I’m a big fan of sketching, and this post by Jacob Rader does a great job of explaining why it’s such an important part of the design process:

Sensemaking is the active conversation we have with the events that we encounter; it’s our ability to take in information, process it, and derive meaning and action from it.

Rather than focusing on the external, sketching provides us a sensemaking process for our own creative flux. When we’re presented with a problem our minds go to work to create this cloud of ideas, populating it with information and attempting to form connections. This facilitated sensemaking turns that abstract concoction into a concrete reality. This works because sketching forces us to make decisions and apply structure to our ideas. By externalizing we pass those fragments through a filter of our own experience creating a foundation to build our ideas from.

When we externalize the pieces of an idea through a sketch we’re making a testable “design move” which we’re able make judgements around. This positions us to make further moves that iteratively cycles and builds an idea.

John Maeda on The Great Discontent:

I’ve never met anyone who is good at what they do creatively and is super-confident.

Well, that’s a relief. Because I’m not feeling particularly confident right now. He goes on to say this:

If you have audacity and take on a risk, it means you don’t know what you’re getting into; you’re walking through a door, into a dark room, with no idea what’s there. If you have courage, it means that you know exactly what’s behind that door; there’s something dangerous, hard, and it’s going to make you really uncomfortable.

I don’t know if I’m audacious, courageous, or just plain crazy, but in case you were wondering why it’s been so quiet here over the past couple of weeks, it’s because I just moved from Cape Town to Portland, and today started a new job as Director of Product at HealthSparq. I’m excited about the move and the role, but also pretty nervous about the dark room I’m walking into. But I guess that’s what makes life exciting. That not knowing that keeps us pushing to find our own limits so we can break through them.

I expect things to stay a little bit slow on Elezea for another week or so. This week is obviously crazy, next week I’m speaking at Industry Conf, and after that things will hopefully return to a reasonably regular posting schedule. I just felt that I probably owed you guys an update.

Thanks for caring.

Tim Wu brings up some interesting points in Why Making Technology Easier to Use Isn’t Always Good:

We make ourselves into what we, as a species, will become, mainly through our choices as consumers. If you accept these premises, our choice of technological tools becomes all-important; by the logic of biological atrophy, our unused skills and capacities tend to melt away, like the tail of an ape. It may sound overly dramatic, but the use of demanding technologies may actually be important to the future of the human race.

Wu explains that if everything is easy, we’ll simply stop learning things. So what are these “demanding technologies” like?

Three elements are defining: it is technology that takes time to master, whose usage is highly occupying, and whose operation includes some real risk of failure. By this measure, a piano is a demanding technology, as is a frying pan, a programming language, or a paintbrush. So-called convenience technologies, in contrast — like instant mashed potatoes or automatic transmissions — usually require little concentrated effort and yield predictable results.

One of my favorite articles of the year so far is Zachary Crockett’s The Invention of the AeroPress:

The AeroPress was conceived at Alan Adler’s dinner table. The company was having a team meal, when the wife of Aerobie’s sales manager posed a question: “What do you guys do when you just want one cup of coffee?”

A long-time coffee enthusiast and self-proclaimed “one cup kinda guy,” Adler had wondered this many times himself. He’d grown increasingly frustrated with his coffee maker, which yielded 6-8 cups per brew. In typical Adler fashion, he didn’t let the problem bother him long: he set out to invent a better way to brew single cup of coffee.

It might sound like an article about coffee, but it’s more about entrepreneurship, product design, and the sheer tenacity of true inventors. Great read.

Anthony Colangelo explains how he uses a technique called Switch Programming to help solve coding problems:

We gave each other 30 seconds to explain our intended results, and nothing else. Then, we traded computers and got to work.

I was working on a fairly new project with a codebase that Mark really hadn’t been in, and Mark was working on an old project that I hadn’t touched for over a year and a half (long story). Point is, neither of us were intimately familiar with the project we were debugging. It didn’t matter—we knew what had to happen, and we dug in.

Within five minutes, our issues were solved. We explained to each other what we did to fix the problems, we learned a little something, and we got back to work.

This sounds like a great approach to solve design challenges as well. If you’re not sure how to get past a particular design problem, explain the intended result to someone, and give them 5 minutes to try to sketch a few solutions. It will probably not be perfect, but it’s a great way to get some fresh thinking to bump you back on track.

