so i’m thinking a lot about ideas.

my ideas, other people’s ideas, ideas we share, ideas we keep to ourselves…

this makes a great deal of sense, i suppose, since in many ways i am in the business of ideas – connecting the dots between an amorphous, glimmering concept to a fully formed, solid manifestation that can be seen and shared and played with is what designers do. a final manifestation

the thing is, i’m not that interested in the final manifestation.
the difference, i think, is that i’m not thinking about a specific idea, i’m thinking about ideas as a material of their own, and about how much of my work is really about building the tools that people need to manipulate and explore their ideas on their own.

when i was working at the hollytree, i found myself, as always, commenting on the design of the things we used. the water glasses were stupidly bottom-heavy, for example. an attempt to make them not tip over gone terribly wrong, i believe, since the designers apparently didn’t think about the fact that glasses are quite often upside down in restaurant settings – in the dishwasher, for example – so while bottom-heavy glasses might behave admirably when bumped on a table by a slightly inebriated or clumsy customer, they then turn around and wreak total havoc and frustration when carried about by totally competent kitchen porters and waitstaff, leading to more breakages than would probably occur were they just neutrally weighted.

i racked up similar complaints about the fancy adjustable table legs which screwed and unscrewed themselves whenever tables were moved, leading to wobblier tables and more pinched fingers than if we had just been compelled to cram a napkin under the occasional natural rebel, and about the rounded handle knives that were the bane of formal table setting because they sometimes decided that a vertical orientation was simply not in their nature, and they would rather spin around and make the frazzled waitstaff feel like they were playing a game with a poltergeist.

all in a day’s work.

so what does one do with ideas like these?

i was more interested in the fact that observations like these must be everywhere, in every workplace, waiting for someone to take the time to swoop in, collect them, and transmit them to budding (or established, i suppose) entrepreneurs. we spend a lot of energy training people to be designers so that they can go out and observe and interview people to find out things that are everyday knowledge for the “locals”, and one model of design is that we just get enough missionaries out there to

in order for this to happen, computing has to become more malleable
there are limits to the amount of personalization designs of chairs and shirts and helmets could allow. not so with the digital world. the only limit to the amount of personalization is the size and shape of the window into the code.

at CHI next year:
is this design?
is this HCI?
is design…?

very short list, that.
those questions are too generic.
just getting the idea out.

partially a response to erik the elder talking about the lack of debate in the literature on hci and design

and partly an extension of my own desire to write about the different kinds of designers and where they overlap with hci. it seems a potentially good project to work on in a participatory way.

thought-provoking talk
very interesting man
made points about how the q’uran teaches that creation is diverse, and that it is not up to human beings to decide what is true, only to live in accordance with the teachings of the prophet and allow judgement to be passed in time.
the q’uran teaches honesty, respect for others, and the inclusion of minorities, so interfaith dialogue follows from this naturally, in his opinion.
faith is needed, and what matters is that we understand that each person needs to find their own way of understanding, it is not our place to presume to know what is right for everyone, we should focus instead on figuring out what is right for us and then finding what we can agree on with others and working from there.

that’s my overall summary in retrospect, though i’m sure it’s affected by my own interpretations. during the lecture i struggled with the idea that one way of seeing the tolerance he was suggesting was as a kind of test for the faithful – “hey dudes, it doesn’t matter if they get it right. just focus on knowing that YOU got it right, and be nice. if they don’t get their shit in order in time, that’s their problem.”

in the end, these reservations were lessened a good bit during the q&a, when dr. sajid got the chance to give a more nuanced description of what he means by respect and how fundamentally he holds the contention that we can’t really pretend to know the whole truth. but the questions from the audience suggested that the deeper struggle is still with the seeming paradox of believing in The Truth and being respectful of other opinions, so i think there is still a mental leap to make before we really grok the interfaith cooperation thing at a cultural level.

here are the notes i took during the session:

“to believe that everyone is deserving of respect, and to focus on finding a common ground.

but beneath this, do we believe that our understanding of truth is the correct way, and it simply isn’t our job to convince others, it is only our job to live well and let them make up their own minds? so our tolerance of other beliefs is kind of a test of our own faith, but we still have a deeper belief in our worldview, and its kind of like “too bad” for people who don’t get it?

the ends achievable through these means seem very powerful, but what does it mean about our conception of truth? is it possible for us to not only believe that we should tolerate other wrong beliefs because such tolerance is a part of the right beliefs, but to actually believe that there is more than one sort of rightness? what if the truth is actually impossible to comprehend from any one perspective, so we have different religions and philosophies because they transform the truth into contextualized metaphors that are most likely to lead us to right behavior? so the real belief is in right behavior, and the respect for other perspectives comes not from a belief that tolerance of inaccuracy is a test of faith but because any path to right behavior is deserving of respect and admiration and genuine interest. so debates over points of religion are not about what is true and what is false, but about how well a creed or perspective leads to right behavior.

