspired, loved and hated things around me, objects, technology, experiences, people and use that to my advantage.

I should be able to talk to you of my wonder in front of so many things that I still need to learn, all along this road of my life, so many books to read, people to meet and conversations to be had.

I should be able to tell you I only work emotionally, when a project plays with my emotions, that I see beauty I wish to communicate to others or horror which I want to point out.

I should be able to tell you of my love of poetry in a temporary installation, the beauty of something that transcends its physical nature, when an object is more than its shell, that the idea shines through.

I should be able to let you see the possibilities to express that poetry which I seek in technology around me and scarcely find. I wish I could see myself working to better some things, not all, that I know I cannot achieve sadly.

I would tell you of my absolute love of the expression “delicious experience” and my loath of the word “user”. I am not a user, I do not use, I enjoy or detest, I am emotions and intellect, not use.

I should be able to hope that interaction design is not just a screen, hiding the truth, faking experiences for people who have forgotten to appreciate hard work or a sunset. Enhancing is beautiful, faking is a crime.

I should be able to concentrate on this light at the end of the tunnel that are these 2 years in a small Italian village away from reality.

I should be able to see the beauty in befriending and working with 20 other unique, funny, sarcastic, egostistic, ambitious, depressed and talented people who one after the other have made me change a little more everyday as a designer, a student and a person.

I should be able to tell you that I think anything worthy of mention is a combination of different points of view and has a natural richness because of this.

I should be able to say and do these things but I fear, and maybe I should just be silent, take a deep breath and listen for the sound of a future I can’t quite fathom.

It’s always scary and entertaining when a concept that comes from programming techniques kindof made me think of the way I run my company.

Instead, most of a program’s overall functionality is coded into a single “all-knowing” object, which maintains most of the information about the entire program and provides most of the methods for manipulating this data. Because this object holds so much data and requires so many methods, its role in the program becomes God-like (all-encompassing). Instead of program objects communicating amongst themselves directly, the other objects within the program rely on the God object for most of their information and interaction. Since the God object is referenced by so much of the other code, maintenance becomes more difficult than it otherwise would in a more evenly divided programming design. [...] While creating a God object is typically considered bad programming practice, this technique is occasionally used for tight programming environments (such as microcontrollers), where the slight performance increase and centralization of control is more important than maintainability and programming elegance.

A bit of a tradition started 3 years ago by a canadian friend. I think it’s as good a way as any to recap.

1.What did you do in 2009 that you’d never done before?
Missed a flight.

2. Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Really didn’t as far as I can remember. I have a lot on next year’s list as a result.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Yes, plenty. More significantly Caroline my best friend in Canada.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
No.

5. What countries did you visit?
France, Italy, Hungary, Belgium, Netherlands.

6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
Perspective

7. What date from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory?
Easter Friday

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Keeping my company going through a recession.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Totally putting the essentials of my life aside to make 8. happen.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Yes

11. What was the best thing you bought?
Japanese school-girl bag.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
Obama for making me not want to puke anymore when i go to the US.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
Amy Whinehouse

14. Where did most of your money go?
My business.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Working with great people on exciting projects!

16. What song/album will always remind you of 2009?
Mrs Cold by Kings of Convenience

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
Much more tired.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Sports

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Travelling

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
Spent it with some friends.

21. Who did you spend the most time on the phone with?
Brock who works with me

22. Did you fall in love in 2009?
No

23. What was your favourite TV programme?
FireFly and Mad Men

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
No

26. What was the best book(s) you read?
Makers by Cory Doctorow
Book of Dave by Will Self

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Wild Beasts

28. What did you want and get?
To move somewhere with a garden

29. What did you want and not get?
Peace of mind

30. What were your favourite films of this year?
Up

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned 29 and spent it with friends in London

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
More money

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?
Back to black

34. What kept you sane?
My friends and family and horrible 80s pop classics

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Toni Servillo & James McAvoy

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
American elections

37. Who did you miss?
Friends across the world, Caroline more than most.

38. Who was the best new person you met?
Ben

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009.
You can only really choose one between fame and fortune. They rarely come together.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year?

Every shooting stars in one night
The water and sand in our eyesight
The rocks in our hands preparing for flight
The lack of sleeping but it’s alright

If you fancy at all, do link to your own list!

So after 5 months of vacation I’ve decided to take up tweeting on my private account again. But this will be different…

- I’ve removed anyone who is too closely associated with work
- I’ve removed anyone who I wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing a drunken conversation with

and basically kept anyone who I know wouldn’t mind me being me. I realised that my online presence, other than my Flickr stream is very much about my professional life and I’d quite like some down time and normality somewhere on the internet. Yes, yes that’s what Live Journal is about, but I don’t necessarily have the attention span for that…140 characters of bitching is quite enough :)

Stuff I’ve noticed is happening as I slowly crawl towards my 30s:

- Chocolate isn’t that great anymore. It’s still nice, but not as a snack, in the middle of the day or milky. And brownies are gross.

