When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

Similar to my observations about how language affects meaning from years ago.

Worry isn’t work. Being stressed out isn’t work. Anxiety isn’t work. Entertaining a sense of impending doom isn’t work. Incessant internal verbal punishment isn’t work. Indulging the great unknown fear in your own mind isn’t work. Hating yourself isn’t work.

Work is the manifestation of value, and anyone who tells you that a person whose mind is 50% occupied with anxiety is more likely to manifest value is a person who isn’t manifesting much.

• Dan Pallotta

Kim Goodwin and Michael Voege, IxD + ID

• When ID & IxD can work together from the start, can be a good convergence process. Start wild, gradually narrow down
• ID often requires more emotional cues from people in user research
• Daily, quick checkins are useful between design teams even in the separate design phases

Stuart Karten, Hearing aids

• People of all ages wanted the hearing enhancement one hearing aid company was offering; not just the old
• Modemapping: research technique to chart all the activities a person does throughout the day by time and quality/happiness, to discover common pain points and patterns across people, then list out functional, behavioral, and social needs in those.
• Sample themes for ID of hearing aids: jewelry, algorithms/nature, performance enhancement.
• Capacitive touch on the ear has issues when people brush their hair back
• Using an iPhone/Android app can be a good way to test touch interactions; just simulate the product onscreen and use the iPhone to respond to touch input

Wendy Ju, Implicit Interactions

• Joe Malia’s privacy scarves are awesome
• Many important interactions take place in the “attentional periphery”: a doorman’s offer to open a door; a dog wagging its tail. Each communicates status, an offer, and acknowledgment of you.
• Implicit interaction axes: Foreground/Background, Proactive/Reactive. A single interaction can move around these quadrants. Most UIs today are Foreground + Reactive; lots of potential in the others

Mike Kuniavsky, Information as a material

• FedEx Senseaware, a passive (soon active) device + web info system for packages
• Multiple screens (phone, tablet, desktop, tv) are “holes in space to the same thing”
• Are you building an APPLIANCE (limited functionality, focused UI) or a TERMINAL (infinite functionality, general UI)?
• A terminal: “a transparent window into services”

Ian Myles, Astro Design

• Concept design can be a fancy concept movie or a simple sketch with localized glowing; both convey the idea but the latter is much simpler
• Intel Moorestown device; ultra widescreen (32:9) suggests new interactions/uses

Dan Harden, Frog -> Whipsaw

• Interesting Skymall items: laser scissors; overhead book holder
• “A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his workand his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.” – LP Jacks
• “Look to the essence of a thing, whether it be a point of doctrine, of practice, or of interpretation.” – Marcus Aurelius
• Livescribe pen lets you draw interface elements and then use them by touching: http://waynehodgins.typepad.com/ontarget/2008/08/cool-tools- live.html
• “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. ” – C.A.R. Hoare
• Vudu remote control is beautiful
• InfiniteZ virtual holographic display system

Julian Bleecker, Design Fiction

• “A Survey of Human-Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies“
• “Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision” – Genevieve Bell
• “Scientists on the Set“, “The Future is Now“, & upcoming book “Science on the Silver Screen” by David Kirby

Watch a School Bus Go 367 MPH On Fiery Rocket Power.

“Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.” – Clayton Christensen.

Another excerpt:

“It’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.”

Brooks: Great design does not come from great processes; it comes from great designers.

Wired: But surely The Design of Design is about creating better processes for great designers?

Brooks: The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing.

via Master Planner: Fred Brooks Shows How to Design Anything | Magazine.

The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40…

My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption…

We’ll increasingly be defined by what we say no to.

The Acceleration of Addictiveness.