blog I have for the last three weeks been engaged in the difficult, time-consuming project of growing a beard.
Whilst this ostensibly involves no real activity (I haven’t sculpted or trimmed it, just given up shaving), it does require a significant mental shift.
People treat you differently, new facial textures demand attention, routines change, and looking in the mirror inspires a reassessment of who and what you are.
I am not sure what I am saying to the world by having a beard. Is it vanity or the lack of vanity? Have I given up on basic hygiene or am I advertising my masculinity? These questions puzzle me because I honestly don’t know what people are thinking. And as I think a lot about other people this makes me think more about what people are thinking about me.
Nevertheless, judgement is suspended because I am growing the beard experimentally. This thing that clings to my face is not a part of me, it is being held in the purgatory of the possible.
Your identity is a collection of decisions. By holding off on making a decision you are still making a decision. By contrast, the absence of a decision is the absence of identity. Strong identities are unpopular nowadays. We don’t much admire people like Philip Larkin, people who decide who they are in the twenties and live out those decisions until they die. We used to prefer chameleons like Madonna and David Bowie, stars who reflect the zeitgeist. But now it’s all about the cipher — people like Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga — an absence of identity, upon which we can project our desires.
I sometimes feel like a cipher, not because I can’t make decisions but because my decisions cancel each other out. I hate information overload and short attention spans, but have embraced a career whose coordinates are defined by the internet (i.e. the thing that has caused them).
With such cognitive dissonance it becomes tempting to procrastinate or avoid thinking at all. What if we make a decision that we come to regret? What if we find ourselves in a situation we can’t decide our way out of?
It is at this point that we should make long-term plans, escape routes that acknowledge the contradiction whilst looking towards a point in the future where they will be resolved.
Not sure where this leaves the beard though.
11 Jul 2010
blog Last month’s UX Book Club discussed Matthew Frederick’s 101 Things I Learned at Architecture School, a beautifully illustrated little hardback full of gnomic advice for architects. It has been popularised in the UX community via Luke Wroblewski’s post about it.
Anyhow, this is what I learned from it:
- Draw lines clearly (don’t be sketchy, be fluid)
- Consider ‘Ground’ space (negative space) as being where movement takes place
- Positive space is where people tend to dwell (a quadrangle), delimited by solid objects
- Sense of place is important
- Contrast on arrival – give people a sense of arrival
- Accommodate experience and intent
- Plan space for functional requirements first
- The more specific a design idea, the greater its appeal
- Engineers concerned with physical things themselves, Architects concerned with human interface.
- The central idea (parti) should infuse the dna of the design
- Justify design decisions in at least two ways
- Start with general and move towards the specific
- Architect should know something about everything, engineer everything about something
- Reinforce parti with details
- Adapt big idea with new information
- Design has to be an integrated whole not just good ideas
- Understand design problems before starting
- Don’t just use old solutions, look to the new
- Don’t be egocentric
- Ideas are conditional/adaptable
- Ask ‘what if’ even when you’ve decided
- Design grows naturally, logically, and poetically out of conditions
- Develop a good process
- Think about thinking (meta thinking)
- Use counterpoint for emphasis
- Symmetry = power, firmness, authority, permanence (sometimes boring)
- There’s simplicity (child), complexity (adult) and informed simplicity (designer)
- Give your idea a name, even if it is silly
- Just do something
- Limitations are good
- Accessibility should be considered immediately, not as an afterthought
- Think about human universals, like our search for purpose and meaning
- What is the zeitgeist? (you will always embody it anyway)
- Oddities and imperfections humanize a design
- Asymmetrical balance is more interesting
- Beauty = harmony of all elements not the appearance of each of the elements
02 Jul 2010
blog People are encouraged to make far-reaching changes in their lives, obliterating the past and running uncertainly into the future. How much better if everyone made small improvements everyday, becoming more of who you are with each iteration.