- Grey hair appears on pictures more clearly.

- Bullshit meter is at its most efficient.

- I’m less and less patient, and I was never patient to begin with.

- Spending an evening with a cup of tea and the internet seems like a perfectly reasonable way to spend a Saturday night.

- Living with housemates is for “young people”.

- Nostalgia sets in as a permanent state of mind. “In my days” is sometimes the start of a sentence. Not often. Just sometimes.

Shit.

Thankfully I can’t even take credit for this expression that I picked up from Aram back in Talponia days, but that’s exactly how I feel at the moment so you’ll have to excuse the hollow sound of this blog at the moment.

Things I’m busy with include researching robots, helping with blogging for LIREC, learning about origami for some of what i’ll talk about at Interesting, managing 2 large projects at Tinker.it! convincing new people to work with us on Christmas stuff, planning on learning all about conductive threads for the V&A, throwing crunched up post-its at Peter who sits conveniently accross from me, convincing Ben to quit Goldsmiths and just work with us for the rest of his creative life, enjoying having Cefn around the office in between paragliding trips, thinking about home automation from the ground up and cheap internet-of-things and taking the occasional trip to Europe to see friends. Conferences coming up soon as well.

All of this will of course materialise in different forms. Or I might just have a nervous breakdown. Will have to schedule that in though :)

Just because I really can’t help writing, I’ve started a personal blog on life “south of the river” called Yes this really is in Brixton

Disclaimer: this one has nothing to do with work, design or otherwise and will probably only make sense if you’re a friend and live or know or are curious about London. Enjoy!

I’m featured in the Rising Stars section of the August edition of Wired UK (page 23), wearing attire that I wouldn’t normally be caught dead in, but hey, they were after a “feminine look”, and a girl simply cant say no to wearing 700 quid Ferragamo shoes for 15 minutes (only to end up with the photo being cropped of course).

Happy now? :)

It seemed Google has taken designswarm off of its index as they seem to be finding spam hidden in one of the pages. No idea what to do and I’m now invisible to the outside world…if you can help, please catch me on Skype!

One way to level up in European immigration as a foreigner is to have an italian parent (my father in this case) as since the mid 90s Italy recognises citizenship for people with parents or grandparents who were born in Italy. This now means I am pretty much free to live in Europe for the rest of my life if I wanted to which makes me extremely happy and makes customs a total breeze as opposed to a semi frantic experience peppered with little white lies.

Celebrating nearly 2 years as the CEO of a small and dynamic interaction design company I thought I’d collate some thoughts on starting up your own company in interaction design as this be useful for someone out there.

- SHOW ME THE MONEY
Money is important. When you start your own company, (i’m talking normal company here and not web2.0. There is no angel, VC or other convenient fluffy forms of funding here) you’ll realise how much cash flow rules your world and every decision you will ever make. Want to do r&d? Where’s the money coming from? Want to make stickers, buy a printer, pay people? Where’s the money coming from? Get an accountant fast and get one who cares about your business. If you’re around 10 people, get a part-time CFO, just a few days a month will do, you’ll need someone to be the bad cop with money, otherwise, you’ll end up spending your days chasing after people.

- EDUCATE & LEARN
Don’t fool yourself, the types of people who understand what you do are few and far between. You will spend 80% of your time explaining to people what you do and trying to make that come to life for them. Be prepared. The fact that there are over 50 schools around the world that teach interaction design and physical computing does NOT mean that there is an established industry to settle in. You’re the weird kid on the block. Hang out with people from the advertising industry, they will teach you a lot. Learn about what people who are high up in companies need to hear and what their comfort level is. Make yourself understandable and flexible enough to not seem too risky or threatening. Otherwise, people won’t know what to do with you.

- FORGET CHILDREN
When you start a company, it becomes part of you in (i’m assuming) the same way a child does. Weekends are a write-off, you’ll work every evening and time “away” will be hard as you try to grow a business that eventually doesn’t need you to feed it everyday. That will take years. I’m not there yet.

- DON’T GET BORED
Never forget what motivated you to do this, if you start sounding “bored”, then you’re doing something wrong, stop right now and get a regular job.

- PEOPLE MATTER
I’m blessed to be surrounded with the absolute most wonderful, talented, creative, weird people I could imagine. You’ll spend more time with these people than with your significant other, so choose them well and build a team you can rely on. This will be crucial when times get rough and you’re running out of steam.