so under that, there is a belief in right behavior. the difference of opinion comes in regarding where that rightness comes from.

what we have to decide is whether we are more committed to getting to a place where we all believe the same things or a place where we all agree on what constitutes right action.
i’m saying that the mental leap is to understand that different beliefs are the only path to similar actions, because we are all living in different contexts.

so the separation of church and state is different than the separation of faith and state.

what we agree on is that there is some force compelling us to right action, and we may believe that our way is right, but we can’t say that the existence of multiple paths is not the only want to reach a common destination.

the danger is in confusing our own personal revelations with The Way It is. we know that we need to figure things out, but we should be comfortable with the idea that our own truths do not need to be everyone’s truths in order for them to be valid. all that matters is that they direct us to do good. ”

—

i think these are pretty good notes, and they felt good at the time in terms of getting stuff out of the head and onto the page, but they’re still rather scattered and susceptible to the “sounds a lot more obvious than it felt” phenomenon.

a lot of these things relate to stuff i’m thinking about in general regarding the quest for the certainty of purpose that i need to pick a project and stick with it, and the motivation to kick my work into a higher gear once i’m there.

or, at least, i Made them relate to those things, and the illusion was heightened because i had the gift of two chats with erik tonight, both before and after the talk, and even though we did manage to discuss a range of things, the larger arcs still fed these same fires as if they were scripted for the task. while that is probably partly because we really are dealing with some similar shit, i am sure that it is also partly just that i was in one of those “whoa! everything relates to this!!” kind of moods, so i only hope that the relevance to what erik was actually saying and thinking was not entirely in my mind, and therefore i didn’t completely commandeer the conversations to serve my own ends.

muhahaha

anyway, i don’t know how much of it is my mind just grasping for answers to some of the questions i’ve been grappling with of late, but i do know that, in the meet and greet after the talk, and on my walk home, i felt a sort of clarity. it felt easier to look people in the eye and actually listen. it was easier to smile at strangers on the street and really mean it. i felt ready and excited to talk about things, and more capable of really believing what i always tell myself – that changing my mind is an exciting victory in the cause of better understanding, rather than a referendum on things i should have known all along.

i felt less defensive and more ready to just work, which is the real goal i have been seeing lately, because i think that a lot of people are afraid of different ways of thinking because they feel that their own way of life is threatened, and the only way they know how to react is to lash out and claim theirs as the way of truth and light. we are stuck in a mindset where things need to be one way or the other, even as we spout rhetoric about honoring diversity and try to believe it as long as it isn’t really threatening us. but it’s hard to really wrap our minds around, and we need to get cracking if we are going to survive in our new world of thinner borders.

and whether i have been able to articulate it or not, tonight i had a glimmer of a moment where i could actually see it, and that’s something to celebrate.

cheers!

some words on itunes
downloading singles makes it less likely that we’ll wade through the rest of albums, and discover the gems therein

smart playlists not smart enough

library too big

stupid with external files

so i had an idea a couple of weeks ago, and it goes like this:

what if i ask everyone that i know who has seen hotel rwanda to donate an amount equivalent to the cost of their ticket to humanitarian relief agencies working in darfur?

it’s kind of like those empty plate dinners that raise money for hunger… have you ever seen one of those? you pay for a dinner, but then you don’t actually go, so all the money goes to the cause without anyone having to spend anything on your spaghetti.

this is like buying a seat for a movie and then not going, so all the money goes to whatever the movie would have been about, and you don’t even have to turn off your cell phone!

:)

we could squabble about whether such small amounts will really make a difference, who we should donate to in order to maximize our impact, whether green is really the new black…

but in the time it takes to have such squabbles, we could each earn the amount in question by flipping burgers at mcdonalds, so i’m going with… not worth it.

at worst, we send $9 in movie money to unicef, and they scratch their heads and go on with their day.

and at best?

let’s just say the potential is hard to ignore.

so let’s try it, shall we?

consider this an official request, from me to you, for you to spend the next 5 minutes of your life clicking on one of the links below and then donating the price of a movie ticket in your hometown.

i’ll do it myself right after i hit “Publish”, and i’ll write another post soon about where the idea came from, for those of you with interest in such things.

give a shout out in the comments if you play along, eh? (but if you’re considering making comparisons to any haley joel osment movies, comment that one forward instead, will ya? ;)

i do appreciate it.

challenge on.

• oxfam
• doctors without borders
• genocideintervention.net
• amnesty international
• the red cross
• unicef
• google (in case you’re the “i will choose an organization mySelf, thank you very much” type)