Memes

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.

Draw

This is beautiful.

Aesthetics

The ability to define true beauty has been at debate, surely, as long as humans have had the words to do so. From ancient Greece, to modern philosophy, Western society has always had an obsession with pinning down why one thing (be it visual or lyrical art) is more aesthetically pleasing than another.
The debate about whether one even has the ability to do so goes even deeper into the human psyche. Can beauty be defined? If so, are humans capable of defining it within the language we currently possess? The problem with such questions is that they are posed to corner a response into a “yes” or “no”- as if such words could really be complex enough to answer a question so large and vague.
Positively, if one merely observes what he or she can see in the world, we can define beauty. Each of us has, at one time or another, chosen the word to define an object or idea- whether it really meant inspiration, as in Plato’s Ion, or not, it happens, and thus, we can say it is so. The debate, then, is whether beauty can be defined universally.
Such a goal would imply that the universe abides by the same standards that we humans measure it out into. (As in, an inch exists outside of a human calling it so.) I do not think it does.
Let us first say that because the human mind works in comparisons- one thing is better than another- that beauty would not exist in a world without the “not beautiful” (the ugly). Next, let us acknowledge that this definition is entirely dependent on human perspective, which has not yet consumed all of the knowledge of the universe, and thus all of the knowledge of the “not beautiful” and/or beautiful is still in the process of being known by us humans. Finally, placing human existence in time, where we are capable of experiencing only a miniscule amount of the universe’s beauty or ugliness before the opportunity has passed us by for the next moment, puts us in no position to assert any definition of universal beauty- just as we would think it silly for a child to determine the planning of a city based on what he sees from his bedroom window in an evening!
The question left is now whether beauty exists.
As I have posed before, the question of beauty is one side of a comparison between what Hume would say is what the mind defines as pleasing or not (which is totally abstract, inconstant between individuals, and often changing within individual minds) and little more. [At least, under the circumstances that we humans were given to examine the term.]
I know, upon introspection, only this: I find things beautiful and I find things ugly. There are times when others agree with my opinions about these things and times when they don’t. My opinion about beauty changes over time, and there are times when I can’t even agree with myself about the aesthetics of a work of art, but what I can’t do is stop my mind from trying to sort these works into one or the other- beautiful or not. I am always searching, always sorting.

Designing Media

ack!!!!! Horay!!!

On: Bjorn Again? Rethinking 70s Revivalism through the Reappropriation of 70s Clothing

By Nicky Gregson, Kate Brooks and Louise Crewe

This article covers 2 different reasons that groups in England in the early 90's were adopting 70's clothing and how one side was for play while the other was a symbol, ad advertisement, of one's knowledge and respect for the design. I see in it the hunt of youth for knowledge, respect, and reputation. It was entertaining.

Same Ol' Same Ol'

On Pruitt and Adlin's Personal Life Cycle (Tanner Thompson).

On second reading of this chapter, I couldn't let go of a phrase that I recently heard a design researcher say to me "Once you have a persona, you don't need a new one. People are people, and new technology isn't going to make them any different, it's only going to alter which object they use to carry out the same behavior. My boss can make me go out and check to see if there's anything new, but I'm going to see the same thing: wow, people use their phones instead of their alarm clocks, computers, and newspapers. New object, same action."

So I'm reading this Tanner Thompson persona, and I'm thinking about how it's slightly dated, and how I watched this PARC talk about how teenagers are using 2-4 internet/entertainment devices at the same time now days and how crazy that was and how web designs need to be integrated with the idea that no one will be entirely focused on your page, so non-irritating alarms are being added. And I'm wondering how -even though his goals would remain the same- if Tanner's persona would need an update for more than just to keep the interest of a designer. Hmp. Think. Think. Think. I get back to you.

On Fournier's Consumers and Thier Brands:

Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research

I'm lucky that since this article came out (1998), many of the concepts Fourier discusses have been adopted into marketing and brand concept strategies (at least, where I am earning my degree). I found that this article also somehow re-enforced something Abby Margolis once taught me about objects and brands in relationships: people are not always looking for who they are, but sometimes, a balance of who they think they'd like to be in context... ie: sometimes, a teenage girl wants to feel just a little like a responsible woman (when she's washing her face?), which means that marketing a brand to someone doesn't always mean trying to pretend to be like your audience, but remembering to provide an authentic representation of the value delivered by a product: sometimes soap is better seen as responsible than fun.


The life stories provided by Fournier were hard for me to get through, and I worry about where any border between storytelling and data is supposed to exist... are the soft sciences about interpretation with a back-story of data? (I need to interview more design researchers about this.) When tabled-out, the relationships were delightful and so humanistic that I was forced to subject my neighbor to a long and drawn-out conversation about how his relationships with brands fit into this type of table. Super fun.