Craig Mod’s newsletter is one of the few emails I always look forward to reading. In the most recent one Craig gives some advice for people in their 20s:



To the younger folks reading now: If you’re willing to live in that small apartment, forgo that fancy food and expensive clothing, and uphold a semblance of disciplined and focused work ethic, you can probably hack more experience into your life than you’d imagine. […]
> 
>

The emotional textural quality of my memory of life then is so intense because it was a period of only the ephemeral. Those years can only reverberate in my gut because there is no material thing upon which to place those feelings. No physical token to help me remember. It’s a period of my life where I learned to walk a city (because it was cheaper than eating through a city, or five-star hoteling a city), learned to find great pleasure in the night-sounds of one piece of town winding down or the stirring of another the dawn following.
> 
>

His thoughts brought me back to my own story, and the similar circumstances I was in when I first moved to the US years ago. I moved into my first apartment with only a blow-up mattress I borrowed from my then-fiancé, and a coffee machine she bought me as a housewarming gift. I bought my first chair for $20 at a Salvation Army store, and since I didn’t have a car I had to leave my passport with them so I could borrow a dolly and push the chair back to my apartment (what a sight that must have been to passers-by).



But you know what? It was an amazing time. It taught me not to take anything for granted. It taught me how to really get to know a city (on foot — always on foot). And it taught me the value of working hard, and always keeping an eye out for things to make me laugh, especially when it’s not going well.



Starting from the bottom of a mountain teaches us that there’s more to life than standing at the top. What matters is the people you’re with and the conversations you have and the lessons you learn — not how far up you go. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be ambitious. I’m just saying that as long as you enjoy the views with those who give your moments meaning, who cares where you’re standing?

The VCSO team did a great interview with designer and illustrator Kyle Steed about his recent trip to Israel. I love Kyle’s view that what makes VSCO Cam great is all the ways it’s decidedly not Instagram:

It’s like this, you can’t just slap a b&w filter on a crappy photograph and suddenly it’s Ansel Adams, that’s foolish thinking. But this is where the majority lives I believe, in this make believe world that if they add enough filters and effects to their photo, then they’ll make the “pop” page. Note: Please don’t get me started on the popular page.

And yet another reason why I love the VSCO Grid, there are no likes, comments or other superfluous information that only adds hot air to a photographers headspace. Jerry Maguire said it best: “Fewer clients. Less money.” which could be translated in this case as: “Fewer followers. Less comments.”

Robert McGinley Myers wrote a good post called Misunderstood or Double-edged? about the new Apple holiday ad. He starts off with familiar arguments about faces stuck in phones and blah blah blah — but wait, don’t roll your eyes because of yet another “technology is bad” post. It doesn’t end like you think it will:

That screen is not going away anytime soon, but we don’t have to be passive viewers of it, merely consuming and feeling vaguely guilty about what we consume from it. There’s immense creative power behind the screen. Instead of worrying about it, lamenting it, and disparaging it, we should focus on learning how best to use it — to gather, understand, shape, and share the information around us.

Agreed.

My thanks to Webydo for sponsoring Elezea’s RSS feed this week.

Webydo enables professional web and graphic designers to create, publish, and manage websites without having to write a single line of code, and provides them with the freedom of creativity to focus on what’s important — the DESIGN.

Webydo is made by designers, for designers and is the only solution for website creation with a built in CMS (content management system) and DMS (design management system). Webydo also gives you the option to directly bill your clients, brand Webydo as your own, and provide full cross-browser capabilities. What’s more, with Webydo, you can efficiently create a responsive website with complete cross-browser capabilities as well.

Experience the freedom of creativity with Webydo’s professional online design software today for free.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Finally, I have a legitimate excuse for my obsession with sci-fi and post-apocalyptic literature. Apparently it’s going to make me a better designer. I’ll take it! Rebecca J. Rosen explains Why Today’s Inventors Need to Read More Science Fiction:

Once any sort of technology has users, it becomes extremely difficult to change it — even if you know it should or must be changed. […] How is that affecting our social structure and values? How is that changing the way we view ourselves and even the way we understand our own mental functioning? […]

Reading science fiction is like an ethics class for inventors, and engineers and designers should be trying to think like science fiction authors when they approach their own work. […] I feel with great urgency that we need to very thoughtfully consider what we build as well as encourage that same thoughtfulness out in the world.