Why you are not a number
A collection of articles I have written about creative frameworks that focus on the process, not the outcome.
You have done three straight weeks of regular exercise, closed all your rings on your Apple Watch fitness app every day, and you feel great. Out of the blue, you hurt your ankle while walking down some stairs. It feels okay at first but then it starts to swell.
Three days later, you are still putting ice packs on your ankle and the whole time, your Apple Watch is constantly reminding you to get up because you are “nearly there!”
Your streak is gone because you’re hurt. Yet the watch and most fitness apps have no sense of this. You are not a machine that can just be fixed in an hour by a technician; you are a human with a complex nervous system that needs time to recover.
The more we look at the metrics of what we’re doing, the less we look at why we are doing it. The temptation is to do something you can quantify because numbers are easy to understand and give you a sense of progress. Yet, as in our little drama above, numbers are easily affected by circumstance.
So what are we to do?
Leave numbers and metrics to what they are best at doing: measuring business activity, and operations that do run like machines. If one person gets sick, an entire company doesn’t shut down, it carries on because, like any machine, it can be fixed.
On the other hand, Individuals and communities are not machines. They thrive on a sense of purpose. They need a structure, not a number. Creative frameworks are structures that allow us to make progress without measurement. The joy and the value come from the consistent challenge and curiosity that these structures enable.
Here is a collection of articles I have written about creative frameworks that focus on the process, not the outcome, the structure, not the number.
The journey is to be enjoyed but before you can take it, you need to find out where you are right now, which is a journey in itself.
Move from a fixed to a growth mindset, and the possibilities are endless.
Think about your life and education. Were you ever taught how to be creative?
Focusing on a user’s intent allows you as a designer to look into the future and predict what the user will need and when.
What is a creative framework?
At its simplest, it is a conceptual tool that allows you to test a concept.
“The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”
- Bertrand Russell
The Danish way
Sometimes it’s the small things in life, the small acts of kindness that make life worth living and affirm your connection to the culture around you.
We needed a vacation but didn’t want to go to places we’d been before, so we looked up the cheapest airline tickets to places in Europe. It turned out that Copenhagen was top of the list.
That random selection began a journey that turned out to be one of the best vacations we have taken as a family and an introduction to a way of life that, while not perfect, strived for the right balance.
Sometimes it’s the small things in life, the small acts of kindness that make life worth living and affirm your connection to the culture around you.
Here are three examples to give you a sense of our experience in the city.
Baked good
There is a special policy for children in nearly every bakery we went into in Copenhagen. That policy was to give them a free baked good treat.
It was a little odd at first, but this simple act which could not have cost the bakery more than a few cents was a moment of delight for both our kid, and his parents—it was like being regularly accorded an empathetic understanding of what it means to be a parent with a child in a busy city. Kids get tired quickly and need more food, more often, than you could ever imagine. A free baked good helps all the people large and small in the city stay in balance.
Where did you get that shirt?
We were walking past the national football (soccer) stadium on our way to a park when we heard a voice call out “Nice shirt!” from behind us. We all turned around and saw a middle-aged man wearing a stadium uniform. He said that Mo Salah, the player’s name on the back of my son’s shirt, was one of his favorite players. Without missing a beat the man, whose name was Martin, asked if we would like to take a look at the Stadium!
I have been a football fan my whole life, and my son had caught the football bug from me a while ago. Before we could even reply to this invitation, he was already jumping up and down at the opportunity of looking around Copenhagen FC’s national stadium.
Just like that, Martin opened a large side door in the stadium wall off the sidewalk. We followed him down a corridor that emerged right onto the main pitch. He was preparing it for the first game of the season on the weekend. For the next thirty minutes, he engaged my son (in perfect English) in conversation about the club and the great games that had been played in this stadium and the players he loved to watch. Martin did not have to do this—he must have been pretty busy—but he could understand that this was a simple and very kind way of making someone’s day.
Learning the city
Copenhagen is full of beautiful parks. But there is one extraordinary one. It’s designed for both playing and learning.
On the streets of Copenhagen, there is a complex choreography of pedestrians, cyclists, and cars. To help younger members of the community to understand how that works, the city built a mini-city in the middle of one of its many parks.
Kids from four to twelve can come and borrow a bike or a pedal car for free, or walk around this miniature city. The road signs, traffic lights, and bike paths are all scaled down to kids’ size, so they can practice the skills they need to live in a busy city.
—
None of our experiences in Copenhagen by themselves are groundbreaking changes in city life. Still, in combination, they gave my family a sense of belonging to a city we were only visiting for a week. It showed a sense of balance, which was beautiful to experience.
For me, design as a practice is the ability to take ideas or concepts and rearrange them into new patterns and create something new and unexpected. Using this definition, you can see how Denmark is trying to redesign its culture.
Could they, and we, all do more? Eradicate poverty, racism, sexism and create a more equal and fair society? Of course, we could, and must. But it takes a lot of small steps in a run-up to build momentum before a giant leap. Without taking those smaller steps first, we will not leap very far as a culture.
——
Books of 2021
This year, reading each of the books below helped challenge me to think of a new narrative for the future.
December 31st, 2021
6 min read
I like books that are hard to summarize. Hard to explain why they make sense. That challenge our use of language because the words we are reading don’t fit with our narrative of the world we live in.
2021 was a year of challenge, and 2022 will be a year in which we have to rewrite many of the narratives we have told ourselves over the years. Where we live, how we live, how we communicate with people, where we work, how we work, and for whom.
This year, reading each of the books below helped challenge me to think of a new narrative for the future.
Hoping you all have a great start to the new year and that these books can help guide you on a new path for what is turning out to be a whole new world.
- Kaushik
Monoculture by F.S. Michaels
A book that describes the ever-smaller circles that our culture is creating.
”Over time, the monoculture evolves into a nearly invisible foundation that structures and shapes our lives, giving us our sense of how the world works. It shapes our ideas about what’s normal and what we can expect from life.”
“Once we’re thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost; but it’s only here that the new and the good begins.” —LEO TOLSTOY
A game of birds and wolves by Simon Parkin
A remarkable story of how one man and a group of very intelligent women saved England and Europe from defeat in the Second World War.
”This was not the hyperbole of propaganda. Of the 39,000 men who went to sea in U-boats during the Second World War, seventy percent were killed in action. By contrast, only six percent of those who fought in the British Army died in combat.”
“This was Roberts’ masterstroke. By repeatedly playing through recent action at sea and using a game to understand the situation from all angles, he would be in a strong position to see where the British commanders had misunderstood the U-boats’ behavior. The process would enable him to formulate the first universal set of defensive tactics for the navy to use against U-boats, encouraging escort ships to work together like team-mates, rather than individuals.”
Ask Iwata by Satoru Iwata
A fascinating book about the philosophy and management style of Nintendo’s late CEO.
“This is why I spent my first month as president interviewing everybody at the company. The discoveries were endless”
“So how do you know when a project is going well? When someone points to a gray area in the initial plan, then asks you “Hey, can I take care of this?” and follows through.”
"A good idea is something that solves multiple problems in a flash.” This is something that Shigeru Miyamoto taught me at Nintendo about making games.”
Dune by Frank Herbert
A focus on planet ecology and ancient cultures make Dune a unique read.
“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”
“Give as few orders as possible,” his father had told him…once…long ago. “Once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.”
Maigret at the Coroner’s by Georges Simenon
Maigret comes to America to find out about police methods and finds a whole lot more.
If you have never read a Maigret mystery then please do, they transport you to Paris between 1930 and 1970 and give you a tremendous feeling for the city, its people, and the culture. In this book, Maigret takes a break from Paris and is visiting America on an exchange program for police officers to learn from each other’s methods. What he discovers is a new world of both Victorian values and booze-soaked 60’s free living. He finds a new style of policing all about relationships, networks, and consumerism and I am not sure he likes any of it.
Lila by Robert M. Pirsig
This follow-up to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a deeper dive into the metaphysics of quality while sailing down the Hudson River valley.
“Cultural relativists held that it is unscientific to interpret values in culture B by the values of culture A. It would be wrong for an Australian Bushman anthropologist to come to New York and find people backward and primitive because hardly anyone could throw a boomerang properly. It is equally wrong for a New York anthropologist to go to Australia and find a Bushman backward and primitive because he cannot read or write. Cultures are unique historical patterns that contain their own values
and cannot be judged in terms of the values of other cultures. The cultural relativists, backed by Boas's doctrines of scientific empiricism, virtually wiped out the credibility of the older Victorian evolutionists and gave anthropology a shape it has had ever since.”
Read, Curate, Write
The art of this literary curation, of gathering your reading into one place, is a starting point to help you find your own voice as a writer.
"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot"
- Stephen King
Every day you are flooded with information, articles, books, social media, blog posts, lots and lots of information. It can be overwhelming because none of it speaks to your voice inside; it is just a lot of noise. You might have favorite authors and retreat to them when faced with all this noise but how do you find your voice? How do you get your ideas out into the world? It can seem impossible.
Writing is hard, and writing in your own voice is even harder. It makes you vulnerable, it makes you look inside and talk about what you really feel and believe. Most of all, it puts new ideas and visions out into a world that might not be ready to receive them.
Stephen King is right, reading lots and writing lots is the key to unlocking your own voice and ideas, but writing can be especially hard as an immediate next step after you read. One step toward a solution can be found in a curatorial approach.
Reading Stephen King's quote made me think about the process of writing and how reliant it is on both reading and curating your thoughts while reading. This may seem like merely collecting or organizing but it can be an important step between thinking about an idea and actually writing something of value for yourself. Curation bridges the gap between reading and writing and creates a path toward a writing habit.
Try it: Collect 5 articles on an idea you find interesting. Now find another 10 articles. Next, select from these 15 articles the 5 most important ones that start to form a narrative arc for the story you want to tell. Each of the five articles will help tell a different part of the story. Begin with the article that gives the best overview of the current situation of the subject you are interested in. Then find the articles that best outline the problem or opportunity with the subject. Finally, pick the articles you feel talk about a solution to the problem you posed. Through this process, the act of curation tells a story and makes an argument.
The next step might be to write a sentence or paragraph about the collection of articles, providing some context for your selections and order. Finally, write more specifically about the ideas in the articles. Through this process, you start to find your own voice.
Reading, curating, and eventually writing. Over time the reading and curating will not be what you publish. Rather, you'll publish your writing on the ideas this process has sparked within you.
The art of this literary curation, of gathering your reading into one place, is a starting point to help you find your own voice as a writer. In a sea of information and opinion, it will help you find yourself every day.
Selected Reading 2017
This year has been a year of change, to put it mildly.
This year has been a year of change, to put it mildly. And so, the books that have captured my attention in 2017 have focused on an America that could have been in “American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace," about FDR's Vice President and the architect of the New Deal; the reasons for the America that exists, in “Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation;” and the forces that have shaped our current culture in “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.” Having understood this context I also read “In Praise of Idleness,” by Bertrand Russell which provides clear solutions to many of our core issues. Finally, I read several of George Simenon's “Maigret” novels, which show what can happen when (an admittedly fictional) someone applies intelligence and context to solve a problem, rather than resorting--as happens in our present information-obsessed culture--to raw data alone.
Happy New Year.
K.
American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace
By John C. Culver and John Hyde
"The Wallaces have prospered and been successful, he said, because “we have never thought of wealth or social position as ends in themselves, but merely as means of enlarging our possible usefulness to the community at large."
"The question I would raise is whether a new unity can be built which is based on the principles of economic balance and an advancing culture. Is it possible to hope for an educated democracy, capable of making the necessary key economic decisions in a spirit which does not have its origins in hatred or greed or prejudice?"
"Probably the most damaging indictment that can be made of the capitalistic system is the way in which its emphasis on unfettered individualism results in exploitation of natural resources in a manner to destroy the physical foundations of national longevity."
Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation
By Nicholas Guyatt"Abraham Lincoln, in the first years of his presidency, did more to secure government support for black emigration than any politician since James Monroe."
"Wayne was confronted by extraordinary sights. The “banditti” had cleared five hundred acres for the cultivation of crops. Most of them lived in log houses, neatly arranged in a fashion that would put to shame many white frontier settlements, and used the same utensils and manufactured goods as the soldiers who had defeated them."
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
By Neil Postman
"What extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? To steelworkers, vegetable-store owners, teachers, garage mechanics, musicians, bricklayers, dentists, and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes? Their private matters have been made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; are subjected to more examinations; are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about them; are often reduced to mere numerical objects. They are inundated by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising agencies and political organizations.new technologies compete with old ones—for time, for attention, for money, for prestige, but mostly for dominance of their world-view."
"New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop."
In Praise of Idleness
By Bertrand Russell"People have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part."
"Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle."
Maigret
George SimenonAs a diversion from history and philosophy I read George Simenon's Maigret detective novels. This year I have read around 10 of them. Each one of them captures a time and place and allows you to imagine yourself in a particular place in Maigret's Paris. The novels capture the small details of both a place and time but also of human nature. I find a detective's process to be very similar to a designer's; you piece together the clues to the problem, try out different hypotheses, and then find the solution. The only difference being that in a murder case there is only one right answer, only one murderer; design allows for many right answers.