Maeda's SIMPLICITY

Why Being Creative Is Good

Much of my days and all hours are now spent on contemplating the value of the arts and design. Of course there is the economical value of art as artifacts that accrue value, or design as enabling enhancements that result in product revenues. But my mind has wandered towards this strange overused word of creative. The idea of someone that has a propensity to create.

While watching my daughter's viola lesson, and as she stood in front of the class, I realized that the moment when the bow touched the strings was not something to be taken for granted. It was the moment when she was to begin the process of expressing herself by creating music. To create is to potentially embarrass oneself in front of others. It is about the courage to be oneself and to be seen as oneself. Putting ink to a page, or pressing one's fingers against clay, or typing a line of computer code, or blowing glass and realizing mistake. Or success. With everyone watching. But most importantly, you.

So it dawned upon me how important it is to be a creative. Because it means you have within you infinite capacity to experiment. You are unafraid to go somewhere new because you are creating a new thought process about your own creativity. You know that if you stop and no longer challenge yourself, you cease to be creative. You become still, silent, and the bow no longer connect with the strings and music is not made. And you do not exist. You show you do not have the courage to exist.

Creativity is courage. The world needs more fearless people that can influence all disciplines to challenge their very existence. Creativity is reflection aimed not at yourself, but at the world around you.

The Power of Siblings

Last week was busy for me not only because of the RISD announcement but because my toddler was in the hospital for pneumonia. It's never easy to see your own children in the hospital. Especially when you see the other kids around that are much much sicker. It helps give you perspective on how lucky we all are to be alive and healthy, or at least healthy enough to laugh and smile at the world around us.

While swapping shifts at the hospital with my wife Kris, I was looking for a way to enliven my toddler as she seemed so distant, tired, and tuned out. While at home before heading out to see the baby, I shot a quick video of her siblings saying her name, "hi," and dancing around as they are all prone to doing (they don't get this from me). From the moment I pressed play, my toddler's eyes widened and her listlessness ceased, and she started talking once again with squeals of delight. It made me realize how strong the bonds are between siblings, even when distant and apart. It made me realize the importance of family within the equation of wellness in life.

RISD

For my next life adventure, I will be taking on a new role as the next President of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

On Having Potential

End of the year busy-ness has consumed my mind. The situation has only been exacerbated through developing a hernia. There is no correlation between my body's happenstance versus my mental confusion of course. I read that there is a genetic predisposition which is validated by the constantly odd realization that everything my Dad and Mom have had body-wise, I eventually encounter in my own life. Perhaps it is a simple way of reminding me to observe filial piety.

The older I get, the more disconnected I seem to feel my mind and body have become. My mind seems to think it is completely weird that the body in which it lives is constantly in a state of decay; meanwhile, my body could care less what my mind thinks of course, because it can't think at all without the mind and thus really has no perspective on the matter. Aging is great because your mind gets so much more agile in the conceptual dimensions (memory does indeed degrade however) so it is a pity that the body doesn't follow along a similar growth curve. Or maybe that is the blessing -- as your body fades, your mind gets to spend more on its own development and doesn't have to manage the physical plant the way it used to in the younger years. I guess that makes sense.

A visitor recently told me a story told by a prominent young leader. It went something like this:

"When you're young you are told that you have so much potential to offer; when you're older, instead you're told how great you are for what you did in the past. The key is ... to always be told you have potential."

I hope you realize your true potential in the little remainder of this year of 2007.

Anniversaries Are Always

It is interesting how life unfolds in cycles. What happens today, happens some time in the future to a different degree. And it has already happened in the past. This week, and almost exactly a year ago, I had a past experience amplified at least a hundredfold. The actors and circumstances are luckily different, but the episode was resonant. I am glad that I remember my early lessons and manage to stay true to form eleven years, three months, and two weeks later. Calmness is critical to moving forward.

No D; No O; Just DO

I've never been good at defending myself. I think it is because I grew up in a family culture where I wasn't allowed to speak back to my parents. Thus today I find myself completely open to any kind of criticism, really. I will listen and rake it. Absorb, and not deflect.

Being open to receiving criticism is one thing; being completely immune to it is something else. To be wrong never feels good. The question to ask yourself though is whether it hurts more to hear it from others? Or does it torment you even more when the questioning comes from within. For me it is the latter. And for that reason, listening to criticism is possible because it doesn't smart as much as knowing deep inside that you are not meeting your own internal standards.

To be wrong gives the opportunity to reflect and to advance internally; to be right eliminates the need to be pensive and provides visible evidence that advancement is achieved. Although the latter is more efficient strategy for winning, the former is necessary to achieve internal growth.

I wonder at times what a good Defense is versus a good Offense. I find that either mode does not fit how I approach my own philosophy of life. Not because they are somehow wrong ... they're just not me. Finding me is an important task in everyone's life I think. I'm still looking for him.

In summary, I hope in my life that I don't have to Defend my beliefs, nor should I have to Offend others with them. Neither a D, nor an O. I think I prefer to just DO. It's simpler that way.

Growing Gains

Green is good.

While on vacation I found a book in the house I was renting with a little note enscribed in the margin:

When you're green you grow.
When you're ripe you rot.

Finding this quote was quite heartening as it validated my own philosophy of life. When I know something well, I stop doing it in search of something that I don't know at all. My teachers always recommended that I just do one single thing well and be really really good at it. I now know I did not choose that route for a simple reason -- to be green forever. But Kermit the frog was right: "It really isn't easy to be green."

The Worst Thing About Thinking The Worst In Others

When I was younger, I often tended to think the worst of others when I felt sleighted in some seemingly unfortunate way. "I have been wronged because other person X has intentionally wronged me with motive Y." I punish the other person by publicly expressing person X's (alleged and) imagined motive Y.
Often you discover that your imagination has done its work the way it should -- it imagined something happened in elegant detail without ever actually happening. The net result is not only embarrassment, but even worse your own poor intentions or habits with respect to others are revealed. You imagine most vividly what you do yourself.

The best route is to avoid situations of thinking ill of others by enacting exemplar behaviors yourself. You are likely to be in a better position as you are in a better mood and more resilient to adopting negative behavior -- thus affecting your surrounds with the positive energy necessary to do amazing things in this world.

The De-Fault is to Accept Fault

These past two weeks have been rather complex for me on a variety of levels. The most important lesson I learned in the continual re-learning we do everyday in life, is that I remembered how easy it is to see the faults in others.

Everyone makes mistakes. If you choose to do nothing at all, you might think it is impossible to make mistakes. But by virtue of doing nothing, this lack of action can also be perceived as a mistake. On the other hand do too much, and you're bound to increase your probability of making many mistakes big-time. So the conservative strategy of do less is likely in your favor. Do more is quite a risky road to take. No matter which direction you take however, you are guaranteed to make mistakes.

When I was younger, I was obsessed with perfection. Everything had to be flawless. Upon seeing a Master exercise a work with some errors, I would immediately discount his/her work. I realized later how I was fixating on what was wrong versus everything else that was right.

This week is a new week. I have recalibrated myself with the natural resolve that comes on the rebound of experiencing a personal failure. To find faults in others is quite easy; to see them in yourself is close to impossible. In the end, I found myself at greatest fault for not fixing what was inside first, before trying to address what was around me.

I am glad to learn for another day, and to accept all future fault for seeing any faults as a lifetime de-fault.

The Ball or the Sword

There is a famous movies series in Japan called Kozure Okami (Lone Wolf and Cub in English) that I watched as a child. The premise is simple. A respected swordsman is defamed by his superiors, his wife is killed, and his 1-year old child is all that remains of his household. The swordsman spends the rest of his life as a kind of assasin with his child in tow, and a baby carriage filled with medieval weaponry that would make James Bond proud. Thinking back to the degree of bloodiness in these movies, I realize that it was back when movie ratings like R and such didn't exist in the foreign movie theatres.

The pivotal moment in this series is at its origin. When the father decides that he must flee and places before his child, Daigoro, two objects: a short sword and a brightly colored ball. Daigoro eyes both objects carefully and in the end reaches for the sword. His destiny is decided.

