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
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).
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.
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About
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino is a product & interaction designer and entrepreneur. She works around the "Internet of things" and has been blogging since 2005.
She's also on Twitter and Linkedin.
