3 Thoughts About Process
Art resides in the quality of doing, process is not magic.
– Charles Eames
A good process can lead to good outcomes, but it doesn’t guarantee them.
– Seth Godin
Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions.
– Elizabeth King
From Start Finishing by Charlie Gilkey:
I’ve found that projects are both mirrors of what’s going on in our current world and bridges to a better world.
From Herminia Ibarra’s Working Identity:
Better to live the contradictions than to come to a premature resolution.
Take Emotion Seriously
From Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen’s How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
(There’s lots of amazing stuff in this article, but this is just what jumped out today.)
Take emotion seriously: Historically, work on tools for thought has focused principally on cognition; much of the work has been stuck in Spock-space. But it should take emotion as seriously as the best musicians, movie directors, and video game designers. Mnemonic video is a promising vehicle for such explorations, possibly combining both deep emotional connection with the detailed intellectual mastery the mnemonic medium aspires toward.
I thought this was interesting in line with yesterday’s thought’s about “lovable” products.
When designing anything, even–especially–systems that feel like they are dry and neutral, we need to take emotion seriously. What does that look like?
Just bought my tix for Makesensemess, aka the nerdiest party of the year! Loved Abby Covert’s books and excited to see the lineup for this year’s celebration of sensemaking!
Simple, Lovable, Complete
The idea of “minimum viable product” never made sense to me, so I appreciated this reframe of “simple, lovable, complete.”
This conversation comes primarily from tech entrepreneurship, where for years, entrepreneurs were encouraged to launch a “minimum viable product” for customer feedback. This never felt right to me, and I appreciated this explanation of using “simple, lovable, complete” as criteria instead.
How can this idea be applied in other contexts to build things with time and resource constraints? What would a “simple, lovable, complete” website for an organization that can’t afford web developer help look like?
What would a “simple, lovable, complete” report look like?
I LOVE the fact that “lovable” is an explicit criterion here – we all want something lovable (to read, to use, to watch) but how often do we use that as a criterion for what we are making?
I also devote a lot of time to learning technique. When I’m writing a novel, even one like this, if I’m reading another novel, I might plug in a technique I just saw used by somebody else in an unusual way. And then take it out again. Just to see how it works. It’s a weird combination of the subconscious process and very conscious mechanical process too.
We need to talk about vocational awe.
Not editing is winging it at the audition. The boring stuff will probably never stop being boring. You’ll just care less about it being boring. You have to do the boring stuff because not everything is solos. Some things are scales and sightreading. All together, the boring stuff and fun stuff are the practice that makes art
When you have clarity on visions and intention — the form will emerge, by itself.
– Kening Zhu from the house on the webs introduction
a data system is a hypothesis about the world
A file system is an expression of how you see the world.
Which things are like other things? Which things are different? Which categories are important? Which are unimportant?
Organizations have trouble creating a file system that works for everyone, because everyone sees the world differently.
And because they think a file system is objective. It should just “make sense.”
Each person’s file system makes sense to that person, because it’s aligned with that person’s worldview, habits and preferences.
Yet it seems objective, because it’s just… files.
The most frustrating thing for me as a “data person” (who is also a writer, a storyteller, a “leader” and a “program person”) is that people think data structures are objective.
They aren’t.
A database is an expression of how you see the world. A file system is an expression of how you see the world.
Get everyone on the same page about how they see the world of your group’s work, and the structure will emerge from that clarity.
From “Start More Than You Can Finish: A Creative Permission Slip to Unleash Your Best Ideas” by Becky Blades -
“The value in acting on our ideas is not measured in grand, planned finishes. The value is in each and every start.”
Found in Show Your Work, by Austin Kleon:
The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act. On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and the good is vast. Mediocrity is, however, still on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.
– Clay Shirky in Cognitive Surplus