A similar choice in the academic enterprise exists today. On the one hand, there are dollars -- real money to be made by the businessification of universities in the profit-focused and highly efficient way of industry. On the other hand, there is honor -- placing a square focus on educational demands and opportunities for new careers to blossom with a constant and brutal discipline to look decades out for the future of humankind.

Then again, one can always strive to do both -- which is more realistic and ultimately difficult to achieve because it's easy to measure the blackness of black or the whiteness of white. Gray is ... well quite literally, gray. (I made a short note about this to myself in 2004).

Nothing conclusive here. Just another point of determination to find the right do both position. Work twice as hard -- not half as hard -- when doing both today.

On Multitasking, Part 2

Thanks Jim!

Reader Jim Rait provided the following extra "scientific data" regarding my post on multitasking:

Many years ago IBM produced this diagram to sketch your post! I like 2-3 projects... one can get boring, two enables me to swap when attention wanes; the gives me a backup if I get stuck on the other two!

I have redrawn the figure he kindly sent me and posted it as a PPT. James points to the source as Wheelwright and Clarke: Revolutionising Product Development.

On Multitasking

There are times in my life where I am uncertain whether I am really getting anything done. Those are dangerous times. And when I recognize them, I try to do something about it.

They usually happen when I'm doing too many things at once. With computers that get increasingly faster such that you can have hundreds of windows open simultaneously, something happens where your brain tries to think it can keep up with the computer. "Sure, I can run just as many active tasks as my computer. I'm a human being. I am way smarter than these junkboxes of wires and plastic." Well, it's a nice human aspirational thing to do or say or mean. But in reality, when I open up too many windows running on my brain, I either go haywire for a few hours or else I have to quickly close all the windows.

Right now in my life, I feel that I have no choice but to run the processor close to the haywire level. I've never multitasked so many things in my life. I know very well that multitasking ultimately implies that each individual task is executed with mediocrity. To have the choice to focus on a single thing -- I know people with such a luxury. I respect and envy them, but at the same time I'm happy to be haywire on some days. It doesn't make any sense really.

So in retrospect, the challenge of doing more with less sleep is truly the ultimate game in life. I will continue to roll the dice for now.

To Forget

Street wisdom.

While traveling in Milan, an old friend told me how he bought a set of plays and in one of them had an old reference by Descartes:

To live is to learn to forget.

I quickly wrote it down on the back of my subway stub as it is something I wished not to forget. I guess I have risked breaking a law of life to get this information to you. Enjoy.

Sorry

I've never liked leaders that don't apologize when they are wrong. But in my life I've seen that the norm tends to ones that don't ever say they are sorry. Saying sorry is really bad because it implies an admission of guilt. In an increasingly legal-sensitive world, hand-delivering a clear admission of guilt is like winning the lottery for the other side.

Unfortunately from a young age I was always taught to say "sorry" for practically everything. Sorry for kicking the door; sorry for tearing a piece of paper in half; sorry for eating too fast; sorry for eating too slow; sorry for saying "sorry." You get the drift.

When you set out to do something, you are likely to do something. And when that something doesn't happen in the right way (which is usually the case) and other people are involved, ill feelings are inevitably pointed in your direction. What are you going to do? Well, you can pretend that you've done nothing wrong. Or, you can just go ahead and say you did something wrong. Both directions have their own unique penalty.

Feigning innocence takes a certain kind of character that I wasn't born with. Perhaps my life would be easier if this were the case. If you are genetically so disposed, then you're probably lucky as you never truly feel other's suffering.

Saying sorry always hurts yourself. It makes you feel small. But by doing so, it makes the other side feel big and tall. Raises them up. Does some healing at your own expense. And maybe you deserved it, so the self-punishment is just the medicine that you need. You can then tell yourself next time, "I ain't going to get in that predicament again." Which never really happens as we tend to repeat our own mistakes, but we avoid getting depressed with these little promises to ourselves -- never again. This is good medicine too.

So, I guess I'm sorry that I don't have a strong conclusion for what I am trying to think through here. You can bet that I'll make the same mistake again. And you'll get another apology for certain.

What's Next

What's New = What's Next

Although I am not terribly political, it is difficult not to get drawn into the media's coverage of the emerging presidential candidates. A common message seems to be that the American people desire an inspirational leader in which their hopes can be placed, and then subsequently realized through his or her leadership. Seems like a good plan in general.

I haven't been home in a while and was going through my regular cleaning ritual of my main desk, bathrooms (not the Media Lab's of course ... well, not yet at least), closet, and so forth. I could probably outsource all these tasks given my financial status, but it is a normalizing ritual I have developed over the years. So today I thankfully feel quite normal now.

Somehow I have managed to follow one of Mindell's rules of survival, and have not checked my email for the last 40 hours. It has certainly helped clear my mind. Cleaning the real world and neglecting the virtual world.

Under the red couch in my studio I keep a little box entitled NEXT. I completely forgot about it until when I unearthed it today while in the throes of cleaning. In the box I used to keep random messages to myself, and scads of clippings from airplane magazines and the likes. I found an article I clipped in 2002 on mentors--the article's conclusion being that there are no mentors out there that you can depend upon, so in the end you need to depend upon yourself to figure out how to move forward in life. It is both a depressing and empowering thought.

From our leaders, it's easy to ask for a lot. From ourselves, it's comparatively harder to ask. In either case when we don't get what we ask for, we face disappointment. I'm reminded of having read Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I think he has an eight or ninth habit now, but really the only habit of the original seven that I remember is that you can't change everyone around you, but you can always change yourself.

I'd like to believe there are great mentors out there. They exist. I've seen them. And they go. You've met them too. It's okay to believe in what's around you, and to also believe in yourself. Do both is preserved.

You and Your Research

MIT Alum Ian Garcia gave me a nice gift today in reference to my post from yesterday. He pointed me to a wise and great lecture by Richard Hamming. Who needs things like YouTube when you've got fantastic old-school texts out there ...

Within the Storm

This week is potentially the busiest week of my life. There's good busy, and there's bad busy. I think this week qualifies as worst busy.

Within the storm, I sat within the eye for a few minutes yesterday. I was leading a session on how the tenure system works at MIT with my colleague Prof. David Mindell. At this meeting, David shared his three secrets to life:

1. Take 24 uninterrupted hours of rest per week.
2. Don't travel as it wastes time.
3. Say "no" to meetings often.

I reflected on David's rules, and realize that I constantly break all of them. Seems like such a simple algorithm for living a better life. I think I have found my escape from the storm ...

On Overachievers

Being at MIT is kind of like subjecting yourself to a daily ritual of personal inadequacy. "You didn't know that?" or "Of course you read XYZ ..." or "See how that obviously follows?" Overachievers are an aggressive lot. Survival of the fittest governs that the person that can pull three-allnighters in a row shall one day rule the world. Well, we thankfully know in the real world this is not the case. Overachievers and underachievers share the global stage. Overachievers often burn out or become bitter and then underachieve; underachievers accidentally seize the day to sometimes grow into overachievers.

It is why in a society of overachievers, I look for opportunities to teach the merits of underachievement. This is not easy, and I don't expect to have the answers here for at least a few more decades.

We know that working hard does not always equate to working well. I read somewhere that your reaction time improves by 89% after you've returned from a *real* (unplugged) vacation. I could certainly use that extra 89% right now, but in order to get it I need to commit to temporarily underachieve by taking time off my work. Ah. It sort of makes sense.

Overworking compared with your peers is often depressing. "Why am *I* working so hard, when others aren't?" Greater disenchantment by the overworker occurs when even though they have been pulling the weight of the team, another person gets to take all the credit. Ouch! That can really hurt. For some reason, these situations occur often when you are younger. Perhaps they occur because you begin to underachieve with age as a defensive mechanism. Or more probably you just develop thicker skin.

In summary, to work hard is good. To take a rest once in a while is crucial. That with age, all things get better (aside from medical thingies). And having a thicker skin ensures that on the average, you can make it through your day with a smile.

Today is Again Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. today is a holiday at MIT.

On Frustration

Stop.

I am no expert on human psychology, but I certainly am a student of the subject. The other day I thought of anger, which is one of the emotions I try to avoid. Today I was entirely frustrated. Is frustration an emotion? Wikipedia says it is. It's certainly an uncomfortable state to experience.

