When an obsession with memes and Ted Talks intersect, no one is safe. From Dan Denett's concept of the "human" ant that is inexplicably drawn into danger by the "virus" of ideals, to Susan Blackmore's telling story of a world of memes waiting to enter our brains, the meme has corrupted my extracurricular thoughts.
Since watching W.H. Whyte's Study of Small Urban Spaces, when I began studying design research, I've taken a behavioral and cognitive psychological approach to groups. Fact is, I've been known to find watching people more exciting than movies: the social mimicry of man is fascinating on all levels.
Who cannot find themselves enamored with Don Norman?
Recently, however, I've combined the idea of social group connections with the concept of a designer's role in communication.
Understanding how animals (like crows) can quickly interpret and adapt to patterns, and how such reasoning methods that we identify as intelligence might actually be easily broken down to simple (almost robotic) trial and error processes could help designers reinterpret web navigation, group-based systems and new products.
I feel, now, like a Buddah, displaced and yet a part of everything around me. "What is" is not good or bad, just the act of happening...
We, life organisms, love taking-in information- especially in visual form (from great minds like Hans Rosling and David McCandless)! What else can we say of the recent data viz. craze that has come as a direct result of society's desire to make sense of the ever-growing and easily accessible database made available to us through the web?!
What new discoveries about how we speak to each other can come about, when we break down human interaction to its most basic natural principles?
Perhaps, Ted will tell me. Perhaps, I will tell Ted.