- CHOOSE YOUR CLIENTS
Having a good relationship with our clients will matter A LOT. Choose them as carefully as you would choose a girlfriend/boyfriend and remember that good business is when there is a benefit for both parties. If you’re being bullied, something’s gone wrong.

- CREATIVITY TAKES A BACK SEAT
As a creative person, if you decided to be at the head of a company, you’ll have to quickly accept the fact that your creativity will only be required 5% of the time. The rest, you will spend paying bills, meeting clients, handling invoices, sending reminders, arranging meetings, going to conferences and other things that will inject life into your business. I spend more time on Powerpoint, Excel and Word than I do using any creative suite. It’s part of the game, and you’ll learn to enjoy it. It makes the creative times that much more intense and precious.

So there. I’m sure I’ll think of more later, but I these are probably the most important things I can think I’ve learnt in the past 2 years.

Having recently gone through a series of breakups both personally and with online services, I’m starting to re-frame how I think of the connections we make online. If there was any way to establish how close you were to someone purely based on your digital traces, what would that look like?
Would you count the amount of @s on Twitter, how many of their pictures you’d favorited? The number of times they called you, texted you? I’m not sure that would make an accurate picture but it would certainly be worth plotting out (maybe something for Stamen).

In times of breakups when people reframe how they think of you, it would equally be worth plotting out how many people keep in touch with you after. Communities and friends aren’t often the same and reconstruct themselves in equally organic ways.

Random theory on a quiet and rainy Saturday afternoon in the city.

Privacy exists only in the eye of the beholder and is more prevalent and easier to engineer than ever before. It’s all a question of audience. I’ll explain. The new standard in our ways of communicating (especially in the geekdom) is to publicly display, reveal and share all the time, whether its our location, our trips, our photos, our thoughts, our desires, our interests and what we go through and who we know. If we simply stop using these services, nothing in our actual behaviour changes, we still go places, we still take pictures, we still share them with who we wish to by “downgrading” to sending them directly to people, family etc but our public self-actualisation is decreased and our privacy increases. I find it intriguing that privacy isn’t explicitly part of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs actually, perhaps its a given, perhaps we’re only making a fuss over it because of the past 5 years of rapid technology changes.

When everyone twitters about what they do all the time, the noise drowns out the signals doesn’t it? If you suddenly decide to stop using a staple means of communication, it’s like you don’t exist anymore. It’s far worst than if you decided to use it less. If you lost your cell phone these days and didn’t care to replace it, and went back to using your landline, you’d essentially be dead to most people. Wouldn’t be surprising if they called the police to check on you, after all who would want to do such a thing? Well maybe it’ll be the same thing if you wanted to stop using facebook. I closed my account long before it had overtaken the world in such a dramatic way. I suspect in 2 years time people will have moved on to using something else, but frankly, I’d rather observe and privatly self-actualise, write more than 140 characters, post up pictures when I really want to and generally concentrate on making my life something that is mine and not everyone else’s too. It’s hard enough as it is.

It’s a strange theory but I kindof like it, for today at least.

Following from what was a weepy post a week ago, I’ve decided to stop using Twitter once I reach 2000 updates (about 150 to go). I remember the evening I started using it, sometime in November 2006 when I was staying at Ben’s on Herengracht in Amsterdam. He sent me an invite and I looked at this thing and huffed and puffed (I would start working for Jaiku a few months later) going “I don’t get it”. He,of course knew better, he always does.

3 years down the line, I’ve had great fun, I’ve kept in touch with people I’d only met once, sometimes not at all. I’ve kept in touch with the latest internet memes, even the ones that only last half a day, I’ve kept in touch with the news, and more importantly I’ve kept in touch with what Matt does during his days at work in lalaland.

But I want more. Living in London, I’ve realised that I need to be much more active about meeting and seeing people in the flesh, remembering that there is a world out there, that I can just pick up the phone and call people and take news, have a coffee, have a great conversation, build real relationships, or at least ones that feel real to me. Twitter has made me lazy about those relationships.

My metaphor for using Facebook was bumping into an old friend in the street and not having anything to say to each other past the first 30 seconds. Twitter feels to me now like walking into a giant party full of people you kinda know, kinda not, some of which you’re only mildly interested in, but all of them speaking really loudly. Matt will tell you I hate those kinds of parties, they intimidate me, and now so does Twitter. So I’m leaving the party behind.

I’m glad the entire world seems to have hopped on the bandwagon, those guys deserve it. It’s just not for me anymore. I’ll try to come back to my blog, to writing and exploring an idea fully.

I won’t close my account, I simply will stop updating it and will only occasionally read it. I think I’ll make a lovely newspaper thing out of these 3 years of my life in a space that has evolved and changed so much, while I’ve been changing too. Maybe I’ll give it to my mom or something.