A quick search found this carefully composed list of emotions. When reading through a list of emotions, it's hard not to get emotional. The good ones are great; the bad ones are sort of ouchy.

"Frustration causes stress." I can agree with that. Usually, my number one way for relieving stress is to go for a jog. This is a good list of things to do to relieve stress that I wish I referred to earlier today. I find the last item on the Relax Now List quite interesting: Cry. As adults we rarely have the chance to cry. Kids cry all the time. No wonder they seem less stressed out than us bigger folks.

On my jog to search for a solution to my problems by consciously forgetting about the problems, I found the solution. It wasn't crying. Although, to watch a grown professor crying on the treadmill might have been newsworthy for the school paper .... Instead of managing a stream of tears on my face, I discovered resolve. To find the resolve to be stronger in cases that lead to frustration.

Is it coincidence that water from our eyes or water from our pores are both effective means for relieving our daily frustrations? To cry, or to jog. This is the simple choice to manage one's stress. Do both if you cannot decide.

On Anger

I was recently on the receiving end of some light anger. It doesn't matter where it came from of course. What's interesting is the concept of anger itself.

Having been born as one of the Star Wars generation, the first thought that comes to mind is Master Yoda's, "Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." (audio). I think that the object of suffering is not clear here -- is it the person who receives anger, or is it the person that expresses anger, that suffers?

It was ten years and three months ago when I got extremely angry at a person. It's an event that I really cannot forget. The object of my frustration was two people -- one was the manager of the person I was upset with, the other the person himself. The manager sat there quietly and listened to my anger. It lasted for no more than three minutes. The manager sat quietly for maybe a minute and a half. Then, he said to me in a calm and measured voice, "Your expression of anger ... belies the qualities ... of a lesser man." I was rendered completely speechless. From that day forward, I've sworn to never express anger at another person.

When receiving someone's anger, you can't help but feel a bit hurt. But then you just have to ask yourself to see it from the other person's point of view. Maybe there's a rational reason for the anger, or maybe there's just good ole' fashioned misunderstanding. In either case, pity is due to the person that expresses anger. In the end, they have lost more than you.

Ten years, two months, and three weeks ago I realized that my anger was unfounded -- that my ill feelings arose from a simple misunderstanding. I've never forgotten how much I lost then, and work every day bit by bit to recover.

Each Spring Matters

Life is busy. It doesn't take a fancy set of college degrees to tell you that. The paradox of receiving an advanced education is that the more you know, the less you begin to care. You learn to care more about knowing -- which is a passive activity the last time I checked the dictionary.

By coming from blue-collar roots, I'm somewhat fortunate to have known what it's like to have less. Less time; more work. Things were difficult working 90-hour weeks at my father's little tofu factory in Seattle's Chinatown (the cultural equivalent of growing up in a family-run bakery somewhere in Brooklyn). As I remember those times, there was only the singleminded goal of my father that one of his kids would get accepted to college such that we wouldn't have to suffer physically like he and my mom.

There's a bestselling book Limbo that documents this paradox of the struggle to know and have more but ending up with less. I think it's befitting that the "Straddler class," as Lubrano calls it, should be able to use the tools of the intellectual world to frame their own situation. It is the reason why I write, I think. To better understand and cope with the complexities of how the world works not in the physical sense (as a scientist) but in the social sense (as a human).

Having turned 40 years recently, I see one more spring now that that has vanished from my counter. It happened so fast! Where did it go?

One of the privileges of being a professor is that while you sadly see wonderful flowers slowly fade (like the professors you once looked up to -- and still do), you also see brand new blossoms of life appear in the new students that arrive each year. You see their smiling faces and think only one thought: They are the future. You are the Present. Get them to the present sooner, and they can live the future longer!

This thought is surely translated from the academic workplace to any workplace. There are the bosses you adore that lose their luster over the years; and there are the new hires that carry the optimism you may have once blindly had. It is the balance of respect for the Past, respect for the Present, and respect for the Future that can keep us all sane.

So life is busy. Life is balance. And life is an opportunity to not be lost. Now I go back to the life that I love so dearly. Maybe you should do so as well.

Next Summer

Was it really that beautiful?

It dipped into the 30s today in the Boston area. The sun was shining with a wickedly sharp wind. MIT students that walk about are simply described as tired. They epitomize hard work and zero life.

Today I'm grateful to the inventors of photography. It's amazing how a color image can transport ourselves to a different time and place. Staring at my recent vacation photos, it helps me remember a time of warmth and wonderment that I easily forget when caught in the daily pattern of work.

Come Monday, I suggest you do the same. Remember a moment other than the moment you own. See again.

2 Letters 2B Human

I've used this term "humanist technologist" to describe what I do. I know that I am neither the first nor the last. I guess a year ago I was wondering on this note. And perhaps today I have an answer for now.

While participating in a PhD oral examination here at the Media Lab for wearable fashion designer Amanda Parkes, the predicament of the technologist became clear to me. The default motto of the technologist is that more technology is better. This is something extremely important for the world. Technologists create progress. Progress is about things happening. We wouldn't want a world where nothing happened at all.

I do, because I can.		technologist
I do, because I care.		humanist

With just the switch of one letter for two (n to re), technology can become humanized. I hope that care prevails over can for the next few years while we weather the utter complexity of the systems that surround us.

Getting Rich

I feel richer.

Reader James Rait in the UK unearthed an old slide "from the last millenium" from the late PARC scientist Rich Gold in response to my own Bermuda Quadrilateral. I just wikipedia'd "Rich Gold" and was surprised to see that he's not listed there. I do hope some wikipedia-er resolves this problem soon.

I met Rich maybe eight or so years ago when I served on an NAS committee on information technology and creativity. Rich was one of the expert witnesses we turned to as a way to better understand the tech/creative space. He was sort of a wacky guy that I didn't quite get at the time, but clearly his seed was planted in my mind. Sadly most of the links on the Web on Rich are 404s. It made me realize that this idea of "permalink" is funny because it's such an unlikelihood that anything we do online will be permanent in the future at all.

While James ignited my memory of Rich Gold, I began to Google him but accidentally typed his name into the "To:" field of my e-mail app. "Weird," I thought, "I'm sending e-mail to a man long gone." Would I get a reply? Sometimes we like to think in solitude, but it's something we can all do at anytime. For that reason communication (the bonafide "two-way" variety) seems all that more precious to enjoy while so engaged. I remember shaking Rich's hand now and his confused sort of being. I learned, and am certainly richer for the experience.

Younger Older

For my talk at the recent Ars Electronica symposium I tried to simplify my philosophy towards life as:

When you're younger:  Do More. Think Less.

When you're older:  Do Less. Think More.

Some younger students, I find, tend to think too much and it sort of paralyzes them. Thus my usual advice to them is to think less. For older students, sometimes they get too caught up in the act of making, and fail to find a moment of reflection. To them, I say do less. Perhaps the superior model is the hybrid approach where you do both and engage in thoughtful doing or doing thoughtfully. I think I know what I'm doing. But maybe I shouldn't.

The Critique of Wrong

At the recent Ars Electronica symposium among many wonderful things I saw there, two out-of-the-ordinary things happened. I re-encountered the person that once told me most civilly that he h*ted me , and I also came in touch with a younger version of myself.

When you are young, sometimes in order to find truth the only way is to negate everything around you. In other words, in order to be right, sometimes you really have to ascribe everything (that is not you) as wrong. And then something happens later on in life, where you realize that the surrounding world wasn't wrong at all. And that you weren't wrong either. The act of questioning is a powerful educational tool that we can attribute to "The Man" but perhaps it's more accurately simply a wonderful part of the natural programming inscribed in we hu-mans.

To be wrong, or to be told that you are wrong, is an important cleansing force in our extremely robust ecosystem of knowledge. If you're always right by the power of scientific fact, then well ... that's kind of boring. It means you're done. Finished. Can disappear. But. You can start over again. So that's not bad either. Perhaps many wrongs, do make a right after all. I may certainly be wrong. I can live with that.

Look, Up in the Sky!

It's not a bird.

Recently I took an extended hiatus from technology to try to calm myself down. No hiptop, no e-mail, etc. Although I did cheat as I brought along a digital camera. Without so many e-mails to read and respond to, I became kind of ADHD and started to get a bit crazy. Cameras don't get cc'ed (yet) so it was nice to focus (literally) on the world around me.

