elliott writes…

it’s not about big ‘D’ or little ‘d’. it’s about good design and bad design. any project can be as big or as small as you make it.

i am on the bandwagon of getting things done by david allen. I am not a member of any forum about productivity, nor do i want to be, so i have been grappling with issues of organizing my life complete with goals, projects, tasks, and calendar events in the dark… just me, the gtd book, and the occasional post from 43 folders. one large part of this organizational framework is the vertical map. a place where you write down your vision for the perfect life, your fundamental principles such as religious based rules of living, and then your goals for various distances into the future. when you have this, your goals should lead towards your vision, and your projects you are working on right now should lead to your goals, and your tasks should lead to your projects. got it? so at the end of the day, almost everything you do, every little thing, is moving you closer to your vision. this all seemed neat and tidy when i first started. i wanted a dog, and i wanted a house in the woods, and i wanted to be financially independent. there are two problems with this framework, and now that i have a teeny tiny bit of the design bug in my, i my desire to fix these problems has taken over my “weekly review.”

the first problem is that this framework is fundamentally future centered. i wanted to do industrial design two years ago. this was a goal. right now i am doing service design, which is making me amazingly happy, so what do i do, i change my goal. this is only one example, but brings up a topic of values and vision. in a class called design management and organizational change at cmu, this topic came up for driving forces of organizations. are they vision driven or value driven? i am not saying that i am value driven necessarily, because of this example or any other number of similar instances, but i can say that i prefer being value driven. in bushido the warrior is said to have no plans, and to make decisions in 7 breaths. i at first saw this as foolish and a product of the times and the simpler lives associated with those times, but looking closer, i realized that i was wrong. the reason no plans are needed, is because of a deep understanding of the self. if you know yourself, you know what you are going to do. if you are value driven, you don’t need a plan for the future, you need to know what you value, and you need to make decisions based on that. first problem.

second problem was that i was unsure that my vision was taking everything into account. my first vision had no health issues in it. should i exercise? did i have a vision of how i wanted to be in the future? could i create goals based on that vision? maybe 10 push ups by next month, 100 by next year? it just didn’t add up. i had financial goals, and physical health goals, and social goals, but was i really covering everything? the framework never told me what my vision should be. 

so lately i started thinking about positive psychology (i will stop linking to wikipedia, anyone can do it on their own). i definitely believe in this stuff because the positive psychologists are right, curing ills does not equal happiness. anyway, there is a growing body of theory and evidence that points to parts of our lives which lead to happiness– pleasurable experiences, the flow state, and contribution to something larger than self. i started thinking that maybe my vertical map should be broken down into three parts to reflect the three aspects of this theory.

then i started to think about buddhist practice. i decided that development/wisdom and awareness/radical acceptance should be the split for my vertical map.

then despite my distaste for maslow, i decided his triangle might make a good basis.

then it hit me! all these are lenses. all of these are perspectives of what makes a good happy healthy life. and i realized that just the division of values or vision into parts described by these people would be biased and not very close to the truth. so what did i do… i put it all on the cross of pain. yes, dick buchanan’s class is getting into the deepest darkest regions of my life. even after almost a year has passed since i took his class, his lessons continue to help me learn about myself. help me not get caught in one perspective, but to see the bigger picture by accepting what everyone says about a situation. dialectics.

anyway, maslow goes on the bottom, positive psychology goes on the left, buddhism with awareness and radical abandon up top (my bias?). so who goes on the right?

so the biggest news in my life right now is in the left bar… pink*. a project, an independent study in school, a dream, all wrapped up into one page. pink* is the service design firm that i have started with a few goods friends from cmu. it’s going to be putting a roof over my head, and food in my mouth for as long as it can, and so far it’s doing better than any job i have ever had.

i cannot express the pros and cons of starting and owning a business in words, but i will say that it is not for the faint of heart, but at the same time, everyone should do it at least once.

two years ago this was all i had. all my worldly possessions tucked into one bag. a few days ago, i finished reading “possessions and the self” by russell belk–a great article for a designer or anyone interested in the place “things” have in our lives. it touched on people, ideas, artifacts, all as being possessions that help to define the “extended-self” it talked about how having more “things” created an enlarged sense of self, and that we spend a lot of our lives extending ourselves. it made me wonder why i was moving in the opposite direction. if possessions help to define who we are as people. if we create our surroundings as a way to understand ourselves, what does it mean to reduce our surroundings to almost nothing? russell would give the optimistic response that as the unextended self, the true self, grows and becomes stronger, there is less of a need for the protective extended self. as the true self becomes more defined, it no longer needs the mirror of possessions to reflect on. st benedict and buddhism would also give similarly jovial pats on the back. renouncing worldly things is a sign of finding the self.