18 Jun 2010
blog 
My favourite quotes from The Invisible Hand by Adam Smith.
Men are much more likely to discover easier and readier methods of attaining any object when the whole attention of their minds is directed towards that single object than when it is dissipated among a great variety of things.
In the first fire-engines, a boy was constantly employed to open and shut alternately the communication between the boiler and the cylinder, according as the piston either ascended or descended. One of those boys, who loved to play with his companions, observed that, by tying a string from the handle of the valve which opened this communication to another part of the machine, the valve would open and shut without his assistance, and leave him at liberty to divert himself with his play-fellows.
Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them.
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar choose to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.
08 Jun 2010
blog 
Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism is a short, thrilling book, vertiginous in its implications. Fisher is like the doctor who gives a name for the mystery disease that you’ve been suffering from, giving you a horrible sensation of mortality and a visceral desire for cure.
07 Jun 2010
blog This weekend we went down to England, ostensibly for my Gran’s 90th Birthday, but also to visit friends. On Friday we went to Cambridgeshire to see my old pal C, his wife L, and their new daughter E.
I respect C a lot, mainly for his quiet, incisive wit and his ability to focus. He is someone who never speaks unnecessarily and who disdains inane chatter. So it was no real surprise to hear that he had deleted his Facebook account, a social network consists of little more than unnecessary and inane chatter. It is an act that I have often contemplated but never managed to undertake, so I thought it would be worth looking at the reasons for and against it.
Facebook is unbelievably successful. Nothing else has managed to appeal across generations, across classes, across genders, and across cliques. Its ubiquity has made it incredibly valuable as a contacts tool, as an events management tool, and as a quick way to keep up-to-date with what your friends and acquaintances are doing. By deleting it, you are not only cutting yourself off from everyone you have ever known but also from everyone in your immediate social circle.
Nevertheless, there is still some residual resentment towards it. Facebook stirs up memory and desire, it encroaches upon the quiet moments of life with its incessant whispering, taunting you with the idea of missing out on something. I find that, whilst you are alerted to lots of interesting events, it tends to produce superficial, partially-engaged acquaintanceships rather than focused and committed friendships. The more I think about it, the more I take note of the negative effects it has on me, the less I want it.
And yet, I refuse to delete it. To delete Facebook would be to admit to myself that I am incapable of controlling my own actions and limit myself to the things that are important.
5 Reasons to Keep Facebook
1. Design. It’s fascinating to view the progression of Facebook’s design. It is one of the best designed UIs on the web in terms of its reach and its hooks.
2. Events. It is a brilliant events management tool (there are few other applications which have so many people in them).
3. Promotion. If you’re just starting out, and you’re doing good stuff, you can build a community on Facebook relatively quickly.
4. Ubiquity. Almost everyone uses it, which makes it appealing, making it super easy to keep in touch with people.
5. Privacy. It has, despite recent reports, good privacy filters, meaning that you can see pictures of your nephews even if your sister is very protective.
5 Reasons to Delete Facebook
1. Lack of nutritional content. In an age of unlimited information, people are beginning to diet the unhealthy stuff. Some of this can be ignored via filters but it is skill pretty bad.
2. Principle. The danger of ubiquity is that it is used for malign purposes. Surely it is better to promote an open standard on principle.
3. Addiction. There is so much on Facebook that it is easy to get lost in the whirl and lose hours playing it.
4. Distraction. If you have things to do then playing Facebook is a distraction. It is worth noting that most people who actually do things aren’t on Facebook.
5. Contrarianism. No one wants to just go along with the herd, it is sometimes better to avoid them and do your own thing.
So, can see that I am still undecided about what to do.
When I joined Facebook I was excited, now I am jaded and want to stop being sucked into the sickly, emotional, social realm of the 21st Century. Even if it means being unhappy. Even if it means being even less popular. Even if it means missing out on exciting things. Forbidden fruit tastes much sweeter, but then again the ignored fruit soon rots, shrinks, and disappears.
25 May 2010
blog Fascinating idea about willpower reserves in Oliver Burkeman’s This Column Will Change Your Life:
. . .because we’re imposing our sense of self on the world, and on our behaviour, and the effort involved is a limited resource. This is why experimental subjects who are asked to prevent themselves from laughing while watching a funny video perform less well at subsequent tasks that require focus: they have temporarily used up their willpower reserves. It’s also why, if you want to change some behaviour, willpower can be only a temporary or partial solution. It’s exhaustible, and if you rely on it too much in one area – eating healthily, say – you will find that you don’t have enough left over for the rest of life. There’ll be lots of healthy food in your fridge, but you’ll probably keep leaving your car keys in there, too.
Source: The Guardian
07 May 2010
blog Words Per Minute, Glasgow’s new lit-performance night, has a lot going for it: it is on in the afternoon so neither audience or artist are blunted by alcohol, they have catholic selection policies (veering towards the experimental and untried), and (crucially) the slots are shorts which means it keeps fresh.
Set up by the delectable duo of Anneliese Mackintosh and Kirstin Innes (below), the first ever one was a lot of fun. It was rough around the edges at times, but in a charming ramshackle way.
Every time I go to a performance night like this I always think that I’m taking part in a low rent version of Britain’s Got Talent. The only difference being that there are no judges apart from the internal monologue in my head. As with singers and dancers, there are so many writers in the world that you have to be really good to make any kind of impact on the world. But what does it mean to be good?
I started thinking that it might be to do with how truthful you are, whether you can filter out the bullshit of modern discourse, scratching away until the words bleed. For instance, I found Colin Begg’s (below) poems slightly too literary.
There was far more real poetry in the litanies of brand names read out by Ewan Morrison as part of his Tales from the Mall series.
The again, I also enjoyed Martin O’Connor’s bizarrely naive tale of a man gulled into appearing in a soft porn film, which is pure fantasy.
Final act of the night was Miaoux Miaoux, whose song Hratski particularly wowed me and my internal Simon Cowell.
More photos of the night here.
02 May 2010
blog 
There are now people living under the Clyde part of the Central Station railway bridge. It is most disconcerting to see heads popping out of the iron work.
Internet phenomenon, the Dancing Girl, Kate Deeming, always brings a smile to my face.
Striking clouds!
Bizarre detritus on the river near the Casino.
A jazzy cyclist wearing a different shade of yellow than the boring normal luminous.
30 Apr 2010
blog Mindfulness is the difference between being human and being a zombie. Without it, you are a slave to your instincts and a creature of distraction. To be mindful is to be attuned to the world around you, to be present in the moment, and to be so absorbed that you experience flow.
I sometimes think that the sole purpose of the internet is to prevent mindfulness. An endless succession of hypertextual links make your consciousness bitty and mean. Absorption is interrupted on a regular basis as you instinctively check your email; most of the time you have none (disappointment), occasionally you do (distraction).
However, recently I been wondering whether the internet can be used to aid mindfulness rather than getting in the way. The Hawthorne effect implies that productivity (and, presumably, absorption) increases when you measure what they are doing. What if you could utilize this effect by, say, taking in your surroundings and choosing to publish your thoughts every hour?
This is what I have done on my new website, F91W, which I am going to update every time I hear the hourly chime of my Casio F91-W watch.
The initial inspiration for the site was Tehching Hsieh, a performance artist whose incredible year-long experiments display unparalleled levels of dedication. For instance, Hsieh’s first piece was to live in a cage for a year without talking, reading, or watching television. Later he lived outside for a year. Later still he was tied to Linda Montano for a year.
My experiment isn’t quite as strict (I am not going to wear the watch in bed) and is likely going to be a lot more vulgar (Hsieh pointedly avoided documenting anything as banal as his everyday thoughts), but . . .
25 Apr 2010