We spend so much time looking eye level at stuff on a daily basis. You look ahead, and maybe down; rarely do you look up. Why? Because nothing important's ever up there. But then I got to thinking about the ongoing conflict in the Middle East that has thankfully subsided for now. If I lived there during the most difficult of times, I would most certainly be looking up a lot driven by survival instead of a carefree desire for inspiration.

So today, look up. What do you see? Do you see a sky clear of manmade disruptions or else Mother Nature's tantrums? If so, then I think that today will be a good day for you. It is for me.

Feeling the Heat

Today we're expected to hit the 100's in Boston. On the drive to work and while stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, I had a moment of dejavu near the place that a taxi cab rear-ended me on Memorial Drive. It was a day or two after 9/11. There was a fairly dangerous situation that led to this accident, and luckily both of us were fine. I turned my lane change signal and we both moved to the side of the road.

It was an odd feeling. Perhaps a month before 9/11 I would have worried about the bump on my car fender. But I looked at the driver, and he looked at me, and we were both so shell-shocked about the events in NY that both of us were just happy to be alive. We shook hands, and expressed thanks. And both drove off as if nothing happened. Because nothing really happened of significance.

With all that the media overwhelmingly feeds us about the ongoing conflict in Lebanon and Israel, and although I personally live far away, I cannot help but think about how the lives of people on both sides of the border has changed for the worse. The simple artificiality of every day life likely gives way to what matters the most. It is sad and unfortunate that cataclysmic events are what serves as the best reminder of normalcy that is lost.

Newer is Worser?

A few days ago at a team lunch, I was curious why one of the new graduate students, Luis Blackaller, used an older digital camera. He said that he had bought a newer one, but it was no good in the sense that it was too slow to focus. Although he had gained several more megapixels, with all kinds of new features and so forth, he chose to go back to not what was just old, but what was better.

Yesterday I began to work with a brand new digital camera and understood what he meant. Compared to my older camera, I counted 83 new features with 5 megapixels more of resolution. Add on to this the new amazing "anti-blur" feature so I can now wobble my hands all over the place and take the perfect picture. In theory, I should now be able to take a better picture than my older camera. But I've discovered that I can take an extremely high-resolution photo of much poorer quality than my previous camera. How does this happen?

Paradoxically by buying newer technology that's supposed to make me more empowered, I'm feeling less confident because there must be something wrong with me because I'm not untapping the potential here. My natural insecurities are copiously fed by the power of new technologies. I'm feeling ... indigestion.

I wish there were online stores where you could choose the year in which you'd like to shop. Say you visit an online store like outpost.com and give it the flag 'outpost.com?year=2003&mo=feb' and it lets you buy stuff available in inventory from February in 2003. There's all this good stuff that goes away and is replaced with new stuff that nobody wants. This also applies to websites in general that become unusable by adding all the latest Flash-goop and Javascript hacks -- I'd like to dial-back to web experiences that truly work versus are simply new. It would be like time traveling "for real" into the wayback machine.

I think I'm sounding old here ... but I've essentially outlined here that being old can be good. It's good to be old. Especially when there's no other choice.

Proxy

My unique friend Noreen Morioka recently put me in Adobe Proxy when I shared a warm spring day with the extremely heartful and insightful Charles Hall.

Darfur

Darfur Darfur Darfur Darfur ...

Looking at the current estimated death toll in Darfur of 400,000 people is sad and disturbing. The number 400,000 in computer terms is 400K. In the technology sphere we freely work with numbers in the mega-digits (10⁶) and giga-digits (10⁹) so the number can seem quite small. Numerical systems help to vastly simplify a statistic -- for instance when thought in terms of the millions, 400 thousand people dead is just 0.4 million people. Given our world population projection we are at 6,515,847,379 people. Thus looking at the total number of people now gone in Darfur -- 400 thousand people -- a simple analysis reveals that just 0.006% are now dead in the total world population.

Simplicity is really no good when it hides important complexities.

400 thousand people. Six letters in the word "Darfur." That is the word "Darfur" written 66,666.66 times where each letter signifies a single person.

66,666.66 words. Adding in a space per word, and then calculating the average word as 5 characters gives us approximately 93 thousand words. The average number of words per page is 250, which gives us 373 pages of text where each letter is a single person that is dead.

82 characters. The number of characters going into a simple C-program to print out the word "Darfur" 66,666 times:

#include

main()
{
int i;
for(i=0;i<66666;i++)
printf("Darfur ");
}

465 kilobytes. A plaintext file that makes 400K dead a bit more real. But scroll through it and it all looks monotonously the same. There's nothing there to feel. Perhaps that is the problem. The world is not at all simple.

Hunger is Danger

At this year's TED conference there was a snippet of programming where a gentleman told a story of a husky dog chained to the ground, and how a polar bear had approached out of the blue. The story goes that the bear did not eat the dog, but instead engaged in playful embrace. It took me many Google searches to finally find one of these images, which is right here.

Reason why I remembered this story was because I was explaining to a colleague how organizational politics tend to work at elite institutions. The problem with a place like MIT is that everybody's smart here. Heck there's even movies like Goodwill Hunting where the MIT custodian's an ubergenius. I've seen it happen. The rats here have PhD equivalents. Smartness is everywhere. In any case, an ecosystem of brilliance is a perfect example of the principle of the survival of the fittest. The smarter you are, the longer you will tend to survive.

There's all kind of intellectual animals in any given system. Some of the classical "dark side" brethren could include superpredators like a shark or wolf; others might be smallscale scavengers like hyenas or, at even smaller scales, trying to avoid detection like mice. The majority tend to be well-meaning, decent animals that are just trying to get to the waterhole and make life work -- like the antelopes or sheep. I guess using this analogy, the role of "human" would be played by the government/institution or any other force that tries to game the ecosystem to their advantage through ill-/well-intentioned manipulation.

The polar bear story is important, because it makes you remember that even the superpredators can be as calm and gentle as any other law-abiding animal when they're not hungry. And I get shivers up my spine thinking of a large pack of hungry mice knocking on my door. Hunger is a funny thing. It can make anything or anybody behave in an unfortunate way.

Lesson for the day is to stay away from superpredators when they're hungry, but embrace their presence when the food is plenty for everyone. If you're hungry, try to eat your own food instead of taking someone else's meal, or even better go through the trouble of growing your own food and cooking for yourself. Feed a friend, or enemy, when you have the chance. You might make a few more friends this way. I do.

Oh yes, what am I? A jellyfish of course. Floating along the way ...

Cheap Feng Shui

Today I asked my doctor how she feels about being one. Her reply came without hesitation: "It's intellectually stimulating, but you deal with real issues -- people die. And you're emotionally attached to them, and it's not easy." She then went on to say, "I tell my students that you have to be emotionally attached to your patients to truly give good care as a doctor." I found this level of commitment very heartening.

I related back to her a funny story I was told by Gary Chang whom I know from my Philips affiliation on their Simplicity Advisory Board. Gary said how in China, many building projects involve feng shui Masters. I remember being captivated by the ideas of feng shui while watching TV shows in Japan about their various theories and shiny tools. There are probably similar TV shows which air in the States on home/living channels but I don't get cable TV.

Gary told me how there are "budget" feng shui Masters that operate on sketchy principles. For instance, when a client is told that there are certain feng shui principles that are being violated, and then the client says back, "That's too expensive to fix. We can't do that!" -- the feng shui Master replies, "No problem. We can fix it with a ceremony." I imagine that the ceremony cost is cheaper than the cost of editing the building, so the wheels of business roll on. In contrast, Gary said that the best feng shui Masters demand X from a building, and X is delivered at any cost.

Emotional attachment to whatever job one has is expensive for all parties. Sound business principles would say that emotion shouldn't enter the equation of transactions. But although we might think that some emotions seem irrational, it is entirely rational to have emotions.

How much are emotions worth? Can they be bought? It seems unlikely -- especially if those emotions are genuine. Something you can't buy with money; yet you would easily pay for. I guess you've just just got to be lucky in life to find genuine experiences. The best way to do that I figure, is to live as long as you can.

Tea Versus Salad

Salad as artist.

It was nice to deliver the completed manuscript and design for my forthcoming book The Laws of Simplicity. Every project pays its toll, and a slight medical mishap reminded me of how what matters most is not work but life.

There may be an occasion upon the day you read this text to see something stunningly beautiful. Let it linger for more than a moment. The museum of the living world is always open for business. Admission is free.

Necessary Procrastination

Loving what you do is key. But I realize that loving what you can do is also important. The need to do more seems to drive extreme creativity.

The idea of overcommitting oneself is not uncommon. "Maybe I can do more?" one thinks. And then you help yourself to another serving of doing more whether for altruism or for profit. "Sure, I can do that too." At some point you ask yourself, "Have I now undercommitted my time to be preciously just creative?" In other words, when you've sold off your entire brain to achieving specific goals, is there nothing left for your selfish self to squander away just for the heck of it?

The more you overcommit, the more that procrastination becomes intolerably expensive to engage ... yet it is when procrastination becomes exceedingly costly to do, it is then that extreme creativity emerges. In the impossible moment, miracles tend to happen. "Necessary procrastination" is a prime factor in the creative process. When the cost of procrastination increases, the probability for radical new thoughts to emerge increases as well. The thought you never thought you would ever need, is often the one that can count the most in the big scope of things.

The Art of Sharing

Our Cape Cod event for the SIMPLICITY consortium closed without any problems thanks to the powerful support of Heather Pierce. Heather was my former assistant that left for motherhood, but came back to temporarily pinch-hit for an event that would surely have not happened without her help.

Upon arriving to the hotel site on Sunday, I tended to several early international guests, as well staff members that had come to help get the event set up. When I checked in to the hotel, I must admit that I was somewhat puzzled when I realized that my room faced the parking lot dumpster. The vanity inside spoke to me, "I'm running ragged to run this ocean side event, and I'm not even looking at the ocean?" I got over my own ego quickly, and the evening went wonderfully.

The following day I was overhearing how Heather had put herself and I into an undesirable room, knowing that I would want to save the best rooms for all of the guests and staff that helped. I related this story at the end of the meeting as it reminded me of something I remembered from my childhood.

My father was a cook, and loved to have visitors come over and eat heartily. One time I saw him preparing a beautiful Japanese kaiseki (multi-course) dinner and was puzzled as to why he used the best parts of the fish for the visitors, and ate the least desirable parts by himself. I reasoned that since he had cooked for so long, he would know the taste of everything better than anyone, so only he could fully enjoy the taste of something that was truly excellent. I asked this question, and he didn't quite understand my point.

Today I postulate that perhaps once you've tasted all the wonderful things in the world, you realize that there's nothing more you need to taste. Could it be that after a certain point, you realize that sharing the incredible experiences you have already had yourself with others, can be more satisfying than tasting them yet again yourself? It is much easier to take than to give, most certainly. I wonder for those that seek the highests challenges in life, that there may be no greater challenge than to have the consistent capacity to share?

As a start, I share the lesson I re-learned today from the good hearted Mrs. Pierce. It turns out that Heather was only following instructions from me that I gave her from two years ago. Always remember the purer voice of your younger self when you can.

Old MacDonalds

Today I drove master typographer Matthew Carter to the Cape today for our upcoming SIMPLICITY meeting and we had a nice chat on the way here. I first met Matthew when visiting Bitstream (a pioneer in digital typography) in the mid 80's as an innocent student on a field trip. At the time the Web was not yet built, and software tools were in their nascent but excitingly wild state of development. There were no rules nor dominant players in the creative tools industry and really everything was fresh and surprising. But then, companies like Adobe and Apple moved in to sort of MacDonald-ize the playing field of creativity into a business that every year seems to become less and less creative.

Matthew shared with me that he still uses Mac OS 8.1 and an earlier version of Fontographer running on an old G3 ... something about being so used to its idiosyncracies that although he can surely afford the latest computers and software, he sticks to what works perfectly for him. It struck me that creativity is not in the newest gadget or technology available, but instead within the ability to focus. This wonderful computer thingamajig keeps us so defocused throughout the day that we tend to forget how to focus. Au contraire, I am there.

KUU

Today I attended a lunch in Harvard Square sponsored by the Census of Marine Life where the goal is to get a general count of all the marine life in the ocean. That seems like a fairly complex task to me. A quick browse of the kind of forms that exist in the ocean do make any form of contemporary art look entirely passee.

I learned of the KUU method of looking at the world. That there are things that are Known, Unknown, and Unknowable. This methodology has the air of something deeply grounded in the space of logic, but the terminal U of Unknowable has a kind of humility embedded in the methodology. The idea of an absolutely can't know is a powerful idea in the search for knowledge. Definitely kuul ...

Simplicity is Everywhere

Simple soup.

Whether it's credit cards to car financing to chicken broth, it seems that the value of simplicity, if not yet proven, is at least popular ... and healthy if you believe in the power of chicken soup.

I had the opportunity to attend a maharam sales conference in beautiful Miami where Michael Maharam shared some time with me. Michael believes that simplicity is an important tool for his business as a means to tame the complex mechanisms that have led to their current success, so that they can move forward to even higher goals. Pure and simple. As true as the chicken broth box sayeth. Who needs fortune cookies anyways?

However I must admit that my mind was a bit distracted by the beautiful beach only a few footsteps away from the meeting room where the calm of the ocean belied the most deepest form of simplicity. The temperature there was much better than the way it was at the Cape last year where we are soon to return for a consortium meeting.

Best Practices in Science

At an increasing number of faculty congregations of all types around MIT I hear this phrase "best practices." Googling this phrase doesn't reveal its origins. Yahooing it doesn't seem to do any better. It's a favorite phrase to use to describe the best best things in the business world. Seems that invoking the phrase "best practice" makes anything uttered in said context invincible, and cannot be contested by any means. Why? Because its the "best." But who said it was the best? I find that the answer to this question is that it's best not to ask the question.

Another "best practice" in naming of best things is "best in class." I don't hear that one in academia so much. Maybe its because we have classes at the core of our operation here, and would find it confusing to use such a phrase (although I understand the use of "class" is different). Yet another is "best in breed." That one is kind of icky to me.

A certain colleague of mine refers to their research endeavors with a unique intensity and passion. They refer to a maniacal means to achieve their vision as only possible with a "Manhattan Project-style approach" of gathering the best minds in the field to work towards a singular goal. Upon hearing such a statement on two occasions, I am drawn to raising my eyebrow and think to myself, "In the field of science, is the Manhattan Project a kind of 'best practice' for achieving a desired goal?" And then I realized the answer is, well, "Yes" in that person's mind, and if not just him, there are likely others.

Not long ago, there were living guardians of the mindset that the Manhattan Project might have been a great scientific achievement, but it was a terrible blow to humanity. Jerome Wiesner, the former MIT president that co-founded the Media Lab and who actually worked on the Manhattan Project, felt this way. Many of his generation are now gone.

Certainly there are great things that have happened due to great progress in science. However if there is no reflection, there is advancement that is not only ill-informed but is ultimately deadly to the human race. In the back of my mind, I pray that my colleague, and others that think like him, wonder like me, how it would feel to be on the receiving end of a nuclear weapon or any other "best practice." "Best" is best when it means something good. Let's keep it that way. It's definitely for the best.

Progress Implied

You can only go down from here.

I have had the same Kinesis keyboard for eight years now. It seems to have as much wear as my teacup, which I've had for equally long. I know that the keyboard's on its last leg as the "Page Up" key is no longer functioning. "Page Down" works fine, so it's easy to move ahead in a document. However without a "Page Up" key, I find myself forming a rather progressive attitude of never looking back. This "bug" has made me much less reflective as it's no longer easy to flip back in a document. It's the ultimate in positive thinking -- all roads only go forward. I wonder what key is the next to go?

Sound of Summer

Human powered cicada.

I'm frantically working on a new simplicity "bloog" (a term invented by Jessie Scanlon of BusinessWeek to describe this thing I'm doing with her help). A "bloog" is the term we are using to describe the style of my forthcoming book on simplicity to be entitled, what else, The Laws of Simplicity. I started this blog here as an antidote to writing a book, and then later thought it would be neat if I could turn it into a book, but then realized that blogs don't translate to books very well. So I had to start over from scratch and have ended up with something that is sort of a cross between the feel of a blog and a book. I thought it was a "blogk" but I like Jessie's term better of a "bloog." I have to go back and bloog now ...

Jason Kottke comments that the proper modern term is a "blook." No, the bloog doesn't quite fit this definition. I opened an account on wikipedia thinking that I could try and define "bloog" more officially but the interface lost me unfortunately.

One Resolution

Nick Hackworth for Dazed & Confused Magazine in the UK referred to the fact that I'm becoming 40 this year. I never thought of things that way, but I guess he's right. I figure it's still the simple things that matter, so I've been looking for the grand resolution in life to approach the next 40 years. I've decided that it is to become more of an optimist. I feel it working already.

On Education

I had the privilege of attending TED this year. The greatest piece of wisdom, in my mind, came from Sir Ken Robinson who said to the TED audience in an eloquent no-visuals speech that, "Our education system exists to support the singular goal of entrance to university." A light bulb went on.

I recalled something I had read last year about a student in high school that was told that if he didn't bring his grades up, that this student wouldn't get into college and end up as a failure in life. His father had not gone to college and became a successful contractor and entrepreneur. The teacher was essentially calling the student's father a failure, which of course the father was not (and in reality the teacher didn't intend to do so I would imagine). I found that father's link here which I was amused to find is even further extended with entrepreneurial spirit.

My father didn't go to college, or even high school. Neither did my mother. I found it disturbing to realize that I am part of an industry that exhalts itself as important, which by definition must label the non-comformists as any less important. I have always tended to break things into black and white, when I know that I should think in terms of gray.

Robinson's simple analysis made me think of how academia is simply a kind of religion today -- which makes sense given education's original roots in the church. Will I be the good priest or the evil priest? No. Will I be the grey priest? Gandalf the Grey seemed to have it right.

The Ancients Were Correct

Today I will drink more tea.

Yesterday was the last day of my exhibition at Fondation Cartier in Paris. Leanne Sacramone expertly curated the collection of 14 new works for computer and video, and the exhibit achieved a record-breaking 100,000+ visitor count for the Fondation. More is better, in this respect.

Today the sun is shining and I'm busily trying to finish my new book. Long ago I disavowed caffeine due to my previous caffeine addiction. Once in a while, the addict inside convinces me that, "Just this one more time and that'll be the end of it." Facing writer's block, I was happy to look inside my worn tea mug to get some ideas as to how to move forward. There is a lot predicted in my leaves of tea, and I am now compelled to realize that future. Time to switch windows ...

Curried Carrot Leaves

On a recent trip to my native Seattle, I told my father about the Japanese movie by director Hirokazu Koreeda called After Life here in the United States. He had never seen the movie, but I had described the plot in rough form. When people die, they go to a place where there is a movie production company. There the staff interviews the new arrivals to get them to select the one memory that they can take with them as they pass on to wherever that might be. A movie is made of that one memory, that they get to take with them as how they remember their life. When I told my father this plotline, I asked him what memory he might want to keep with him for the rest of time.

Oddly, without hesitation he told me a story from his childhood. His older brother left home when he was young due to a disagreement with his father. They were thirteen years separated in age, but the bond was clearly very strong as he spoke of his older brother in respectful terms. There was a long story about how his brother went through many circuitous paths through a network of relatives, to finally end up back at the family home for a brief respite after WWII. This brother, named "Eiryoo" (a classical name for a monk apparently), took some carrot leaves and lightly sauteed them in curry powder, and served this over some rice. He described this moment as one of wonder as he had never tasted something so delicious. This simple moment in childhood is what inspired my father later to become a cook, and is the most precious memory to him. What is your most precious memory?

Debts Paid

Indebted.

I built a simple service that helps to visualize the tackling of one's credit card debt as the ones on the Web made me rather confused. Many senior citizens today suffer from credit card debt, and it is clear that it can be a terrible way to end one's life.

Berry Good

Delicious complexity.

Being in a lot of airports, the gift shop is where I tend to hang out as I am always curious to find something unique to the airport's locale. Too many shops carry essentially the same object (cup, t-shirt, salt/pepper shaker), and they are just stamped with the city's name.

One time in Korea I found something quite precious but it's been a while since I've scored another find. In the airport at Seattle, within the midst of the Alaskan salmon and so forth was a generic Godiva chocolate display that caught my eye. In the midst of the simple and elegant plain colors of white and browns popped out a berry-ified package design. Raspberry-infused chocolate spoke to me and beckoned. I simply obeyed.

Texture is a lovely kind of visual noise to be used sparingly. Come to think of it, flavor is a kind of noise as well. Time to turn up the volume.

Two Lights

Two years ago in an intense conversation with our Patriarch here at the Media Lab, Negroponte told me to become a light bulb instead of a laser beam. The logic being that a laser beam is focused with exact precision and without affecting its surroundings, whereas a lightbulb can illuminate everything (and everyone) around them. I took this advice to heart, like most things he has shown me over the years. It was my new year's resolution for 2004, and I think it will do for 2006 as well. (Incidentally my resolution for 2005 was to be the laser beam instead ... I am of the "do both" religion).

Where There's Smoke

From start to finish.

With the trickling arrival of fancy computational new year's greetings from my former students [1] [2], I feel peer-pressured into posting something in a similar spirit. I wish everyone a simple work year of 2006, where all the countless fires that arise happily get put out by themselves (this tends to be the case if you haven't noticed ...).

Blink of the Mind

Today I had an interesting online conversation for an upcoming issue of Blackbook Magazine. It was a moderated conversation about the "Future of Art" between Paola Antonelli, Shirin Neshat, Yinka Shonibare, and myself. In discussions today that involve the dichotomies present in political art, and also the distinction between art and design, I find myself recently a bit ... lost. And then I was found.

I remembered hearing once about how the ear doesn't blink. The point being that our eyes blink, and thus seeing discontinuous imagery is tolerable -- as we often experience during the rapid cuts of a movie edit. Yet our ears never blink, and that when sound suddenly changes in a discontinous manner, it is jarring. It occurred to me that good art makes our mind blink. Whether it's a visage of alarming beauty or acknowledgement of a horrific social disaster, the process of blinking makes our mind remember that we are here. And not somewhere else deep in our thoughts that have nothing to do with here. There. I am now here.

Believe

Yesterday I visited Reebok International headquarters here in Massachusetts. Their facilities reminded me of Electronic Arts' headquarters in Los Angeles -- basketball courts, baseball fields, and so forth. Corporation = Gymnasium?

There I met with some young shoe designers and we talked about the state of the world and so forth. One asked, "Are you optimistic about technology?" My answer was, "I'm not excited about technology." I realized that wasn't an answer to his question shortly after my utterance.

Later during the discussion, we discussed globalism and the eventual Walmart-ization of the world and so forth. Catching my own statement of inevitability of decline as captured in my tone and so forth the young, inquisitive man said, "That's b*llshit." He went on to say that it is people that determine their fate ... and that economic futures cannot be held with the same statement of truth that we ascribe to the laws of gravity. It was then that I realized that B-school had begun to assimilate my brain into the global muck of money, and that this young man's courage had temporarily saved my soul from oblivion. I believe that the change can become permanent. I believe like him, that we should believe.

Trust Me

When I was in graduate school at the Media Lab in 1989, I had an officemate with a unique perspective on life. He was entirely cynical from a lifetime of wheeling and dealing, and at the time I was the picture of naivete. One day he told me, "John, when you're listening to someone, and they say to you, 'Trust me,' just replace every instance of their use of that phrase with 'F*ck you.'" My officemate explained that every time somebody asked you for their trust, that they were implicitly giving you the shaft. Ironically, I trusted my then PhD advisor who said to me, "Trust me," and I did. In the end I found that trust undeserved, and I dropped out of the Media Lab. Was my officemate right?

Today, while having a light dinner with a friend in the textile business, we talked about how trust is at the essence of any great enterprise. When everyone in an organization trusts each other, then politics are minimized and the pace of work can pick up enormously. However in the cynical world we live in, as I mention above, the idea of trust is often a fleeting and rare quality to find in the workplace. In the SIMPLICITY consortium we are currently studing this ever fragile concept of trust as one of the keys to realizing simplicity in technology. Some of the core precepts have emerged in our research, and we are gaining the necessary critical mass in our program to begin to make a difference. Will our efforts make the world any more bearable and inevitably simpler? Trust me.