but taking what i have learned in design classes, and thinking of myself as a designer of my own life, i thought what is the opposite perspective of this situation? belk also said that people have power over objects and objects have power over people. could it be true that this quest for designing a streamlined life is actually causing me to cling to my possessions more than anyone else? when each process in life, each possession has been transformed from a piece of routine to a piece of ritual, the extended self could be even more deeply invested in things. things not only give a sense of self, but also add meaning to the world.

i don’t really know what any of this means. the article talked about issues so subtly different from the obvious that it’s hard to gleam anything from it. i talked to a friend about gift giving as a way of possessing someone and he responded “sure, that person owes you a favor now.” but that response was a slight twist from what belk intended. that person that you give a gift to doesn’t owe you a favor, you own a piece of that person. a piece of that person is a part of you. is then making sacrifices to god an act of reclaiming the alienated self?

i think to make this article operational in the design of my own life, i think i need to think about how precious some objects are. i need to be careful of the hold that objects have on me, and learn to not care too much about my 100 dollar pens. in terms of design, i think i need to start thinking about the artifacts, processes, environments, and information that make up a person’s experience, and think about the location of each in a person’s extended self. as far as this blog goes, i am learning that as i love what i do for a living, the line between personal and professional space, fades away.

i was at IxDA a month or so ago, and had very interesting conversations. one was on a topic i love to talk about: paper versus digital. i had recently moved from moleskines to 8.5 x 11 paper so that i could scan all of my notes afterwards. i talked about my love for paper and pens, but my desire to have all of my notes easily searchable. i wanted to have a perfect memory. another designer, dana, protested and made a strong argument for paper as paper. forget scanning, what about that moment when you are searching for some tidbit of information and you stumble across something forgotten? what about serendipity, she said. it made me pause. i had been working on a project recently to create a sort of design database. i wanted to be able to pull up all quotes from Dick Buchanan on Service Design, or pull up all authors who tried to define design. i wanted a memory better than my own, but what about serendipity? Dana said that designers thrive off of creation which is not derived from pulling up information and re-assembling it for some other purpose. design is that beautiful experience of turning an errant pencil stroke into a stroke of genius. design is that faith in the unforeseen future. design thrives on serendipity. and so i began to question my own motives and looked into my own beliefs.

my ex-girlfriend, current friend, and devil’s advocate is an amazing reader. she reads so much that half of the books she has read in the last 6 months, she can’t remember immediately. but one thing she said that stuck was that you don’t need to remember the plot or the characters when you read. when you read a good book, you are changed as a person, and that change is more important than any information. and because of that change, you can never put that book down or forget… that book is always a part of you.

a similar story is told in a principle of Bushido. every decision should be made in the span of 7 breaths. there is no need to remember the past because this moment is the culmination of all of the events in the past, and you don’t need to figure out the future if you know yourself and move forward based on what you would do.

so this brings me to my thoughts about the iPhone and serendipity in life. just as in design, we need to allow space for magic in our lives. how many times have people gotten lost on a road trip and have come back with an amazing story? but with gps you will never be lost. with instant email, you will never be out of touch, and with blog readers and ipods, you will never be bored. what will happen when there are no explorations and no blunders? what will happen when no one stumbles upon anything, everything is carefully tailored to you? amazon will suggest books and you will buy them, instead of rumaging through a book store. netflix will suggest the next movie, and every purchase in your life is dictated by an immaculate wish list tucked away in the perfect memory of your laptop’s hard drive. what will happen when people don’t have to make mistakes… when they have to choose to make a mistake. who will take that path?

so now i am sitting wondering if a stand needs to be made for serendipity, but i don’t know if this means that i should be making iphone apps that allow for exploration, if this means that i should not be moving towards the all knowing all seeing devices. if this means i need to make a change in my life and forget about the tools that support it, or if this means i am just justifying a purchase or talking myself out of it. in any case, i am left with a question, and i think most times that is more valuable than being left with an answer. 

from kip’s blog: