Letters from the Equator

It’s ok to not like things, just don’t be a dick about it.

Elephant on a Trampoline

How does parenting affect upbringing of children?

WSJ article here about how twins raised apart from each other revealed very little effects of parenting on their eventual becoming.

i.e. adult twins were mirror identicals to each other even though they were raised by different parents.

Parents’ main rationale is that their effort is an investment in their children’s future; they’re sacrificing now to turn their kids into healthy, smart, successful, well-adjusted adults.  But according to decades of twin research, their rationale is just, well, wrong.  High-strung parenting isn’t dangerous, but it does make being a parent a lot more work and less fun than it has to be.

Note to parents: relax

Note to growing children: your future is your responsibility

Note to adults: if you’re wondering, it probably wasn’t your parents fault

caveat: I think this mostly relates to mostly “normal” parenting, i.e. not considering traumatic life-changing experiences like nuclear attack from aliens, etc.

via @globalmoxie

There’s a big party going on around the world. People are having a good time making a mockery of the whole rapture debacle, and I admit - some of it is pretty humorous and all.

And then I saw this.

And I kinda laughed inside a little. And then I stopped, staring at the bit of the strip with the burning Christians.

And I felt something curl up and die inside me, like… I was doing something wrong for believing that there was a second coming. That I should abandon my beliefs, the trust I place in something and someone that a lot of people consider to be an absolute joke and mockery of everything good - Jesus.

A lot of people, except me and maybe a few other people, do think that this whole Jesus thing is one of the most laughable things on the face of the planet. But because some of these people are my friends, I have to suck it up and keep on going.

And it’s fine, I’ll be ok by tomorrow. Because people are just out to have a good laugh, and that’s ok.

Right?

Handmade visualization tool-kit by jose.duarte on Flickr.

Death to powerpoint. Bring out your inner creative.

There’s a really vibrant UX community here in London, with a diverse range of activities and groups such as book clubs, talks, field trips, mentorship programs and the like. But there’s one type of meetup I’ve particularly gained a lot from, called Start UX.

About a year ago, Joe Lanman had an idea to gather a few people who weren’t officially UX designers but were trying to build it into their work and organizations. At the time, I was working at a startup and I was doing everything from user research all the way to the production code. One of the group’s first members, Jeff van Campen, got me into Start UX along with a few others – Francis Norton, Nick Smith, Rob Enslin, and Basheera Khan, who were all interested in getting UX into organizations and influencing change.

We’ve been meeting informally since then to talk about our experiences (war stories) about getting UX into our work and organizations. I’ve been extremely grateful to have these friends to share with, bounce ideas off, and rant to whenever I needed an outlet, some help or support, even another perspective.

The benefit of having a group of people like this isn’t just about learning from each other, but about challenging each other to do what’s worth doing. It’s like peer-coaching.

A year has passed since Start UX first got off the ground, and even though some of us have moved on to dedicated UX roles, the journey still continues and the relationships have grown more mature and valuable. So, I think the spirit of Start UX is about challenging, encouraging, learning from, and growing with one another – like apprentices in a guild.

I highly encourage other practitioners to start their own version of Start UX. If you’re interested in starting one, here are some loose guidelines that may be useful to you and your group:

• keep the group to about 10-12 people, with each meeting made up of about 5-7 people (not everyone will make it at all times) – this keeps the group more intimate and allow for better sharing and social cohesion
• keep to the same group members, so that the members will really get to know each other and each member’s issues over time
• use google groups or something similar to facilitate discussion online, plan meetups, etc.
• for the meetup: find a spot that’s conducive for discussion, has enough room to support a meeting space, and refreshments
• choosing a meeting topic can help scope discussions (e.g. we had a meeting about deliverables once)

Also, make sure to share it with the wider community. That’s one thing our group has failed to do, but that’s going to change -  starting with this blog post. :)

Design consultancies that promoted Design Thinking were, in effect, hoping that a process trick would produce significant cultural and organizational change. From the beginning, the process of Design Thinking was a scaffolding for the real deliverable: creativity. But in order to appeal to the business culture of process, it was denuded of the mess, the conflict, failure, emotions, and looping circularity that is part and parcel of the creative process. In a few companies, CEOs and managers accepted that mess along with the process and real innovation took place. In most others, it did not. As practitioners of design thinking in consultancies now acknowledge, the success rate for the process was low, very low.

- Bruce Nussbaum

OK great now that that’s over, can we all focus on designing with intent and embracing risk and failure?

Smart people want to give their best and as they learn more, they learn that they need to learn a lot more before they start sharing. They learn some more and they learn they need to learn some more. What they forget is that most of the expertise that they already have is either becoming “obvious” to them or better yet, going into their “background thinking.”

Becoming obvious means that there is nothing special about it.

Becoming their background thinking means that they don’t even realize that it’s knowledge. It becomes part of them. For example think about alphabets and multiplication tables. It is in our background thinking and we don’t think about that as knowledge.

@sjors: Good summary on why it’s important that anyone should blog

(via @sjors)

Jared Spool does it again.

He explains how two important aspects that are key to successful design teams:

• Direct exposure to user observation of team members for at least 2 hours in six weeks

Each team member has to be exposed directly to the users themselves. Teams that have dedicated user research professionals, who watch the users, then in turn, report the results through documents or videos, don’t deliver the same benefits. It’s from the direct exposure to the users that we see the improvements in the design.

• Involvement of strong influencers (execs, project managers, etc.) in direct observation of users

The tipping point came when we found teams where all these other folks were participating in the user research studies. No longer did they assert their own opinions of the design direction above what the research findings were telling the teams. Having the execs, stakeholders, and other non-design folks part of the exposure program produced a more user-focused process overall.

The question is – will we be willing to sacrifice invest in order to ensure this happens to make our designs more successful? It’s a common occurrence everywhere, and we as designers need to stand our ground.

Apple crates from Bailey’s Home & Garden - perfect modular shelves for any home…

Thinking of getting a few.

That, or the Ikea PS Bintje’s.