And the Winner is ...

All I got was a cookie.

I emcee-ed the National Design Awards last night. It was quite a glamorous affair that was a quintessential "New York evening." Perhaps the most exciting moment was before the ceremony when I spent some time with Martha Stewart whose daughter Alexis was one of the awards presenters. I oddly felt like my hands had pushed past the glass facade of the television screen.

Awards ceremonies are complex because there is the perception that if there are winners, there are losers. Winning is fun; losing is hard. Win too much and your head gets fat; lose too much and your heart goes flat. Winning and losing aside, by far the hardest thing to do is show up for the game at all. We who choose to compete, in life and happiness, are all winners.

The Power of Sardines

Three shiny objects and two smells.

On some days the planets align. Today was such a day. On my table at MIT, there was an unplanned meeting between three silvery objects. One was the heatsink (the piece of metal that is attached to microprocessors in order to dissipate their incredible heat) to my old Mac G4, the second was a Powerbook battery I stopped using that tended to overheat in kind of a dangerous way, and the third was a can of sardines I recently purchased in Paris for the beauty of its silvery box. I am a believer in signs for the same reason I gave pause when I discovered that SIMPLICITY and COMPLEXITY both contain the letters MIT in sequence. What might this particular sign of silver rectangles mean? By coincidence (maybe not anymore) I am working on a new piece entitled "Silver" for the Fondation Cartier exhibition. I guess that means I better finish it soon.

Ping Pong Table of Learning

Fun for every(one).

Today I met with Michael Erlhoff for coffee in Harvard Square. It's hard to explain who Michael Erlhoff is. Either you know him or you don't know him. If I were to Google the contents of my own brain with "radical German intellectual," Michael would certain pop up as the top link. I first met him in regards to his institute's award program that is run completely by students with a special ... errr ... trophy called "the thumper." The idea of a student-run award program is simply brilliant. Groups of students find their particular champion and lobby the student body for acceptance. All collateral and arrangements are done by the students and it forms an invaluable learning experience in entrepreneurship. In Michael's words, he believes that, "the students, and not the teachers, should be in charge of their own learning."

Michael and his partner Uta apparently have a lecture together every year for the students where they engage in some type of fierce debate. Instead of sitting next to each other or opposite each other at podiums, they get a ping pong table and sit across from each other. The ping pong table is not only a metaphor for their shared discourse, but it also signifies the kind of game-like challenge that exists in the best of academic discussions. What is the point of being a faculty member if you can't teach your students how to play with ideas?

It was not easy to keep up with Michael. Between the puffs of his cigarette that would momentarily render me unable to breathe, I tried my best to hit the ping pong ball back. In the end he won, but as is the point of playing a better player than yourself, I learned a few new tricks.

What Color Is Your Straightjacket?

I have heard of the book What Color Is Your Parachute? for as long as I can remember, but only recently do I know what the book is for. I've never been in terribly adventurous circles, thus I found it odd that the concept of jumping from an airplane could somehow lay in my cognitive proximity. Today I realize that it is part of a movement started in the 70's by a Mr. Richard Bolles that has now lasted for over 30 years. Frankly I have no immediate intention to leave my current job. However, the whole industry of job searching does fascinate me. For instance, through the power of an expensive advertising campaign, I know of this site monster.com that I just visited in order to see if there is a job posting out there for a "humanist technologist." Hmmm, the links that come up are not to my liking. They include "ultrasound technologist" or "nuclear medicine technologist." I'm pretty sure I lack the training for any of these jobs so I guess I will stick with my current one.

I receive many inquiries as to my rationale for pursuing an MBA. I'm 63% of the way there (of course I'm not desperately counting down to July 2006 or anything silly like that), and I have to admit that I do ask the same question of myself from time to time. The answer does exist -- it's because in my early 30's I felt that I lacked the knowledge necessary to do understand things that dealt with the "non-creative" side of things. There was a time that was very brief when I first realized that there truly is the "no win situation." This is of course before I discovered the world of the win win, but everything does have its rightful order in life. When you are trained to overachieve all your life, you are taught to overcome at all costs. "Overcome" usually implies going through or around the obstacle kind of like in the take-no-prisoners manner that Donald Trump's Apprentice seems to suggest as the secret to success. Contrary to this dominant doctrine, I learned through personal experience that in some rare occasions, the only way to overcome, paradoxically, is to simply withdraw. Give up? Nope. It's all about being prepared ... for ... the ... right ... moment.

I think that the famed General Patton said it well, "Never fight a battle unless you will gain by winning." I heard it said differently by my former colleague Bruce Blumberg as, "If you die in battle (short-term), you cannot win the war (long-term)." And so I patiently wait.

James Shewmaker writes, "I was reminded of Joseph Ellis' biography of George Washington entitled, 'His Excellency.' Twelve times, Mr. Ellis, uses the term Fabian to describe Washington's reluctant Revolutionary War strategy. Washington discovered early in the War that he would not be able to fight the war the way that he desired to fight the war but rather would be forced to constantly withdraw his troops anytime the odds were against victory. Washington's own personality was geared towards charging headlong into battle, but he came to realize quickly that he would lose the war if he let his natural inclination 'inform' his decision making."

Wanting to Be Liked

It tastes like chicken ...

We all want to be liked in one form or the other. The same can be said about the unfamiliar space of the abstract. By not looking like anything, an abstract element need not pretend to be anything that it really is not. Everything that one might draw is fake; everything that one might emulate could be real. Something that is real, does not have to be like anything else. It doesn't hurt of course when an iPod Shuffle might resemble a packet of chewing gum for metaphor's sake. The two are not interchangeable. For instance if I were on a deserted island, I'd certainly choose the chewing gum. I can imagine that others might go for the iPod. I'm the wrong market for the iPod as I have insisted before.

As I begin to trawl through my brain for content to fill the space of the Nature exhibition, I begin to find myself in that terrible "like" trap. It is easy to want to be identified with something that is recognizable. To be unique is dangerous and undefined. The key to the successful abstraction, it appears, is to be not-likeable. Quite a pitiful position if you ask me ...

Straight Down

Two meanings for the price of one.

I made a quick trip to Paris for the Philips Simplicity Event and to do some coordination regarding my exhibition at the Fondation Cartier. As is customary with exhibition preparation, I had the opportunity to talk to a variety of people in the European press. Talking to the media is like taking an exam. Either you pass or you fail. Human nature is to prefer to pass; although the self-tortured individual prefers to fail. I think deep down inside we are always both although the learner in us has the preference for failure.

When I started being a student last year, it took a while to deal with the fact that I would have to take tests again. I wish I could say that I have had perfect scores throughout the experience, but honestly I haven't nearly reached that mark. A test is able to illustrate how closely your thinking aligns to the thinking of the instructor. When the instructor is truly right in all factual senses and high objectivity, then your score signifies the distance you must travel to achieve perfection. Thus whenever I score poorly, I get an immediate assessment of what I am missing; however whenever I score perfectly (which is entirely rare) I feel a bit lost. It is easier to learn when you know what you are missing; it is harder to learn if you think you already know the material. Perhaps for that reason, all tests should be sufficiently difficult in order to create the ideal learning experience. In a way, I pity my current students that are reading this right now (insert innocent smile here).

Tripping onto the floor by accident within a crowd can be embarrassing. You can be alone without the witnessing crowd and still feel flushed. What defines the moment of learning is whether you pick yourself up, or instead just lie there to be trampled upon.

On the way home, at Charles de Gaulle airport I became stuck in an infinite loop with signage that pointed downwards towards my target of terminal 2C. I would go up the escalator, and see the sign pointing downwards, and thus go down the escalator. I would go up again, and then down. It was a long while before I realized that the downward arrow would signify one of two things -- "down the escalator" or "straight ahead" -- it could signify both meanings even on the same piece of signage. I took this as the final exam on my trip to Paris -- another invaluable learning experience. The lesson learned was that even if you fail countless times at whatever you might be doing, if in the end you make it to any final destination you have succeeded in changing. Change = Youth. Not only did I make it back to Boston, but thanks to the challenging discussions I had in Paris I am forever changed and forever young again. Vive la France!

(Less)ons

Half a year left till nirvana.

If I cannot keep up with my own email, I certainly cannot keep on updating my daily calendar. Today I had the fortune of flipping through several months of Dalai Lama-isms in order to extract that which I needed to center it all. In the pile on the left, I put the stuff that I found irrelevant. The smaller pile on the right is that which I found resonance. I'm now going through the resonant pile to reduce it to one or two ...

I haven't been able to post as regularly as I once did in this space. The reality of my Cartier Foundation exhibition is real. And thus everyday I am thinking thinking thinking and sketching sketching sketching and coding coding coding. Art is on my mind.

Thus it may be coincidence, but August 4's Dalai Lama-ism is, "In the interests of everyone, of humanity, the artist has a responsibility to use his medium well." Of course he does make reference to this sentence in the context of making art that is spiritual. I find it odd that in other parts of the calendar he makes the point that religion shouldn't be pushed onto anyone. I take great satisfaction, as a result, that my new artwork pushes no politics nor religion. It's just about nature really. And that's that.

Trust

We tend to trust things that are simple. I googled "how to gain trust" and was surprised to find so many relevant links. If it's so easy to gain trust, then why is trust so rare in our modern world?

Perhaps the very fact that there are so many googleable ways to gain trust lies at the root of the problem. If manipulating people to gain trust is a codifiable process, then our reason for trusting people that try to gain our trust is naturally suspect. Are they sincere? Or am I being manipulated? Perhaps the question though is whether even though our trust granting process were manipulated, was the manipulation warranted? What if I can trust what I have been convinced to trust in an accelerated fashion. Seems like a win. But it's hard to feel that way.

When something is AYSIWYG, or all you see is what you got, like a simple white cube made of marble, you do not question the object's raison d'etre. The cube is all that it is. You trust that it will not beep, vibrate, or blink at you. The form's visual presentation creates immediate trust.

On the other hand, you can have a white cube made of marble with an mp3 player inside it. You shake it, it turns on; you shake it, it turns off. The simplicity of the form upholds its promise.

However add a rewind, or fast-forward, or browsing functionality to the cube. You may set forth a visual promise with its simple form. But the actual interface to the added technical functions necessitates the disbarring of the illusion. Perhaps there is a hidden lever, or one of the faces is a trackpad-like input device. Thus the overall form creates the situation of, "Trust at first sight." Yet that trust is betrayed as the relationship deepens.

Thus trust at first sight may be the first step, but it's that more elusive lasting trust that requires a great deal more of thought in the design process for simplicity. The same, of course, can be said about life. I trust you'll figure out the answers yourself.

Your Money, or Your Life

More important than E = mc².

From the recent AIGA Aspen thinktank session, I have many good memories. One in particular is the diagram drawn by the team that included Michael Cronan shown here on the right. Our team was given the topic of discourse while Michael's team was given the topic of money.

I am not certain if this illustration (I refer to the one above and not below) of the fundamental challenge in life is original. Yet it reads quite clearly with a strength that has its own form of timelessness. Especially in the creative professions, there is no bigger issue of balance than that of the do something for the money versus the do something because you love to do it. Often the two are not coincident, and thus you must inevitably choose. Choose money? Choose love? Of course your situation is remedied if you love money in which case I'm happy for you that you've solved the paradox, but I feel sad for you as you will certainly miss out.

I first encountered this equation when I met Paul Rand. I was alone with him at his studio when he suddenly got quiet and looked me in the eye, "I have something important to tell you young man." (Everyone was young compared to him of course as he was 80-ish at the time.) With trepidation I stuttered back, "Wh-what?" Rand said, "Make lots of money." Naturally I was a bit taken aback when I heard this, and my face showed a sense of dismay. Rand followed with saying, "Doing the things you love to do will make absolutely no money; so you've got to do some things that do make money." He cited the production of his own books which ranged in the 100's of thousands that were funded out of his own pocket.

So it was nice to see the equation rewritten in Aspen in visual form. The question is one of balance, as it always tends to be. I've got 44 more years until I'm as old as Paul was before he passed away. I wonder how the equation will be written for me? We all write our own equations, don't we? Let us see.

When In Rome

I've been in Rome for the past day working with Philips on their Sense and Simplicity advisory board. On this board, I'm given the rare opportunity to see how internal change can be managed, or maybe more appropriately, led through example.

The CEO of Philips Design, Stefano Marzano has struck me as a particular interesting role model. He has led Philips Design for 14 years through bad times and good. Stefano manages thousands of designers globally with attention to both organizational and creative detail with a sharp eye. I have no aspirations to be a CEO after meeting many in the last two years. I have great admiration, but no aspiration. The job requires multitasking and delegation to the nth degree. I instead prefer the model of working towards being a master baker. Ideally the bakery never gets too big, the bread tastes better than all the rest, and the master baker never forgets how to bake his own bread.

Stefano's model of management subscribes to what he calls the agricultural school. This was new to me. A farmer has to grow his or her crops yearly, and sometimes they plant the seeds and nothing grows. Sometimes a storm or other calamity wipes the crop away. But the farmer keeps on going. Year to year, maybe the farmer feels no advancement. But Stefano pointed out that you have to look a one's lifetime of work as a farmer, and not just season to season.

Observing Stefano's perspective gave me a chance to step back. Maybe instead I want to be an organic baker where I grow my own crop of wheat? Start from the basics. Think broadly. And also remember to care. I think this is a plan that I can live by.

Powers of Two

As I entered the cramped fitness center of the San Francisco Hyatt Regency Hotel, I felt as though I had entered a foreign country. There were three folks running on the treadmill, and they seemed to be minding themselves yet I could hear a strange sort of chatter. Was it from the TV? The sounds didn't match, and I couldn't hear what they were saying on the TV as well. What was this strange language I was hearing?

After I initiated my jog, I noted another TV in the room that was showing a completely different program than the other. What were they saying? It made no sense. And then the often dim lightbulb in my head realized -- oh! It's the sound from the two programs canceling each other out. I didn't notice it at first because the two programs were similar in audio content and thus there sum was a kind of intelligible, unintelligible kind of hum that resulted.

Maybe it is my early fascination with Noah's ark -- not the religious aspects, but the animals coming in two's -- that compels me to always buy two of everything I get. Or maybe it's my whole digital thing with the one's and zero's, or two numerical states, that has taken over my brain. I never mastered counting in binary like some of my more awesomely nerdy friends, but I seem to have mastered the art of buying in two. I buy two as a just-in-case measure, perhaps because I automatically assume that one will eventually go bad. The other reason I buy two is for the symmetry of it all to have two same things placed diametrically opposed.

Back to the treadmill, it dawned upon me that if one TV were showing a talk show, and the other was showing a classical concert (not in this country of course), there would no longer be noise, but harmony. The power of many is meaningless without harmony. Harmony is a certain exquisite flavor of contrasting elements that leaves no bad after taste.

Thus perhaps the easiest form of constructed harmonies is sameness -- like when I buy two of the same. Wow, I never realized that I've been lazy all these years. This gives me the perfect excuse to go shopping!

H2O

An incentive to drink heavily.

I am a fan of clever packaging. I will often purchase a product that I don't particularly care for, but do so out of respect for its package. On the way to commencement exercises at MIT, I stopped by the school store to pick up some water. I was amazed about the incredible variety of waters to choose from. In the end, I chose Smart Water. The packaging of Smart Water was extremely simple compared to the other waters that were available. However on the side of the bottle there was an incentive presented as a vertical bar. The claim presented by the vertical bar was that the more you drank, the smarter you would become. Since I had planned to sit for several hours in the commencement tent, I figured that I could counteract my boredom by gaining in intelligence. As there are so many smart people here at MIT, it couldn't hurt to get a tiny little bit smarter.

Rewinding back to a day in NYC where I saw Bruce Mau speak about the dire state that the world is in, I remember an encounter with another water product. At the beginning of his lecture, Bruce pulled out a bottle of "NEWater" which is made out of filtered waste from sewage in Singapore. He pops it open and theatrically drinks it with relish in view of the crowd. Apparently this wasn't the first time he's done it. Although I was deeply inspired by Bruce's